OpenAI is betting big on ChatGPT, which is generating at least $4 billion in annualized revenue. But that’s not the only application the AI firm is hoping will make big bucks. If you saw our story last month detailing OpenAI’s financial projections, you might have noticed an intriguing reference…
In today’s AI news, CoreWeave has acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases. According to The Information, CoreWeave spent $1.7 Billion on the transaction. Weights & Biases was valued at $1.25 Billion in 2023. The acquisition extends CoreWeave’s purpose-built cloud platform by enabling an end-to-end experience for customers, enhancing functionality for the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises to build, tune and deploy AI applications.
S Turing Award — often called the Nobel Prize of computer science — is going to Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, the pioneers of a key approach that underlies much of today Then, a team of researchers at Zoom has developed a breakthrough technique that could dramatically reduce the cost and computational resources needed for AI systems to tackle complex reasoning problems, Chain of draft (CoD), enables large language models (LLMs) to solve problems with minimal words — using as little as 7.6% of the text required by current methods while maintaining or even improving accuracy.
And soon, all businesses will be able to use Meta’s AI to power live, 24/7 customer service that can interact with customers on behalf of businesses on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Meta announced advancements in business AI—including the customer service AI agent that will make purchases and can respond to voice prompts from a user.
In videos, say goodbye to manual contract processing! IBM’s Brandon Swink explores how Generative AI, ECM, and Orchestration Hubs streamline document management and improve efficiency. Discover how these technologies transform your approach to complex documents.
And, in this episode of Top of Mind, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Daryl Plummer explores the emerging world of guardian agents — AI designed to monitor other AI. Learn how guardian agents will become critical for organizations deploying AI agents for quality control, system observation and security from rogue AI behavior.
Then, how far are we from a true one-person unicorn and what does this mean for the future of employment and capital? Panelists Benjamine Liu, Kanjun Qiu, Dan Murphy, Mitchell Green, Sarah Franklin, and Richard Socher discuss this engaging topic during the recent World Economic Forum in Davos.
S Julia Boorstin sitting down Clara Shih, Meta Thats all for today, but AI is moving fast — like, comment, follow, and subscribe for more Neural News!
In today’s AI news, CoreWeave has acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases. According to The Information, CoreWeave spent $1.7 Billion on the transaction. Weights & Biases was valued at $1.25 Billion in 2023. The acquisition extends CoreWeave’s purpose-built cloud platform by enabling an end-to-end experience for customers, enhancing functionality for the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises to build, tune and deploy AI applications.
S Turing Award — often called the Nobel Prize of computer science — is going to Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, the pioneers of a key approach that underlies much of today Then, a team of researchers at Zoom has developed a breakthrough technique that could dramatically reduce the cost and computational resources needed for AI systems to tackle complex reasoning problems, Chain of draft (CoD), enables large language models (LLMs) to solve problems with minimal words — using as little as 7.6% of the text required by current methods while maintaining or even improving accuracy.
And soon, all businesses will be able to use Meta’s AI to power live, 24/7 customer service that can interact with customers on behalf of businesses on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Meta announced advancements in business AI—including the customer service AI agent that will make purchases and can respond to voice prompts from a user.
In videos, say goodbye to manual contract processing! IBM’s Brandon Swink explores how Generative AI, ECM, and Orchestration Hubs streamline document management and improve efficiency. Discover how these technologies transform your approach to complex documents.
And, in this episode of Top of Mind, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Daryl Plummer explores the emerging world of guardian agents — AI designed to monitor other AI. Learn how guardian agents will become critical for organizations deploying AI agents for quality control, system observation and security from rogue AI behavior.
Then, how far are we from a true one-person unicorn and what does this mean for the future of employment and capital? Panelists Benjamine Liu, Kanjun Qiu, Dan Murphy, Mitchell Green, Sarah Franklin, and Richard Socher discuss this engaging topic during the recent World Economic Forum in Davos.
S Julia Boorstin sitting down Clara Shih, Meta Thats all for today, but AI is moving fast — like, comment, follow, and subscribe for more Neural News!.7 Billion” | >
Joscha Bach is a German cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher known for his work on cognitive architectures, artificial intelligence, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, multi-agent systems, and the philosophy of mind.
Links of interest:
• http://bach.ai/
• https://twitter.com/Plinz.
Steve and Joscha discuss:
00:00 Introduction.
01:26 Growing up in the forest in East Germany.
06:23 Academia: early neural net pioneers, CS and Philosophy.
10:17 The fall of the Berlin Wall.
14:57 Commodore 64 and early programming experiences.
15:29 AGI timeline and predictions.
19:35 Scaling hypothesis, beyond Transformers, universality of information structures and world models.
25:29 Consciousness.
41:11 The ethics of brain interventions, zombies, and the Turing test.
43:43 LLMs and simulated phenomenology.
46:34 The future of consciousness research.
48:44 Cultural perspectives on suffering.
52:19 AGI and humanity’s future.
58:18 Simulation hypothesis.
01:03:33 Liquid AI: Innovations and goals.
01:16:02 Philosophy of Identity: the Transporter Problem, Is there anything beyond memory records?
Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.
Ray Kurzweil, who used to be a computer scientist at Google, is no stranger to accurate predictions. With an impressive track record, he foresaw consumers designing their own clothes from home computers by 1999 and the world’s best chess player losing to a computer by 2000. He had also predicted the widespread use of portable computers in various shapes and sizes by 2009.
His groundbreaking forecasts have consistently inspired people to push the boundaries of what is possible. Ray Kurzweil has so far made 147 predictions with 86% accuracy and has the world looking forward to the new ones with much anticipation. For his remarkable contributions and insight, the visionary was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Technology in 1999. He was also inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022.
The renowned futurist predicts that AI will surpass human intelligence and pass the Turing test by 2029. And that by 2045, humans will merge with the artificial intelligence we’ve created, a phenomenon he calls ‘The Singularity.’ He believes this would exponentially amplify our intelligence, creating unparalleled opportunities for innovation and progress.
Artificial Intelligence is not just an engineering discipline, but also a philosophical project, aimed at the naturalization of the mind. By allowing to build testable models, AI offers a metaphysical framework and a methodology for defining and exploring mental representations, perception, agency, self modeling, attention and systemic models of psychology. At the same time, very little practical AI research is concerned with understanding consciousness and the mind. Starting from the epistemological position of computationalist functionalism, we will discuss the phenomenology of consciousness (especially second order perception and \.
Reminds me of robocop.
EngineAI’s PM01 humanoid robots patrol Shenzhen with police, shaking hands, responding to commands, and engaging crowds.
Researchers have developed a high-speed electro-optic switch that is energy-efficient, has low crosstalk and works across a broad bandwidth. Made using a scalable, chip-friendly process, this switch could enhance data capacity in optical networks and data centers by improving signal routing and switching.
Jinwei Su from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China will present this research at Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC), the global event for optical communications and networking, which will take place 30 March–3 April 2025 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
As artificial intelligence and cloud computing rapidly advance, the demand for high-capacity data exchange continues to rise. Optical switching, with its broad bandwidth and low latency, is emerging as one of the most promising solutions to address this challenge. To achieve nanosecond-scale optical switching, the researchers fabricated a 2×2 cascaded electro-optic switch by micro-transfer printing pre-etched thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN) onto silicon nitride.
Deciphering some people’s writing can be a major challenge—especially when that writing is cuneiform characters imprinted onto 3,000-year-old tablets.
Now, Middle East scholars can use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and copy over cuneiform characters from photos of tablets, letting them read complicated scripts with ease.
Along with Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform is one of the oldest known forms of writing, and consists of more than 1,000 unique characters. The appearance of these characters can vary across eras, cultures, geography and even individual writers, making them difficult to interpret. Researchers from Cornell and Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed an approach called ProtoSnap that “snaps” into place a prototype of a character to fit the individual variations imprinted on a tablet.
In the quest for ultra-secure, long-range quantum communication, two major challenges stand in the way: the unpredictable nature of atmospheric turbulence and the limitations of current optical wavefront correction techniques. Researchers at the University of Ottawa, under the supervision of Professor Ebrahim Karimi, the director of Nexus for Quantum Technologies, in collaboration with the National Research Council Canada (NRC) and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (Germany), have made significant advances in overcoming both obstacles.
Their two latest breakthroughs—an AI-powered turbulence forecasting tool called TAROQQO and a high-speed Adaptive Optics (AO) system for correcting turbulence in quantum channels—represent a turning point in developing free-space quantum networks.
These advancements, published in Optics Express and Communication Physics, offer complementary solutions to the fundamental issue of atmospheric turbulence that distorts and diminishes photonic quantum states as they traverse through the air.
The world’s first “biological computer” that fuses human brain cells with silicon hardware to form fluid neural networks has been commercially launched, ushering in a new age of AI technology. The CL1, from Australian company Cortical Labs, offers a whole new kind of computing intelligence – one that’s more dynamic, sustainable and energy efficient than any AI that currently exists – and we will start to see its potential when it’s in users’ hands in the coming months.
Known as a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI), Cortical’s CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025, and is expected to be a game-changer for science and medical research. The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon “chip” are essentially an ever-evolving organic computer, and the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon-based AI chips used to train existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.
“Today is the culmination of a vision that has powered Cortical Labs for almost six years,” said Cortical founder and CEO Dr Hon Weng Chong. “We’ve enjoyed a series of critical breakthroughs in recent years, most notably our research in the journal Neuron, through which cultures were embedded in a simulated game-world, and were provided with electrophysiological stimulation and recording to mimic the arcade game Pong. However, our long-term mission has been to democratize this technology, making it accessible to researchers without specialized hardware and software. The CL1 is the realization of that mission.”
