ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
OpenAI Announces a New AI Model, Code-Named Strawberry, That Solves Difficult Problems Step by Step
Will Knight | Wired
“The company today announced a new advance that signals a shift in approach—a model that can ‘reason’ logically through many difficult problems and is significantly smarter than existing AI without a major scale-up. The new model, dubbed OpenAI o1, can solve problems that stump existing AI models, including OpenAI’s most powerful existing model, GPT-4o.”
COMPUTING
Google Says It’s Made a Quantum Computing Breakthrough That Reduces Errors
Sophia Chen | MIT Technology Review
“One major challenge has been that quantum computers can store or manipulate information incorrectly, preventing them from executing algorithms that are long enough to be useful. The new research from Google Quantum AI and its academic collaborators demonstrates that they can actually add components to reduce these errors. …’This error correction stuff really works, and I think it’s only going to get better,’ wrote Michael Newman, a member of the Google team, on X.”
AUTOMATION
Driverless Semis Could Be Months Away
Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica
“On a sunny morning in December, an 18-wheeler will pull into a truck depot in Palmer, Texas, just south of Dallas. The driver will step out of the cab and help transfer his trailer to a second rig outfitted with powerful sensors. This second truck will head south on Interstate 45 toward Houston. …Trucks travel the 200 miles between Dallas and Houston all the time. But there will be something special about the middle leg of this trip: There will be no one in the vehicle.”
ENERGY
Geothermal Energy Could Outperform Nuclear Power
Editorial Staff | The Economist
“How big could EGS [or enhanced geothermal systems] get? Big enough. Though DOE analyses suggest only around 40GW of conventional geothermal resource exist in America, new techniques expand the theoretical potential to a whopping 5,500GW across much of the country, with strong potential in over half of states. The heat is definitely on.”
BIOTECH
CRISPR-Enhanced Viruses Are Being Deployed Against UTIs
Emily Mullin | Wired
“The global rise in antibiotic resistance is making bacterial infections harder to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, and death. Once considered miracle drugs, antibiotics are now losing their effectiveness against ever-evolving bacteria. One company is aiming to treat infections with a different strategy: arming tiny viruses called bacteriophages with CRISPR.”
TECH
OpenAI’s Fund-Raising Talks Could Value Company at $150 Billion
Cade Metz, Mike Isaac, Tripp Mickle, and Michael J. de la Merced | The New York Times
“If the new deal is completed, OpenAI will be more valuable than SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by Elon Musk (who was also one of OpenAI’s co-founders). It would also be nearly twice as valuable as Intel, the venerable chip giant, whose total market value has slipped to around $83 billion as it has been unable to keep up with the AI boom.”
COMPUTING
Transistor-Like Qubits Hit Key Benchmark
Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“A team in Australia has recently demonstrated a key advance in metal-oxide-semiconductor-based (or MOS-based) quantum computers. They showed that their two-qubit gates—logical operations that involve more than one quantum bit, or qubit—perform without errors 99 percent of the time. …What’s more, these MOS-based quantum computers are compatible with existing CMOS technology, which will make it more straightforward to manufacture a large number of qubits on a single chip than with other techniques.”
ROBOTICS
Inside Google’s 7-Year Mission to Give AI a Robot Body
Hans Peter Brondmo | Quote
“As the head of Alphabet’s AI-powered robotics moonshot, I came to believe many things. For one, robots can’t come soon enough. For another, they shouldn’t look like us. …I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on ‘minimum viable products’ and VCs’ general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things. Here is why.”
TECH
The AI Spending Spree, in Charts
Nate Rattner and Tom Dotan | The Wall Street Journal
“Generative artificial intelligence has sparked one of the biggest spending booms in modern American history, as companies and investors bet hundreds of billions of dollars that the technology will revolutionize the global economy and one day lead to massive profits. The question is when, and even whether, all those investments will pay off.”
Image Credit: Laura Skinner / Unsplash
