The CEO once said a self-sustaining Mars colony won’t work if it’s wildly expensive for each person to make the voyage.
A group of computer scientists once backed by Elon Musk has caused some alarm by developing an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) they say is too dangerous to release to the public.
OpenAI, a research non-profit based in San Francisco, says its “chameleon-like” language prediction system, called GPT–2, will only ever see a limited release in a scaled-down version, due to “concerns about malicious applications of the technology”.
That’s because the computer model, which generates original paragraphs of text based on what it is given to ‘read’, is a little too good at its job.
Elon Musk believes there is a path for the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship (SHS) to be built for less than a Falcon 9. Currently, a single use SpaceX Falcon 9 can be purchased for about $62 million. The estimates for the cost of the SpaceX Super Heavy Starship (SHS) are about $250 to 400 million.
The current design of the SpaceX SHS has 38 Raptor engines. There are 31 Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster and seven in the Starship upper stage. There are 9 Merlin engines in the SpaceX Falcon 9.
This will sound implausible, but I think there’s a path to build Starship / Super Heavy for less than Falcon 9
SpaceX is developing stronger steel superalloys. SpaceX is making improved versions of Inconel alloys.
SpaceX metallurgy team developed SX500 superalloy for 12000 psi, hot oxygen-rich gas. It was hard. Almost any metal turns into a flare in those conditions.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2018
The Elon Musk funded OpenAI non-profit has created a breakthrough system for writing high-quality text. It can write text, performs basic reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization and all without task-specific training.
The system is able to take a few sentences of sample writing and then produce a multi-paragraph article in the style and context of the sample. This capability would let AI’s to impersonate the writing style of any person from previous writing samples.
GPT-2, is a 1.5 billion parameter Transformer that achieves state of the art results on 7 out of 8 tested language modeling datasets in a zero-shot setting, yet still simplifies (or in AI term underfits) their database called WebText. Samples from the model reflect these improvements and contain coherent paragraphs of text. These findings suggest a promising path towards building language processing systems which learn to perform tasks from their naturally occurring demonstrations.
Researchers this week announced they had developed an automatic text generator using artificial intelligence which is very good—so good, it is keeping details private for now.
That software developed by OpenAI could be used to generate news stories, product reviews and other kinds of writing which may be more realistic than anything developed before by computer.
OpenAI, a research center backed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon and Microsoft, said the new software “achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks,” including summarization and translating.
All hopes are on Mars to be the next big adventure for mankind, with groups like NASA working hard to make a manned mission to the Red Planet a reality and companies like SpaceX betting big on Earth-to-Mars travel.
SpaceX boss Elon Musk has long promised that living on Mars will be a reality within our lifetimes, even suggesting that he himself might move there at some point in the not-too-distant future. But once all the kinks are ironed out, how much is it going to cost to leave Earth behind and become a full-fledged Martian? Musk thinks he has the answer.