Toggle light / dark theme

A partnership between Magic Leap and Meta might be on the cards, but why?

According to the Financial Times, Meta is in talks with Magic Leap, an AR headset company, to look into licensing the latter’s tech.

Meta is reportedly in talks with a company called Magic Leap with an eye to a partnership that could see Meta developing its alternative reality (AR) headset in the future.

According to the Financial Times, the two are negotiating a multi-year intellectual property (IP) and manufacturing alliance. The report’s timing is significant for a few reasons.

Are Large Language Model Generative AIs Sentient, Conscious or Thinking?

ChatGPT has changed the world since it emerged a few short months ago. Where will future advancements in generative AI take us?


Welcome back Katie Brenneman, a regular contributor to 21st Century Tech Blog. Several weeks ago when ChatGPT entered the headlines I suggested to Katie that she consider writing about Large Language Modelling (LLM) and the technological and societal implications in terms of its capabilities. Were we witnessing the birth of consciousness in this new artificial intelligence (AI) discipline, or were we coming to terms with what defines our sentience?

By definition, sentience is about feelings and sensations and not thinking. Consciousness, on the other hand, is about our awareness of self and our place in the world around us. And thinking is about the ability to reason, consider a problem, come up with an idea or solution, or have an opinion.

So from what we know about ChatGPT in its various iterations, does it meet the definition of any of these terms? Is it sentient? Is it conscious? Is it thinking?

Dogs have self awareness like humans, new study shows

face_with_colon_three year 2021.


Dogs have been added to a group of animals that, like humans, “recognize themselves as distinct entities from their environment,” a new study shows.

A report by Live Science noted the study’s findings were published Feb. 18 in the journal Scientific Reports.

The study shows that dogs “know where their paws end and the world begins,” Live Science said.

Workshop: Getting started with Design of Experiments

23–25 May 2023 – Register now

Despite the wins offered by DoE, many of us working in commercial research, development, and manufacturing have yet to experience the method. This may be due in part to a lack of awareness and lack of know-how. The best way to gain an appreciation for what DoE may offer you is to experience it.

This series of three one-hour workshops will provide inspirational examples of the use of DoE in many aspects of bringing products to the market, including product design, discovery, and development, process development, scale-up, transfer, and analytical method development. It will also provide the necessary know-how and resources you will need to get started with DoE.

Scientists may have discovered the first antidote to the deadliest mushroom known to humans

But that may change soon enough.

A recent study in Nature Communications finally found a possible death cap mushroom antidote. The researchers report that an FDA-approved compound known as indocyanine green (ICG) can inhibit the mushroom’s deadly toxin.

Scientists have been studying death cap mushrooms since the early 1700s but an antidote has largely eluded them because “we know little about how mushroom toxins kill cells,” Qiaoping Wang, a professor of pharmacology at Sun Yat-Sen University and one of the study’s lead authors, told Insider.

Fear the fire or harness the flame: The future of generative AI

Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11–12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Learn More

Generative AI has taken the world by storm. So much so that in the last several months, the technology has twice been a major feature on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” The rise of startling conversant chatbots such as ChatGPT has even prompted warnings of runaway technology from some luminary artificial intelligence (AI) experts. While the current state of generative AI is clearly impressive — perhaps dazzling would be a better adjective — it might be even further advanced than is generally understood.

This week, The New York Times reported that some researchers in the tech industry believe these systems have moved toward something that cannot be explained as a “stochastic parrot” — a system that simply mimics its underlying dataset. Instead, they are seeing “An AI system that is coming up with humanlike answers and ideas that weren’t programmed into it.” This observation comes from Microsoft and is based on responses to their prompts from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.