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This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 13)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Self-Taught AI Shows Similarities to How the Brain Works
Anil Ananthaswamy | Quanta
"i'I think there's no doubt that 90% of what the brain does is self-supervised learning,' said Blake Richards. Biological brains are...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 6)
NEUROSCIENCE
The Age of Brain-Computer Interfaces Is on the Horizon
Grace Brown | Wired
"The real novelty with Synchron’s device, he says, is that surgeons don’t have to cut open your brain, making it far less invasive,...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 30)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DeepMind Has Predicted the Structure of Almost Every Protein Known to Science
Melissa Heikkilä | MIT Technology Review
"From today, the Alphabet-owned AI lab is offering its database of over 200 million proteins to anyone...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 23)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
OpenAI Is Ready to Sell DALL-E to its First Million Customers
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
"'We've seen much more interest than we had anticipated, much bigger than it was for GPT-3,' says...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 16)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Meet Plato, an AI That Gains Intuition Like a Human Baby
Monisha Ravisetti | CNET
"In collaboration with AI research laboratory DeepMind in the UK, this team developed an artificial intelligence system that learned 'intuitive...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 9)
SPACE
Rocket Lab Offers Next-Day Shipping to Space
Devin Coldewey | TechCrunch
"It wasn’t long ago that orbital launches were something that took years of planning and months of tests and careful preparation. But Rocket Lab’s new...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 2)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
We Asked GPT-3 to Write an Academic Paper About Itself—Then We Tried to Get It Published
Almira Osmanovic Thunström | Scientific American
"On a rainy afternoon earlier this year, I logged in to my OpenAI...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 25)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Yann LeCun Has a Bold New Vision for the Future of AI
Melissa Heikkiläarchive page and Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
"In a draft document shared with MIT Technology Review, LeCun sketches out...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 18)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
This AI Model Tries to Re-create the Mind of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Pranshu Verma | The Washington Post
"The model, called Ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is based on 27 years of Ginsburg’s legal writings on...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 11)
COMPUTING
Photonic Chip Performs Image Recognition at the Speed of Light
Charles Q. Choi | IEEE Spectrum
"In a new study, researchers have developed a photonic deep neural network that can directly analyze images without the need...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through June 4)
COMPUTING
Manipulating Photons for Microseconds Tops 9,000 Years on a Supercomputer
John Timmer | Ars Technica
"Thanks to some tweaks to the design it described a year ago, Xanadu is now able to sometimes perform operations...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 28)
ROBOTICS
Dyson Reveals Its Big Bet...Robots
Jasper Jolly | The Guardian
"Dyson has signaled it is placing a 'big bet' on producing robots capable of household chores by 2030, as it looks to move beyond the vacuum...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 21)
TRANSPORTATION
Drones Are Turning Into Personal Flying Machines
Clive Thompson | Wired
"For eons, sci-fi illustrations depicted people zipping around cities in little flying vehicles. Now those Golden Age fliers might finally be arriving—and 'they're just big...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 14)
COMPUTING
IBM’s Target: a 4,000-Qubit Processor by 2025
Edd Gent | IEEE Spectrum
"The first iteration of road map topped out with the Condor processor that is scheduled for release in 2023, but now the...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 7)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Meta Has Built a Massive New Language AI—and It’s Giving It Away for Free
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
"Meta’s AI lab has created a massive new language model that shares both the...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 30)
COMPUTING
This Two-Inch Diamond Disc Could Hold a Staggering Billion Blu-Ray's Worth of Data
Andrew Liszewski | Gizmodo
"Using quantum memory techniques, it’s estimated that a two-inch diamond wafer will have enough data density to store the...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 23)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
NVIDIA's Next GPUs Will Be Designed Partially by AI
Monica J. White | Digital Trends
"As the company chooses to prioritize AI and machine learning (ML), some of these advancements will already find their way...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 16)
COMPUTING
How Apple’s Monster M1 Ultra Chip Keeps Moore’s Law Alive
Will Knight | Wired
"Apple’s most powerful chip to date has 114 billion transistors packed into over a hundred processing cores dedicated to logic, graphics, and artificial intelligence, all...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 9)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
OpenAI's DALL-E 2 Produces Fantastical Images of Most Anything You Can Imagine
Andrew Tarantola | Engadget
"DALL-E 2, which utilizes OpenAI's CLIP image recognition system, builds on those image generation capabilities. Users can now select...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 2)
BIOTECH
This Startup Wants to Kick-Start a Molecular Electronics Revival
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | MIT Technology Review
"The new vision, shared by Roswell and other on-chip molecular technology makers, is of biosensors that would enable people to check...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 26)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Meta's Yann LeCun Strives for Human-Level AI
Ben Dickson | VentureBeat
"What is the next step toward bridging the gap between natural and artificial intelligence? ..., has been thinking and talking about self-supervised and unsupervised...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 19)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
12 Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2022
Eliza Strickland | IEEE Spectrum
"The 2022 AI Index, which came out this week, is as impressive as ever, with 190 pages covering R&D, technical performance,...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 12)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Will Transformers Take Over Artificial Intelligence?
Stephen Ornes | Quanta
"Just 10 years ago, disparate subfields of AI had little to say to each other. But the arrival of transformers suggests the possibility of a...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 5)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Graphcore Unveils Next-Generation AI Chips and Plans for Powerful Supercomputer
Kyle Wiggers | VentureBeat
"Called the Good Supercomputer in honor of Jack Good, the first person to describe a machine that could exceed the capacity...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 26)
NEUROSCIENCE
Does Life Flash Before Your Eyes? Brain Scan of Dying Man Suggests It's Possible
Nicola Davis | The Guardian
"The team says analysis of recordings of the 30 seconds before and after the man’s heart stopped...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 19)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DeepMind Has Trained an AI to Control Nuclear Fusion
Amit Katwala | Wired
"DeepMind’s AI was able to autonomously figure out how to create these shapes by manipulating the magnetic coils in the right...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 12)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Computer Scientists Prove Why Bigger Neural Networks Do Better
Mordechai Rorvig | Quanta
"Fundamental mathematical results had suggested that networks should only need to be so big, but modern neural networks are commonly scaled up...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through February 5)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DeepMind Says Its New AI Coding Engine Is as Good as an Average Human Programmer
James Vincent | The Verge
"DeepMind has created an AI system named AlphaCode that it says 'writes computer programs at...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 29)
VIRTUAL REALITY
Can We Prove the World Isn’t a Simulation?
David Chalmers | Nautilus
"You might think you have definitive evidence that you’re not . I think that’s impossible, because any such evidence could be simulated. Maybe...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 22)
ROBOTICS
Now You Can Rent a Robotic Worker—for Less Than Paying a Human
Will Knight | Wired
"Last year, to meet rising demand amid a shortage of workers, Polar hired its first robot employee. The robot arm performs...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 15)
BIOTECH
In a First, Man Receives a Heart From a Genetically Altered Pig
Roni Caryn Rabin | The New York Times
"A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig,...
These Were Our Favorite Tech Stories From Around the Web in 2021
Every Saturday we post a curated collection of our favorite articles and news from the week. But now that the year's over, we’ll curate 2021 as a whole. It was another wild one.
Tech companies...
These Were the Most-Read Singularity Hub Stories of 2021
If 2020 was all about the pandemic, 2021 was supposed to be about things getting back on track. Let's just say it was a mixed bag. Along with a slower-than-hoped rollout of vaccines, the...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 18)
COMPUTING
This 'Breakthrough' in Chipmaking Could Bring Us a Phone With One-Week Battery Life
Phillip Tracy | Gizmodo
"The world’s largest chipmakers are promising significant performance and efficiency gains within the next decade, and they’re attributing them...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 11)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Deepmind Says Its New Language Model Can Beat Others 25 Times Its Size
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
"DeepMind’s main result is an AI with a twist: it’s enhanced with an external...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 4)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI Training Is Outpacing Moore's Law
Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum
"The increase in transistor density would account for a little more than doubling of performance between the early version of the MLPerf benchmarks...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 27)
NEUROSCIENCE
Can Digital Reality Be Jacked Directly Into Your Brain?
Adam Rogers | Wired
"The idea of uploading a synthetic experience into a mind has been a load-bearing member in science fiction for at least 75 years... But...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 20)
COMPUTING
This New Startup Has Created a Record-Breaking 256-Qubit Quantum Computer
Siobhan Roberts | MIT Technology Review
"The QuEra machine is the latest leap in scaling up quantum computing to make it more powerful and capable of...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 13)
COMPUTING
Two of World's Biggest Quantum Computers Made in China
Charles Q. Choi | IEEE Spectrum
"...scientists in China have tested two different quantum computers on what they say are more challenging tasks than Sycamore faced...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 6)
COMPUTING
Hologram-in-a-Box Can Teleport You Anywhere
John Boyd | IEEE Spectrum
"ARHT Media, based in Toronto, Canada, and PORTL Inc., a start-up in Los Angeles, have begun shipping portable plug-and-play, cabinet-based holoportal systems the size of a telephone...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 30)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Are We on the Verge of Chatting With Whales?
Christoph Droesser | Hakai Magazine
"An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them. ...If Bronstein’s idea...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 23)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How AI Is Reinventing What Computers Are
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
" smaller and faster, but they’re still boxes with processors that run instructions from humans. AI changes that on at least...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 16)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Facebook Is Researching AI Systems That See, Hear, and Remember Everything You Do
James Vincent | The Verge
" imagines AI systems that are constantly analyzing peoples’ lives using first-person video; recording what they see,...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 9)
NEUROSCIENCE
How the World's Biggest Brain Maps Could Transform Neuroscience
Alison Abbott | Nature
"To truly understand how the brain works, neuroscientists also need to know how each of the roughly 1,000 types of cell thought to...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 2)
ROBOTICS
How DeepMind Is Reinventing the Robot
Tom Chivers | IEEE Spectrum
"Having conquered Go and protein folding, the company turns to a really hard problem. ...To get to the next level, researchers are trying to fuse...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 25)
COMPUTING
Amazing Airborne Microchips Are the Tiniest Human-Built Objects to Take Flight
George Dvorsky | Gizmodo
"Called 'microfliers,' the tiny devices ride the breeze while falling and leverage the powers of spin to fall in a slow...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 18)
BIOTECH
A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth
Carl Zimmer | The New York Times
"A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 11)
LONGEVITY
Meet Altos Labs, Silicon Valley's Latest Wild Bet on Living Forever
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
"Altos is pursuing biological reprogramming technology, a way to rejuvenate cells in the lab that some scientists think could...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 4)
COMPUTING
The $150 Million Machine Keeping Moore's Law Alive
Will Knight | Wired
"The technology will be crucial for making more advanced smartphones and cloud computers, and also for key areas of emerging technology such as artificial...
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through August 28)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
What Would It Be Like to Be a Conscious AI? We May Never Know
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
"It’s possible that one day there could be as many forms of consciousness as...
