ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Google’s New Project Astra Could Be Generative AI’s Killer App
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
“Last week I was taken through an unmarked door on an upper floor of a building in London’s King’s Cross district into a room with strong secret-project vibes. The word ‘ASTRA’ was emblazoned in giant letters across one wall. …’The pitch to my mum is that we’re building an AI that has eyes, ears, and a voice. It can be anywhere with you, and it can help you with anything you’re doing,’ says Greg Wayne, co-lead of the Astra team. ‘It’s not there yet, but that’s the kind of vision.'”
COMPUTING
Graphene Interconnects Aim to Give Moore’s Law New Life
Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“Destination 2D, a startup based in Milpitas, Calif., claims to have solved [two challenges associated with using graphene in chips]. Destination 2D’s team has demonstrated a technique to deposit graphene interconnects onto chips at 300 °C, which is still cool enough to be done by traditional CMOS techniques. They have also developed a method of doping graphene sheets that offers current densities 100 times as dense as copper, according to Kaustav Banerjee, co-founder and CTO of Destination 2D.”
AUTOMATION
Wayve’s AI Self-Driving System Is Here to Drive Like a Human and Take On Waymo and Tesla
Ben Oliver | Wired
“[In contrast to Waymo’s hybrid system] Wayve’s AI operates without high-definition maps or coded interventions, and learns unsupervised from vast quantities of unlabeled real-life or simulated driving videos. ‘I think the gap between that geofenced robotaxi model and what an embodied AI solution can do is stark and game-changing,’ Wayve founder Alex Kendall says. ‘The market’s now somewhat swinging in our direction, but there’s no prizes for having the right idea eight years ago. Now it’s all down to execution.'”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Harvard Makes 1 Million Books Available to Train AI Models
Kate Knibbs | Wired
“Harvard University announced Thursday it’s releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly 1 million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. …In addition to the trove of books, the Institutional Data Initiative is also working with the Boston Public Library to scan millions of articles from different newspapers now in the public domain, and it says it’s open to forming similar collaborations down the line.”
TRANSPORTATION
Electric Cars Could Last Much Longer Than You Think
James Morris | Wired
“Rather than having a shorter lifespan than internal combustion engines, EV batteries are lasting way longer than expected, surprising even the automakers themselves. …A 10-year-old EV could be almost as good as new, and a 20-year-old one still very usable. That could be yet another disruption to an automotive industry that relies on cars mostly heading to the junkyard after 15 years.”
ENVIRONMENT
AI’s Emissions Are About to Skyrocket Even Further
James O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review
“AI models are rapidly moving from fairly simple text generators like ChatGPT toward highly complex image, video, and music generators. Until now, many of these ‘multimodal’ models have been stuck in the research phase, but that’s changing. ‘As we scale up to images and video, the data sizes increase exponentially,’ says Gianluca Guidi, a PhD student in artificial intelligence at University of Pisa and IMT Lucca, who is the paper’s lead author. Combine that with wider adoption, he says, and emissions will soon jump.”
SPACE
NASA’s Boss-to-Be Proclaims We’re About to Enter an ‘Age of Experimentation’
Stephen Clark | Ars Technica
“‘If the launch doesn’t cost a half-billion dollars, we don’t need to spend many, many years and lots of billions to get it right with some super exquisite asset, when you can get into a rhythm of using all of these providers to get things up very quickly to see what works and what doesn’t, and then evolve into something else,’ Jared Isaacman said. ‘What happens when industry starts cranking out spaceships out of multiple factories? …You’re going to have lots and lots of people in space at one time, and that’s why I call it a light switch-like moment, where a lot of things are going to change.'”
AUTOMATION
The End of Cruise Is the Beginning of a Risky New Phase for Autonomous Vehicles
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“Eight years and $10 billion later, GM has decided to pull the plug on its grand robotaxi experiment. The automaker’s CEO, Mary Barra, made the surprise announcement late on Tuesday, arguing that a shared autonomous mobility service was never really in its ‘core business.’ It was too expensive and had too many regulatory hurdles to overcome to make it a viable revenue stream. Instead, GM would pivot to ‘privately owned’ driverless cars—because, after all, that’s what the people really wanted.”
FUTURE
Galactic Civilizations May Be Impossible. Here’s Why.
Adam Frank | Big Think
“For galactic-scale civilizations to exist in our Universe, they would have to overcome two major hurdles related to physics and biology. One is the sheer distance between each society. The other is biological life span. …Do the laws of physics and the dynamics of social arrangements (even alien ones) allow for galactic societies? As much as I love them (how else could I become a Space Pirate?), I fear the answer may be ‘no.'”
Image Credit: Thomas Chan on Unsplash
