To try out our new course (and many others on math and science), go to https://brilliant.org/sabine. You can get started for free, and the first 200 will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.
Physicists have many theories for the beginning of our universe: A big bang, a big bounce, a black hole, a network, a collision of membranes, a gas of strings, and the list goes on. What does this mean? It means we donât know how the universe began. And the reason isnât just that weâre lacking data, the reason is that science is reaching its limits when we try to understand the initial condition of the entire universe.
To help developers protect their applications against possible misuse, we are introducing the faster and more accurate Moderation endpoint. This endpoint provides OpenAI API developers with free access to GPT-based classifiers that detect undesired content â an instance of using AI systems to assist with human supervision of these systems. We have also released both a technical paper describing our methodology and the dataset used for evaluation.
When given a text input, the Moderation endpoint assesses whether the content is sexual, hateful, violent, or promotes self-harm â content prohibited by our content policy. The endpoint has been trained to be quick, accurate, and to perform robustly across a range of applications. Importantly, this reduces the chances of products âsayingâ the wrong thing, even when deployed to users at-scale. As a consequence, AI can unlock benefits in sensitive settings, like education, where it could not otherwise be used with confidence.
A new database aims to make it easier than ever to access and search through the worldâs massive trove of research papers.
Each year, millions of scientific and academic papers get published across thousands of journals. The majority of those papers lie behind paywalls, costing $9 to $30 (or more) to read. Finding them can be difficult: Tools like Google Scholar allow you to search for paper titles and keywords, but more specialized queries are difficult.
The General Index was designed to reduce those obstacles without breaking the law. Developed by the technologist Carl Malamud and his nonprofit foundation Public Resource, the free-to-use index contains words and phrases from more than 107 million research papers, comprising 8.5 terabytes when compressed.
The blockchain revolution, online gaming and virtual reality are powerful new technologies that promise to change our online experience. After summarizing advances in these hot technologies, we use the collective intelligence of our TechCast Experts to forecast the coming Internet that is likely to emerge from their application.
Hereâs what learned:
Security May Arrive About 2027 We found a sharp division of opinion, with roughly half of our experts thinking there is little or no chance that the Internet would become secure â and the other half thinks there is about a 60% probability that blockchain and quantum cryptography will solve the problem at about 2027. After noting the success of Gilderâs previous forecasts, we tend to accept those who agree with Gilder.
DecentralizationLikely About 2028â2030 We find some consensus around a 60% Probability and Most Likely Year About 2028â2030. The critical technologies are thought to focus on blockchain, but quantum, AI, biometrics and the Internet of things (IoT) also thought to offer localizing capabilities.