ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Generative AI Creates Playable Version of Doom Game With No Code
Matthew Sparkes | New Scientist
“An AI-generated re-creation of the classic computer game Doom can be played normally despite having no computer code or graphics. Researchers behind the project say similar AI models could be used to create games from scratch in the future, just as they create text and images today.”
ROBOTICS
Robot Metalsmiths Are Resurrecting Toroidal Tanks for NASA
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“Because of their relatively complex shape, toroidal tanks are much more difficult to make than spherical tanks. Even though these tanks can perform better, NASA simply doesn’t have the expertise to manufacture them anymore, since each one has to be hand-built by highly skilled humans. But a company called Machina Labs thinks that they can do this with robots instead. And their vision is to completely change how we make things out of metal.”
FUTURE
The Year Is 2149 and…
Sean Michaels | MIT Technology Review
“Novelist Sean Michaels envisions what life will look like 125 years from now: ‘The year is 2149 and people mostly live their lives “on rails.” That’s what they call it, “on rails,” which is to live according to the meticulous instructions of software. Software knows most things about you—what causes you anxiety, what raises your endorphin levels, everything you’ve ever searched for, everywhere you’ve been. Software sends messages on your behalf; it listens in on conversations. ‘”
TECH
OpenAI in Talks for Funding Round Valuing It Above $100 Billion
Tom Dotan and Berber Jin | The Wall Street Journal
“The new funding round would be the biggest infusion of outside capital into OpenAI since Microsoft invested around $10 billion in January 2023. Since then, an arms race has developed in Silicon Valley to build the most advanced artificial-intelligence systems in an effort to dominate an industry many say will revolutionize the economy. OpenAI was last valued at $86 billion late last year, when employees sold existing shares.”
COMPUTING
AI Inference Competition Heats Up
Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“While the dominance of Nvidia GPUs for AI training remains undisputed, we may be seeing early signs that, for AI inference, the competition is gaining on the tech giant, particularly in terms of power efficiency. The sheer performance of Nvidia’s new Blackwell chip, however, may be hard to beat.”
TRANSPORTATION
World’s Largest Sailing Cargo Ship Makes First Transatlantic Voyage
Jeremy Hsu | New Scientist
“The world’s largest sailing cargo ship is making its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. It left a port in France in early August, and it is on track to deliver 1,000 tons of cognac and champagne to New York City by 3 September. Its shipments have a carbon footprint one tenth that of a standard container ship.”
COMPUTING
Thought-to-Text Chip Smaller Than Neuralink Achieves 91% Accuracy
Michael Franco | New Atlas
“The chip has been developed by researchers at [EPFL] and represents a leap forward in the sizzling space of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs)—devices that are able to read activity in the brain and translate it into real-world output such as text on a screen. That’s because this particular device—known as a miniaturized brain-machine interface (MiBMI)—is extremely small, consisting of two thin chips measuring just 8 mm2 total.”
SCIENCE
We’ll Soon Get the Sharpest Image Ever of a Black Hole
Isaac Schultz | Gizmodo
“Tests by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration have yielded the highest-resolution observations ever obtained from Earth, laying an exciting foundation for future observations of black holes. …Typically, astronomers will get higher resolution images by using a bigger telescope, but the EHT already spans the Earth. Instead, the collaboration observed shorter wavelengths of light, yielding sharper images.”
TECH
OpenAI Searches for an Answer to Its Copyright Problems
Elizabeth Lopatto | The Verge
“The huge leaps in OpenAI’s GPT model probably came from sucking down the entire written web. That includes entire archives of major publishers such as Axel Springer, Condé Nast, and The Associated Press—without their permission. But for some reason, OpenAI has announced deals with many of these conglomerates anyway. At first glance, this doesn’t entirely make sense. Why would OpenAI pay for something it already had? And why would publishers, some of whom are lawsuit-style angry about their work being stolen, agree?”
DIGITAL MEDIA
Chatbots Are Primed to Warp Reality
Matteo Wong | The Atlantic
“A sizable body of research, alongside conversations I’ve recently had with several experts, suggests that the solicitous, authoritative tone that AI models take—combined with them being legitimately helpful and correct in many cases—could lead people to place too much trust in the technology. That credulity, in turn, could make chatbots a particularly effective tool for anyone seeking to manipulate the public through the subtle spread of misleading or slanted information.”
Image Credit: Nicolas Houdayer / Unsplash
