Lifeboat Foundation

Does the breakthrough to general AI need more data and computing power above all else? Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Metaon the recent debate about scaling sparked by Deepmind’s Gato.

The recent successes of large AI models such as OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Google’s PaLM and Deepmind’s Flamingo have sparked a debate about their significance for progress towards general AI. Deepmind’s Gato has recently given a particular boost to the debate, which has been conducted publicly, especially on Twitter.

Gato is a Transformer model trained with numerous data modalities, including images, text, proprioception or joint moments. All training data is processed by Gato in a token sequence similar to those of large language models. Thanks to the versatile training, Gato can text, describe images, play video games or control robotic arms. Deepmind tested the AI model with over 600 benchmarks.

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DeepMind has released what it calls a “generalist” AI called Gato, which can play Atari games, accurately caption images, chat naturally with a human and stack coloured blocks with a robot arm, among 600 other tasks. But is Gato truly intelligent – having artificial general intelligence – or is it just an AI model with a few extra tricks up its sleeve?

What is artificial general intelligence (AGI)?

Continue reading “Is DeepMind’s Gato AI really a human-level intelligence breakthrough?” »

Dell Technologies announces the expansion of its edge solutions to help retailers quickly generate more value and deliver enhanced customer experiences from data generated in retail locations.

From grocery merchandising and curbside pickup to frictionless checkout and loss prevention, retailers have embraced edge technologies to keep pace with industry demands and create better customer experiences. A recent study conducted by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, and commissioned by Dell found this growth will continue with 77% of retailers expecting to increase edge deployments significantly in the next two years¹. However, without a holistic approach, new technologies across wide geographies and locations can lead to complex and siloed solutions that drive up a retailer’s IT management cost.

“Retailers are increasingly relying on IT technologies and data at the edge to offer more personalized and intelligent customer experiences that drive better business outcomes, dramatically accelerating the need for retailers to bring together siloed technologies,” said Gil Shneorson, senior vice president of edge solutions, Dell Technologies. “We’re helping retailers easily consolidate these technologies so they can analyze data where it’s created, make faster decisions and deliver positive experiences for in-store shoppers and employees.”

Here’s how over 300 astronomers captured the dazzling first image of Sagittarius A*, and why it matters.

Our team was part of the global Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which has used observations from a worldwide network of eight radio telescopes on our planet — collectively forming a single, Earth-sized virtual telescope — to take the stunning image. The breakthrough follows the collaboration’s 2019 release of the first-ever image of a black hole, called M87*, at the center of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy.

Black holes: Looking into darkness

Continue reading “The supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy proves Einstein right” »

Breakthrough hints other cells in central nervous system, such as the brain, could be restored.

Israel is a desert, and water resources are scarce, but today it produces 20% more water than it needs. What can the world learn from Israel’s experience?

Circa 2020

Researchers have created a new 3D printing technique that could replace traditional 3D printers that take far to long to create desired objects.

The problem with traditional 3D printers is that they work in horizontal layers. This process is the bane of 3D printing, as it means that, depending on the size of the object, it will take time to construct. What if the printer could build the entire model all at once, instead of layer-by-layer? Researchers from Switzerland’s Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have done just that with their new invention.

Continue reading “Light-based 3D printing technique prints full objects in just seconds” »

It’s not often that a failed clinical trial leads to a scientific breakthrough.

When patients in the UK started showing adverse side effects during a cancer immunotherapy trial, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Center for Cancer Immunotherapy and University of Liverpool went back through the data and worked with patient samples to see what went wrong.

Their findings, published recently in Nature, provide critical clues to why many immunotherapies trigger dangerous side effects—and point to a better strategy for treating patients with solid tumors.

Pilot tests of ‘game-changing’ salt batteries are set to take place in homes in France, Poland and the Netherlands this year.

“It is not yet a product, but everything is now ready to be tested for the first time in a real-world situation,” said Olaf Adan, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology.

“While the potential is great, we have also seen many great potential technologies that have not made it. So we’re going to keep our feet on the ground and take this one step at a time.”

Continue reading “Battery breakthrough will make ‘millions of homes gas-free’” »