Lifeboat Foundation

00:00 Intro.
03:05 Demis Hassabis: Founder of DeepMind.
14:30 DeepMind: Mission and early years.
19:18 Beating the Atari games.
27:22 Elon Musk: thoughts on DeepMind.
28:42 Elon Musk: AI could destroy humanity.
30:20 AlphaGo.
36:14 AlphaZero.
38:30 MuZero.
40:56 WaveNet.
43:18 AlphaStar.
45:33 AlphaFold.
48:39 Gato, A generalist agent.
50:02 Solving *everything else*

This premium episode is a documentary-style video about the history and importance of Alphabet subsidiary, DeepMind. Demis Hassabis, founder, was a chess prodigy by the time he was 13 years old. He went on to conclude he wanted to “solve intelligence” by building artificial intelligence agents and using digital tools. The team at DeepMind has created systems that defeated the world’s best chess and Go professionals. They’ve also cracked the code on the infamous ‘protein-folding problem.’ Demis Hassabis and DeepMind are fascinating. Moreover, they’re still just getting started.

Continue reading “DeepMind: The Quest to Develop Artificial General Intelligence” »

It’s probably a good time to buy an electric car.

Ford is slashing the price of its electric Mustang Mach-E by as much $6,000, keeping pace with Tesla’s sweeping price cuts, announced just weeks before.

Ford is also increasing production of the Mach-E in an attempt to shorten wait times, which Marin Gjaja, chief customer officer of Ford’s electric Model e division, said can be up to 150 days currently.

Continue reading “Ford hits back at Tesla’s price cuts” »

Scientists have developed a minuscule brain implant smaller than a human hair which allows people to control computers with their minds. The chip is developed by Precision Neuroscience and works along similar principles to those of Elon Musk’s Neuralink company, though the Precision chip sits on the brain rather than in the tissue.

Elon Musk has killed the little hope some had for Tesla in offering a retrofit to the new Autopilot/Self-Driving hardware (HW4) to current Tesla owners.

Tesla is expected to announce a new Autopilot/Self-Driving hardware suite, which has been referred to as Hardware 4.0 (HW4), any day now.

There have been quite a few indications that some major changes are coming. For example, after famously removing radar sensors from its hardware suite, we learned in December that Tesla is planning to add one as soon as this month.

Musk also teased that new products are under development, which presumably could be a new car model. Wall Street analysts expect a lower-cost EV that they have dubbed the “Model 2.”

“I should also say that we have other products in development. We’re not going to announce them obviously but they’re very exciting and I think we’ll blow people’s minds when we reveal them,” Musk said.

Other areas of growth for the company include Tesla insurance, which is currently at an annual premium run rate of $300 million. “We’re growing 20% a quarter so it’s growing faster than the growth in our vehicle business,” CFO Zachary Kirkhorn said.

SpaceX is poised to conduct a wet dress rehearsal of the Starship launch system from its Starbase site in southeastern Texas, a major milestone in CEO Elon Musk’s quest to turn long-haul interplanetary transportation from science fiction to reality.

It’s the strongest signal yet that Starship’s first orbital flight test could well and truly be imminent. The wet dress is a critical series of prelaunch tests that includes propellant loading of both the upper stage and booster, and a run-through of countdown to around T-10 seconds, or just before engine ignition. If no major issues crop up during the testing, the next step would be “de-stacking,” or the separation of the Starship second stage and Super Heavy booster. That would be followed by a full static fire test, where engineers would light up all 33 of the booster’s Raptor 2 engines. The launch system would then be re-stacked before the first orbital flight test.

This could all take place in a matter of weeks — March is not off the table for the orbital flight test — but that’s assuming that everything goes well and no major mishaps take place (they’re not unheard of). It also assumes that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the body that regulates commercial launches, issues SpaceX the all-important launch license fairly soon. The FAA has been basically mum about the status of its evaluation of SpaceX’s plans, though it’s been conducting extensive assessments of the Starship launch program for some time.

When Elon Musk posed the question to his Twitter followers as to whether or not he should resign as CEO, the majority of voters chose the latter option.

As a consequence of the poll’s findings, a number of potential candidates have been proposed to succeed Musk as Twitter’s CEO, but if popularity were a deciding factor, MrBeast would emerge as the clear victor.

His tweet proposing himself for the position has almost a million likes as of this writing, and he has ambitious aspirations for where he would lead the social networking site.

AI robots, with Elon Musk, Boston Dynamics. To learn AI, visit: https://brilliant.org/digitalengine where you’ll also find loads of fun courses on maths, science and computer science.

Sources:

Continue reading “Why these explosive AI robot birds will be everywhere, with Elon Musk, ChatGPT” »

Elon Musk said the private space firm has “a real shot at late February” for the orbital launch of Starship.

We might finally see SpaceX’s Starship soar to orbit next month. SpaceX’s orbital launch of its fully reusable Starship rocket is arguably the most exciting upcoming space mission of the year. And we may not have to wait very long to see it take to the skies.

Starship could fly to orbit for the first time as soon as late February, though March is more likely, according to an update from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk via Twitter.

Continue reading “SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket could soar to orbit as soon as next month” »