Lifeboat Foundation

Has OpenAI invented an AI technology with the potential to “threaten humanity”? From some of the recent headlines, you might be inclined to think so.

Reuters and The Information first reported last week that several OpenAI staff members had, in a letter to the AI startup’s board of directors, flagged the “prowess” and “potential danger” of an internal research project known as “Q*.” This AI project, according to the reporting, could solve certain math problems — albeit only at grade-school level — but had in the researchers’ opinion a chance of building toward an elusive technical breakthrough.

Continue reading “Contrary to reports, OpenAI probably isn’t building humanity-threatening AI” »

New research suggests that biological age, as indicated by DNA methylation, more significantly impacts cognitive abilities like memory and processing speed than chronological age. This finding could reshape our understanding of aging and cognitive health.

A year has passed since NASA’s Artemis I mission sent the new Orion spacecraft all the way to the moon, and then beyond, setting a new record in the process.

Google says this project is the first of its kind.

Frore’s AirJet could change the game — if it can beat the fan.

Two Fridays ago, I drove down to a squat single-story Silicon Valley office building to see a MacBook Air.

MacBook Air head-to-head: original versus AirJet.

Continue reading “This company just put the air in Apple’s MacBook Air” »

Popular Science magazine shifted to an all-digital format a couple of years ago, and now even that’s gone.

After 151 years, Popular Science will no longer be available to purchase as a magazine.

The long-running publication has come to an end.

Continue reading “After 151 years, Popular Science will no longer offer a magazine” »

Artificial intelligence has been steadily infused into various parts of the Synopsys EDA tool suite for the last few years. What started in 2021 with DSO.ai, a tool created to accelerate, enhance and reduce the costs associated with the place-and-route stage of semiconductor design (sometimes called PnR or floor planning), has been expanded across the company’s complete toolchain, called Synopsys.ai suite, which covers virtually the entire chip development workflow. Despite its numerous successes in recent years, however, Synopsys isn’t done innovating. Last week the company announced a strategic collaboration with Microsoft to deliver what it is calling the Synopsys.ai Copilot, a contextually-aware generative AI (GenAI) tool that assists human design teams via conversational intelligence using natural language.

If you missed the previous announcement, the Synopsys.ai Copilot is powered by OpenAI technology running on Microsoft’s Azure on-demand, high-performance cloud infrastructure. Synopsys.ai Copilot is meant to alleviate much of the grunt work required of engineers during RTL generation and verification, similar to the way ChatGPT’s conversational AI capabilities have brought productivity improvements to numerous other industries. Chip designers can effectively ask the Synopsys.ai Copilot questions in plain English, to gain insights into results, produce documentation, or ascertain information about a myriad of other criteria. Today Synopsys revealed that AMD, Intel and Microsoft are already working with the Synopsys.ai GenAI capabilities on various designs.

The generative AI of the Synopsys.ai Copilot enables a number of new capabilities. Collaborative tools can offer engineers guidance on everything from design tools to EDA workflows, and it can provide quick analysis of results. The aria-label="Synopsys.ai Copilot”>Synopsys.ai Copilot can also expedite development of RTL (register-transfer level abstraction), formal verification assertion creation, UVM test benches, and layout design. Synopsys.ai Copilot will also enable end-to-end workflow creation using natural language across the Synopsys.ai suite.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT gets 60 times the traffic of Google’s conversational generative AI engine Bard and boasts industry-leading 30-minutes session times.

I asked AI why that might be, and one potential reason ChatGPT gave me for the disparity: historically higher representation of men in the tech sector, which is likely to be the source of most early adopters. When I also asked on Twitter/X why the disparity might exist, one person cited the fact that historically AI tools like Alexa, Siri and Cortana have often had female names, playing into cultural stereotypes about women helping men. The modern generative AI tools, of course, have names like ChatGPT or Bard or Perplexity or MidJourney. So perhaps that is changing.

Another perfectly valid reason one woman cited: perhaps they just don’t want to.

Continue reading “Men 2X More Likely To Use Generative AI Than Women: Report” »

In my 2015 exploration with General John R. Allen on the concept of Hyperwar, we recognized the potential of artificial intelligence to unalterably change the field of battle. Chief among the examples of autonomous systems were drone swarms, which are both a significant threat and a critical military capability. Today, Hyperwar seems to be the operative paradigm accepted by militaries the world over as a de facto reality. Indeed, the observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop is collapsing. Greater autonomy is being imbued in all manner of weapon systems and sensors. Work is ongoing to develop systems that further decrease reaction times and increase the mass of autonomous systems employed in conflict. This trend is highlighted potently by the U.S. Replicator initiative and China’s swift advancements in automated manufacturing and missile technologies.

The U.S. Replicator Initiative: A Commitment to Autonomous Warfare?

The Pentagon’s “Replicator” initiative is a strategic move to counter adversaries like China by rapidly producing “attritable autonomous systems” across multiple domains. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks emphasized the need for platforms that are “small, smart, cheap, and many,” planning to produce thousands of such systems within 18 to 24 months. The Department of Defense, under this initiative, is developing smaller, more intelligent, and cost-effective platforms, a move that aligns with the creation of a Hyperwar environment.