Lifeboat Foundation

From human intelligence collection to information gathered in the open, the CIA is leveraging generative artificial intelligence for a wide swath of its intelligence-gathering mission set today, and plans to continue to expand upon that into the future, according to the agency’s AI lead.

The CIA has been using AI for things like content triage and “things in the human language technology space — translation, transcription — all the types of processing that need to happen in order to help our analysts go through that data very quickly” as far back as 2012, when the agency hired its first data scientists, Lakshmi Raman, the CIA’s director of AI, said during an on-stage keynote interview at the Amazon Web Services Summit on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

On top of that, AI — particularly generative AI in recent years — has been an important tool for the CIA’s mission to triage open-source intelligence collection, Raman said.

“If you look at the trajectory of improvement, GPT-3 was maybe toddler level intelligence, systems like GPT-4 are smart high schooler intelligence and in the next couple of years we’re looking at PhD level intelligence for specific tasks,” she said during a talk at Dartmouth.

Some took this to suggest we’d be waiting two years for GPT-5 but looking at other OpenAI revelations, such as a graph showing ‘GPT-Next’ this year and ‘future models’ going forward and CEO Sam Altman refusing to mention GPT-5 in recent interviews — I’m not convinced.

Continue reading “ChatGPT could be smarter than your professor in the next 2 years” »

NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang believes that the AI frenzy will automate a whopping $50 trillion worth of companies, stating that Blackwell will play a dominant role.

NVIDIA Isn’t Taking The Foot of The AI Accelerator Pedal Any Time Soon, Plans To Take Blackwell’s Adoption To a Whole New Level

NVIDIA has undoubtedly managed to pick up a market that will progress rapidly in the future. Not only is every big tech firm, whether Microsoft or Amazon, forced into the race of “AI automation,” but the demand for adequate computing power is rising massively.

For decades, inflation has been the dominant cosmological scenario, but recently the theory has been subject to competition and critique. Two renowned pioneers of inflation — Alan Guth and Andrei Linde — join Brian Greene to make their strongest case for the inflationary theory.

This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Continue reading “Epic Expansion: The Case for Inflationary Cosmology” »

Second Sight’s Orion system bypasses the eyes to bring artificial vision directly to the brain. Working prototypes are being tested right now in six blind individuals.

#WhatTheFuture #ArtificialVision #MedicalTech.

Continue reading “This machine creates artificial vision for the blind” »

The company will allow sellers to ship directly to customers from China in an effort to compete with Shein and Temu.

Researchers have described some of the best-preserved three-dimensional trilobite fossils ever discovered. The fossils, which are more than 500 million years old, were collected in the High Atlas of Morocco and are being referred to by scientists as “Pompeii” trilobites due to their remarkable preservation in ash.

The paper, “Rapid volcanic ash entombment reveals the 3D anatomy of Cambrian trilobites,” was published in the journal, Science.

Continue reading “Most pristine trilobite fossils ever found shake up scientific understanding of the long extinct group” »

The commercialized approach of medicating children with ADHD to conform to societal expectations is problematic, and a holistic approach that addresses family stress and meets a child’s needs is more beneficial.

Questions to inspire discussion.

Continue reading “Understanding ADHD, Anxiety & Panic Attacks: Insights from Dr. Gabor Maté” »

Can one have a phenomenal experience to which one does not have access? That is, can you experience something without knowing? The dissociation between phenomenal ℗ and access (A) consciousness is widely debated. A major challenge to the supporters of this dissociation is the apparent inability to experimentally demonstrate that P-without-A consciousness exists; once participants report having a P-experience, they already have access to it. Thus, all previous empirical support for this dissociation is indirect. Here, using a novel paradigm, we create a situation where participants (Experiment 1, N = 40) lack online access to the stimulus yet are nevertheless able to retrospectively form judgements on its phenomenal, qualitative aspects. We further show that their performance cannot be fully explained by unconscious processing or by a response to stimulus offset (Experiment 2, N = 40). This suggests that P and A consciousness are not only conceptually distinct, but might also be teased apart empirically. STATEMENT OF RELEVANCE: A critical question in the scientific quest towards solving the problem of consciousness focuses on the ability to isolate conscious experiences at their purity, without any accompanying cognitive processes. This challenge has been augmented by a highly influential — yet controversial — dissociation suggested by the philosopher Ned Block between Phenomenal consciousness, or the “what it is like” to have an experience, and Access consciousness, indexing the ability to report that one has that experience. Critically, these two types of consciousness most typically go together, making it highly difficult — if not impossible — to isolate Phenomenal consciousness. Our work shows that the dissociation between phenomenal and access consciousness is not merely conceptual, but can also be empirically demonstrated. It further opens the gate to future studies pinpointing the neural correlates of the two types of consciousness.

Keywords: Access consciousness; Cognition; Consciousness; Phenomenal consciousness; Qualia; Unconscious processing.

Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.