Toggle light / dark theme

Intelligence Explosion — Part 2/3

Hallucination!

Can “hallucinations” generate an alternate world, prophesying falsehood?

As I write this article, NVIDIA( is surpassing Wall Street’s expectations. The company, headquartered in Santa Clara, California, has just joined the exclusive club of only five companies in the world valued at over a trillion dollars [Apple (2.7T), Microsoft (2.4T), Saudi Aramco (2T), Alphabet/Google (1.5T), and Amazon (1.2T)], as its shares rose nearly 25% in a single day! A clear sign of how the widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can dramatically reshape the technology sector.

Intel has announced an ambitious plan to develop scientific generative AIs designed with one trillion parameters. These models will be trained on various types of data, including general texts, code, and scientific information. In comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters (the size of GPT-4 has not yet been disclosed by OpenAI). The semiconductor company’s main focus is to apply these AIs in the study of areas such as biology, medicine, climate, cosmology, chemistry, and the development of new materials. To achieve this goal, Intel plans to launch a new supercomputer called Aurora, with processing capacity exceeding two EXAFLOPS(*, later this year.

Hyperloop Technology to Reduce Travel Time Between Dubai and Abu Dhabi to 12 Minutes

A breakthrough in transportation has brought the possibility of traveling between Dubai and Abu Dhabi in just 12 minutes one step closer. Virgin’s Hyperloop, supported by Dubai-based firm DP World, conducted successful tests in the Nevada desert.

During the trial, two Hyperloop staff members traveled 500 meters on a “DevLoop” in just 15 seconds, reaching speeds of 107 mph (172 kph). The Hyperloop, which uses vacuum tubes to propel pods at high speeds, aims to eventually achieve speeds of 1,000 km/h.

Although the recent test occurred in Nevada, the Los Angeles-based Hyperloop company is considering various locations for implementing the technology, including a route between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. If realized, this Hyperloop connection would significantly reduce travel time between the two Emirates.

Google’s ‘Barkour’ will let robots navigate obstacle courses just like real dogs

The Barkour benchmark is customizable and can be adapted to larger course areas with different configurations, similar to real dog agility competitions.

In the world of robotics, quadrupedal robots are becoming increasingly impressive with their abilities and tricks. However, comparing these robots and evaluating their capabilities is challenging due to the absence of standardized metrics.

To address this issue, a team of research scientists at Google has come up with an innovative solution: robot obstacle courses inspired by dog agility competitions. This new approach, known as Barkour, aims to establish a benchmark for assessing the agility and mobility of quadruped robots, a blog post said.

The Role Of Leapfrog Innovation In Emerging Markets

R. Srikumar is Senior Vice President, Head Portfolio Group at Mphasis.

As technology advances at an unprecedented rate, it is easy to assume that all countries and regions have equal access to the latest innovations. However, that is not always the case. Emerging markets often lack the infrastructure and resources necessary to keep up with technological advancements. But instead of being left behind, these regions have embraced “leapfrog innovation” to catch up and even surpass more developed markets.

Leapfrog innovation refers to the process of bypassing traditional technologies and adopting newer, more advanced technologies to meet the specific needs of emerging markets. This approach has increasingly become the norm in some areas of Southeast Asia and Africa, where the lack of infrastructure, limited resources and rapidly growing populations have made traditional development approaches difficult to implement.

Hibernation artificially triggered in potential space travel breakthrough

In science fiction, space crews are often spared the boredom and inconvenience of long-distance space travel by being placed into a state of suspended animation. Now this goal may have come a step closer after scientists showed that hibernation can be artificially triggered in rodents using ultrasonic pulses.

The advance is seen as significant because the technique was effective in rats – animals that do not naturally hibernate. This raises the prospect that humans may also retain a vestigial hibernation circuit in the brain that could be artificially reactivated.

Unleashing the power of water: Researchers build analog computer to forecast chaotic futures

Discover how researchers have developed an innovative analog computer that utilizes water waves to predict chaotic events.

Have you ever wondered what the future holds? Do you think a computer learns from the past and predicts the future? Most of us would think of advanced AI models when posed with this question, but what if we told you that it could happen in a completely different way?

Picture a tank of water instead of a traditional circuitry processor. As surprising as it may sound, a group of researchers has built just that—a unique analog computer that utilizes water waves to forecast chaotic events.


JuSun/iStock.

Team achieves Ångström-resolution fluorescence microscopy

A breakthrough in fluorescence microscopy has been achieved by the research group of Ralf Jungmann at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich. The team developed Resolution Enhancement by Sequential Imaging (RESI), a revolutionary technique that enhances the resolution of fluorescence microscopy down to the Ångström scale. This innovation is poised to usher in a paradigm shift in our approach to study biological systems with thus far unprecedented detail.

Cells, the fundamental units of life, contain a plethora of intricate structures, processes and mechanisms that uphold and perpetuate living systems. Many cellular core components, such as DNA, RNA, proteins and lipids, are just a few nanometers in size. This makes them substantially smaller than the resolution limit of traditional light microscopy. The exact composition and arrangement of these molecules and structures is thus often unknown, resulting in a lack of mechanistic understanding of fundamental aspects of biology.

In recent years, super-resolution techniques have made leaps and bounds to resolve many sub-cellular structures below the classical diffraction limit of light. Single molecule localization microscopy, or SMLM, is a super-resolution approach that can resolve structures on the order of ten nanometers in size by temporally separating their individual fluorescence emission.

/* */