Lifeboat Foundation

Venture capitalist a16z rebuilds a research paper with “AI Town” and releases the code. AI Town uses a language model to simulate a Sims-like virtual world in which all characters can flexibly pursue their motives and make decisions based on prompts.

In April, a team of researchers from Google and Stanford published the research paper Smallville. OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 simulates AI agents in a small digital town based solely on prompts.

Each character has an occupation, personality, and relationships with other characters, which are specified in an initial description. With further prompts, the AI agents begin to observe, plan, and make decisions.

Nvidia (NVDA) will report its second quarter earnings after the closing bell next Wednesday, setting up what will be the AI hype cycle’s biggest test yet. During this AI gold rush, companies around the world looking to profit have turned to Nvidia’s graphics processors to power new AI software and platforms.

Currently, tech firms of all sizes are doing everything they can to get their hands on Nvidia chips. During Tesla’s (TSLA) Q2 earnings call, CEO Elon Musk told analysts that the automaker will take as many Nvidia graphics processors as the company can produce.

Nvidia is widely expected to have a blowout earnings report. A miss could derail the AI hype train.

Continue reading “Nvidia’s earnings will be the AI hype cycle’s biggest test” »

Called “Pibot,” this humanoid robot integrates large language models to help it fly any aircraft as well as, if not better than, a human pilot.

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) are working to develop a humanoid pilot that can fly an aircraft without modifying the cockpit. Called “Pibot,” the robot has articulated arms and fingers that can interact with flight controls with great precision and dexterity. It also comes with camera “eyes” that help the robot monitor the internal and external conditions of the aircraft while in control.

Continue reading “Meet Pibot: Korea’s LLM-powered smart robotic pilot” »

The Japanese have created an uncanny AI model that can estimate your true age from the looks of your chest X-ray. It can help doctors in the early detection of chronic disorders.

Have you ever wondered why some people look much older than their chronological age? A new study from Japan’s Osaka Metropolitan University (OMU) suggests this could be a sign of a disease they don’t know yet.

Continue reading “AI age teller: Using chest X-ray to tell your age” »

A research team co-led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) and The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has recently made a significant advancement in spinal cord injury treatment by using genetically-modified human neural stem cells (hNSCs).

They found that specifically modulating a gene expression to a certain level in hNSCs can effectively promote the reconstruction of damaged neural circuits and restore locomotor functions, offering great potential for new therapeutic opportunities for patients with spinal cord injury. The findings were published in the journal Advanced Science under the title “Transplanting Human Neural Stem Cells with ≈50% Reduction of SOX9 Gene Dosage Promotes Tissue Repair and Functional Recovery from Severe Spinal Cord Injury.”

Traumatic spinal cord injury is a devastating condition that commonly results from accidents such as falls, car crashes or sport-related injuries.

Check Out Human Footprint on PBS Terra: https://youtu.be/-c_KBWyPGaQ

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE

Continue reading “Did JWST Discover Dark Matter Stars?” »

Spin-based sensors have attracted attention due to their high sensitivities. Here authors present a fullerene-based nano spin sensor for in-situ sensing of gas adsorption in porous organic frameworks, demonstrating the potential applications of molecular spin systems in quantum sensing.

Not many pure-play quantum computing start-ups have dared to go public. So far, the financial markets have tended to treat the newcomers unsparingly. One exception is IonQ, who along with D-Wave and Rigetti, reported quarterly earnings last week. Buoyed by hitting key technical and financial goals, IonQ’s stock is up ~400% (year-to-date) and CEO Peter Chapman is taking an aggressive stance in the frothy quantum computing landscape where error correction – not qubit count – has increasingly taken center stage as the key challenge.

This is all occurring at a time when a wide variety of different qubit types are vying for dominance. IBM, Google, and Rigetti are betting on superconducting-based qubits. IonQ and Quantinuuum use trapped ions. Atom Computing and QuEra use neutral atoms. PsiQuantum and Xanadu rely on photonics-based qubits. Microsoft is exploring topological qubits based on the rare Marjorana particle. And more are in the works.

It’s not that the race to scale up qubit-count has ended. IBM has a 433-plus qubit device (Osprey) now and is scheduled to introduce 1100-qubit device (Condor) late this year. Several other quantum computer companies have devices in the 50–100 qubit range. IonQ’s latest QPU, Forte, has 32 qubits. The challenge they all face is that current error rates remain so high that it’s impractical to reliably run most applications on the current crop of QPUs.

Scientists found a way to translate brain waves into music, using a Pink Floyd song — here’s how the tech could be used for communication in the future.
» Sign up for our newsletter KnowThis to get the biggest stories of the day delivered straight to your inbox: https://go.nowth.is/knowthis_youtube.
» Subscribe to NowThis: http://go.nowth.is/News_Subscribe.

For more science and news, subscribe to @NowThisNews.

Continue reading “Scientists Recreate Pink Floyd Song Based on Brain Waves” »