This 12 months, readers had been once more fascinated by tales about synthetic intelligence. One algorithm realized to make quick, playable video video games from video footage; one other cloned actual individuals’s personalities; and yet one more took on the function of your future self—prepared and keen to impart knowledge.
Different fashionable items dug into the rise of robotaxis, tantalizing hints about how we would at some point stave off ageing, and a unified idea of consciousness.
We hope you take pleasure in a re-evaluation or discovering these for the primary time.
As all the time, thanks for studying!
A Google AI Watched 30,000 Hours of Video Video games—Now It Makes Its Personal
By Jason Dorrier
“As AI requires prodigious quantities of knowledge, one approach to forecast the place issues are going subsequent is to have a look at what information is broadly obtainable on-line, however nonetheless largely untapped. Video, of which there’s a lot, is an apparent subsequent step. Certainly, [in February], OpenAI previewed a brand new text-to-video AI known as Sora that surprised onlookers. However what about video…video games?”
Scientists Are Working In the direction of a Unified Principle of Consciousness
By Shelly Fan
“Not all [the] authors agree on the precise mind mechanisms that enable us to understand the outer world and assemble an internal world of ‘self.’ However by collaborating, they merged their concepts, exhibiting that completely different theories aren’t essentially mutually incompatible—in actual fact, they may very well be consolidated right into a basic framework of consciousness and even encourage new concepts that assist unravel one of many mind’s best mysteries.”
Scientists Prolong Life Span in Mice by Restoring This Mind-Physique Connection
By Shelly Fan
“Altering the protein’s conduct in aged mice with genetic engineering prolonged their life span by roughly seven p.c. For a median 76-year life span in people, the rise interprets to over 5 years. The remedy additionally altered the mice’s well being. Mice like to run, however their vigor plummets with age. Reactivating the neurons in aged mice revived their motivation, reworking them from sofa potatoes into spectacular joggers.”
It Will Take Solely a Single SpaceX Starship to Launch a House Station
By Edd Gent
“SpaceX’s forthcoming Starship rocket will make it doable to carry unprecedented quantities of fabric into orbit. …Now, a three way partnership between Airbus and Voyager House that’s constructing a non-public house station known as Starlab has inked a contract with SpaceX to get it into orbit. The enterprise plans to place the spectacular capabilities of the brand new rocket to full use by launching all the 26-foot-diameter house station in a single go.”
OpenAI’s GPT-4o Makes AI Clones of Actual Folks With Stunning Ease
By Edd Gent
“AI has change into uncannily good at aping human conversational capabilities. New analysis suggests its powers of mimicry go so much additional, making it doable to copy particular individuals’s personalities. …A examine led by researchers at Stanford College has found that every one it takes is a two-hour interview for an AI mannequin to foretell individuals’s responses to a battery of questionnaires, persona checks, and thought experiments with an accuracy of 85 p.c.”
‘Droidspeak’: AI Brokers Now Have Their Personal Language Due to Microsoft
By Edd Gent
“Getting AIs to work collectively may very well be a robust pressure multiplier for the know-how. However regardless of their expressive energy, human languages may not be the perfect medium of communication for machines that essentially function in ones and zeros. This prompted researchers from Microsoft to develop a brand new methodology of communication that permits brokers to speak to one another within the high-dimensional mathematical language underpinning LLMs. They’ve named the brand new method Droidspeak…and in a preprint paper printed on the arXiv, the Microsoft group stories it enabled fashions to speak 2.78 occasions sooner with little accuracy misplaced.”
Waymo Robotaxis Are Giving 100,000 Rides a Week. It’ll Quickly Be Extra.
By Jason Dorrier
“After a 12 months of business operations in San Francisco with out main incident, Waymo is eyeing enlargement. In August, the corporate moved into Daly Metropolis, Broadmoor, and Colma, simply south of the town. Waymo has approval to function in a complete of twenty-two cities alongside the peninsula south of San Francisco, and though there’s no timetable but, in keeping with the San Francisco Chronicle, in addition they have ambitions so as to add operations in San Jose and East Bay, which would come with Oakland and Berkeley.”
A One-and-Completed Injection to Sluggish Ageing? New Research in Mice Opens the Chance
By Shelly Fan
“A preventative anti-aging remedy looks as if wishful considering. But a brand new examine led by Dr. Corina Amor Vegas at Chilly Spring Harbor Laboratory describes a remedy that brings the dream to life—no less than for mice. Given a single injection in younger maturity, they aged extra slowly in comparison with their friends. …’If we give it to aged mice, they rejuvenate. If we give it to younger mice, they age slower. No different remedy proper now can do that,’ mentioned Amor Vegas in a press launch.”
These Mini AI Fashions Match OpenAI With 1,000 Instances Much less Information
By Jason Dorrier
“The unreal intelligence trade is obsessive about measurement. Greater algorithms. Extra information. Sprawling information facilities that might, in a number of years, eat sufficient electrical energy to energy entire cities. …Eye-popping numbers like these make it straightforward to neglect measurement isn’t every thing. Some researchers, notably these with fewer assets, are aiming to do extra with much less. AI scaling will proceed, however algorithms may also get way more environment friendly as they develop.”
This MIT Chatbot Simulates Your ‘Future Self.’ It’s Right here to Assist You Make Higher Selections.
By Jason Dorrier
“Chatbots are actually posing as mates, romantic companions, and departed family members. Now, we will add one other to the record: Your future self. MIT Media Lab’s Future You undertaking invited younger individuals, aged 18 to 30, to have a chat with AI simulations of themselves at 60. The sims—which had been powered by a personalised chatbot and included an AI-generated picture of their older selves—answered questions on their expertise, shared recollections, and provided classes realized over the many years.”
Banner Picture Credit score: Luke Jones on Unsplash
