ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
ALS Stole His Voice. AI Retrieved It.
Benjamin Mueller | The New York Times
“Halfway through trying to speak his first prompt aloud—’What good is that?’—a shaking, smiling Mr. Harrell crumpled into tears. …By day two, the machine was ranging across an available vocabulary of 125,000 words with 90 percent accuracy and, for the first time, producing sentences of Mr. Harrell’s own making. The device spoke them in a voice remarkably like his own, too: Using podcast interviews and other old recordings, the researchers had created a deep fake of Mr. Harrell’s pre-ALS voice.”
BIOTECH
This Researcher Wants to Replace Your Brain, Little by Little
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
“A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan for defeating death. His idea? Replace your body parts. All of them. Even your brain. Jean Hébert, a new hire with the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), is expected to lead a major new initiative around ‘functional brain tissue replacement,’ the idea of adding youthful tissue to people’s brains.”
FUTURE
Happy Birthday, Baby! What the Future Holds for Those Born Today
Kara Platoni | MIT Technology Review
“Your arrival coincided with the 125th anniversary of this magazine. With a bit of luck and the right genes, you might see the next 125 years. How will you and the next generation of machines grow up together? We asked more than a dozen experts to imagine your joint future. We explained that this would be a thought experiment. What I mean is: We asked them to get weird.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Study Suggests That Even the Best AI Models Hallucinate a Bunch
Kyle Wiggers | TechCrunch
“A recent study from researchers at Cornell, the universities of Washington and Waterloo and the nonprofit research institute AI2 sought to benchmark hallucinations by fact-checking models like GPT-4o against authoritative sources on topics ranging from law and health to history and geography. …’The most important takeaway from our work is that we cannot yet fully trust the outputs of model generations,’ Wenting Zhao, a doctorate student at Cornell and a co-author on the research, told TechCrunch. ‘At present, even the best models can generate hallucination-free text only about 35% of the time.'”
TRANSPORTATION
Why Alaska Airlines Is Investing in a Jet That’s Like Nothing You’ve Seen Before
Patrick Sisson | Fast Company
“[JetZero’s blended-wing-body (BWB) aircraft] concept boasts a more triangular, stretch design—where the cabin and wing blend together—creating more aerodynamic efficiency and lift. This allows the plane to fly higher, at around 45,000 feet, which further cuts wind resistance. Factor in the change in materials and construction, with bolted metal and composites swapped out for lighter, stitched carbon fiber, and a BWB jet can carry hundreds of passengers with half the fuel, a huge cost savings and environmental benefit.”
SPACE
NASA and Rocket Lab Aim to Prove We Can Go to Mars for 1/10 the Price
Aria Alamalhodaei | TechCrunch
“Instead of spending $550 million on a mission into deep space, NASA set a goal to spend just one-tenth of that and gave each SIMPLEx mission a $55 million price cap, excluding launch. ESCAPADE is one of three missions the agency selected under the SIMPLEx program, and in all likelihood, the first that will actually launch.”
ENERGY
Inside a Green-Hydrogen Pilot Plant
Jesse Orrall | CNET
“We got a look inside Verdagy’s pilot plant, where the company is testing its multimillion-dollar electrolyzer designed to turn renewable energy like wind and solar into hydrogen. …All together, Neese says, it’s ‘millions of dollars for an electrolyzer,’ but the estimated ‘tens of thousands of gallons of diesel equivalent produced per day’ of hydrogen will make green hydrogen competitive in cost with fossil fuels globally by 2030.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
LLMs Are a Dead End to AGI, Says François Chollet
Kristin Houser | Big Think
“Artificial general intelligence (AGI) could change the world, but no one seems to know how close we are to building it. Today’s generative AIs score well on benchmarks, but such benchmarks can be solved through memorization and don’t necessarily signal general intelligence. To accelerate progress in AI, François Chollet launched ARC Prize, a competition to see which AIs can score highest on a set of abstraction and reasoning tasks.”
AUTOMATION
Ikea’s Stock-Counting Warehouse Drones Will Fly Alongside Workers in the US
Emma Roth | The Verge
“The Swedish furniture chain announced that the autonomous drones will soon operate alongside workers in its Perryville, Maryland, distribution center, where Ikea started installation this summer. The Verity-branded drones also come with a new AI-powered system that allows them to fly around warehouses 24/7. That means they’ll now operate alongside human workers, helping to count inventory as well as identify if something’s in the wrong spot. Previously, the drones only flew during nonoperational hours.”
Image Credit: JetZero
