Nothing quite excites the imagination like pondering on the future.
And not only is science fiction great for exploring ideas surrounding the future, but it is also a great avenue for exploring other realities, such as post-apocalypses, zombie takeovers, and alien invasions.
Observations deliver evidence of an exotic “sixth-order” electromagnetic transition in the gamma-ray emission of an iron isotope, a finding that could provide new ways to test nuclear models.
Evolutionary biologists often argue that vertebrate embryos develop in highly similar manners, reflecting their common ancestry.
Fresh on the heels of GPT-4’s public release, a team of Microsoft AI scientists published a research paper claiming the OpenAI language model — which powers Microsoft’s now somewhat lobotomized Bing AI — shows “sparks” of human-level intelligence, or artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Emphasis on the “sparks.” The researchers are careful in the paper to characterize GPT-4’s prowess as “only a first step towards a series of increasingly generally intelligent systems” rather than fully-hatched, human-level AI. They also repeatedly highlighted the fact that this paper is based on an “early version” of GPT-4, which they studied while it was “still in active development by OpenAI,” and not necessarily the version that’s been wrangled into product-applicable formation.
Disclaimers aside, though, these are some serious claims to make. Though a lot of folks out there, even some within the AI industry, think of AGI as a pipe dream, others think that developing AGI will usher in the next era of humanity’s future; the next-gen GPT-4 is the most powerful iteration of the OpenAI-built Large Language Model (LLM) to date, and on the theoretical list of potential AGI contenders, GPT-4 is somewhere around the top of the list, if not number one.
Just a few days after hatching, zebrafish larvae can discriminate between bigger and smaller numbers, suggesting they may have an innate numerical ability.
A team of researchers from the Université libre de Bruxelles and the French National Center for Scientific Research have shown for the first time that an exotic type of process violating causal inequalities can be realized with known physics. A violation of a causal inequality proves under theory-independent assumptions that certain variables in an experiment cannot be assigned a definite causal order.
This is a phenomenon that has been known to be possible in theory, but widely believed impossible in practice, at least in the known regimes of physics. The new study, published in Nature Communications, shows that such processes can in fact be realized in standard quantum mechanics using variables that are delocalized in time. The finding may have far-reaching implications for our understanding of causality in physics.
The concept of causality is essential for physics and for our understanding of the world in general. Usually, we think of events as happening in a well-defined causal order. That is, they are ordered according to some time parameter, such that events in the past can influence events in the future, but not vice versa. For instance, the sunrise causes the rooster to crow, but whether the rooster crows does not have any influence on the sunrise.
If the Somali and Nubian tectonic plates continue to separate, the rift will form a smaller continent that will contain present-day Somalia as well as sections of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania.
