Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,231

AI Inside: Brain Chips Pioneering the Next Leap in Human Evolution

Brain chips are no longer science fiction. They have become a reality and are transforming lives thanks to technological advancements, which allow a computer to decode brain signals, deduce human intentions, and finally enact them directly through a machine.

These systems that are making it possible are called BCI or a brain-computer interface, which studies signals from brain activity. Neuralink is the most well-known company in this field, creating a generalized brain interface to unlock human potential.

But while BCIs have been in development since the 1960s, recent advancements in AI are helping achieve miracles. These advancements have led to significant strides in practical applications, particularly for people with disabilities, showcasing the evolving impact of this technology.

AI Developments Will Speed Up with the Defeat of Anti-Altman Allies

Will AI now move faster and be less controlled?

It seems that the chaotic events of the last week at OpenAI have sped everything up, according to most observers.

Those warning about the risks of AI lost the battle on the drama over the control of 90 billion’s start-up OpenAI as two of the three external board members were replaced, and the outed CEO Sam Altman was reinstated.

Researchers engineer a material that can perform different tasks depending on temperature

Researchers report that they have developed a new composite material designed to change behaviors depending on temperature in order to perform specific tasks. These materials are poised to be part of the next generation of autonomous robotics that will interact with the environment.

The new study conducted by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign civil and environmental engineering professor Shelly Zhang and graduate student Weichen Li, in collaboration with professor Tian Chen and graduate student Yue Wang from the University of Houston, uses , two distinct polymers, and 3D printing to reverse engineer a material that expands and contracts in response to change with or without .

The study findings are reported in the journal Science Advances.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says His Company Is Now Building GPT-5

At an MIT event in March, OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman said his team wasn’t yet training its next AI, GPT-5. “We are not and won’t for some time,” he told the audience.

This week, however, new details about GPT-5’s status emerged.

In an interview, Altman told the Financial Times the company is now working to develop GPT-5. Though the article did not specify whether the model is in training—it likely isn’t—Altman did say it would need more data. The data would come from public online sources—which is how such algorithms, called large language models, have previously been trained—and proprietary private datasets.

With AI chatbots, will Elon Musk and the ultra-rich replace the masses?

Elon Musk is hyping the imminent release of his ChatGPT competitor Grok, yet another example of how his entire personality is just itself a biological LLM made by ingesting all of Reddit and 4chan. Grok already seems patterned in many ways off of the worst of Elon’s indulgences, with the sense of humor of a desperately unfunny and regressive internet troll, and biases informed by a man whose horrible, dangerous biases are fully invisible to himself.

There are all kinds of reasons to be wary of Grok, including the standard reasons to be wary of any current LLM-based AI technology, like hallucinations and inaccuracies. Layer on Elon Musk’s recent track record for disastrous social sensitivity and generally harmful approach to world-shaping issues, and we’re already looking at even more reason for concern. But the real risk probably isn’t yet so easy to grok, just because we have little understanding yet of the extent of the impact that widespread use of LLMs across our daily and online lives will have.

One key area where they’re already having and are bound to have much more of an impact is user-generated content. We’ve seen companies already deploying first-party integrations that start to embrace some of these uses, like Artifact with its AI-generated thumbnails for shared posts, and Meta adding chatbots to basically everything. Musk is debuting Grok on X as a feature reserved for Premium+ subscribers initially, with a rollout supposedly beginning this week.

Contrary to reports, OpenAI probably isn’t building humanity-threatening AI

Has OpenAI invented an AI technology with the potential to “threaten humanity”? From some of the recent headlines, you might be inclined to think so.

Reuters and The Information first reported last week that several OpenAI staff members had, in a letter to the AI startup’s board of directors, flagged the “prowess” and “potential danger” of an internal research project known as “Q*.” This AI project, according to the reporting, could solve certain math problems — albeit only at grade-school level — but had in the researchers’ opinion a chance of building toward an elusive technical breakthrough.

There’s now debate as to whether OpenAI’s board ever received such a letter — The Verge cites a source suggesting that it didn’t. But the framing of Q* aside, Q* in actuality might not be as monumental — or threatening — as it sounds. It might not even be new.