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TAE Technologies, the California, USA-based fusion energy technology company, has announced that its proprietary beam-driven field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasma generator has produced stable plasma at over 50 million degrees Celsius. The milestone has helped the company raise USD280 million in additional funding.

Norman — TAE’s USD150 million National Laboratory-scale device named after company founder, the late Norman Rostoker — was unveiled in May 2017 and reached first plasma in June of that year. The device achieved the latest milestone as part of a “well-choreographed sequence of campaigns” consisting of over 25000 fully-integrated fusion reactor core experiments. These experiments were optimised with the most advanced computing processes available, including machine learning from an ongoing collaboration with Google (which produced the Optometrist Algorithm) and processing power from the US Department of Energy’s INCITE programme that leverages exascale-level computing.

Plasma must be hot enough to enable sufficiently forceful collisions to cause fusion and sustain itself long enough to harness the power at will. These are known as the ‘hot enough’ and ‘long enough’ milestone. TAE said it had proved the ‘long enough’ component in 2015, after more than 100000 experiments. A year later, the company began building Norman, its fifth-generation device, to further test plasma temperature increases in pursuit of ‘hot enough’.

The question cryogenics raises is, can we freeze and then recover consciousness itself as opposed to simply saving imprints of a person’s memories as an AI?

Elon Musk finally got to show off his monkey.

Neuralink, a company founded by Musk that is developing artificial-intelligence-powered microchips to go in people’s brains, released a video Thursday appearing to show a macaque using the tech to play video games, including “Pong.”

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s brain-chip company, Neuralink, released a video of a monkey playing video games with its mind” »

NGAD is the Navy’s effort to replace the Super Hornet. Note: It’s a completely separate program from the Air Force’s own NGAD—which recently designed, tested, and flew a secret new fighter jet—and will produce a completely separate plane. The two aircraft will almost certainly be quite different, with the Air Force’s jet more optimized for air superiority. It’s likely the two fighters, developed roughly within the same time period, will share much of the same technology.

The U.S. Navy elaborated on its plans to replace the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, saying the service’s next strike fighter will “most likely be manned.” The jet will probably fly alongside robotic allies, and remotely crewed aircraft could eventually account for six out of 10 planes on a carrier flight deck.

“As we look at it right now, the Next-Gen Air Dominance [NGAD] is a family of systems, which has as its centerpiece the F/A-XX—which may or may not be manned—platform. It’s the fixed-wing portion of the Next-Gen Air Dominance family of systems,” said Rear Adm. Gregory Harris, the head of the Chief of Naval Operations’ air warfare directorate, during a Navy League event.

Continue reading “The Navy Reveals Plans for Its New Fighter Jet” »

Rice University computer scientists have demonstrated artificial intelligence (AI) software that runs on commodity processors and trains deep neural networks 15 times faster than platforms based on graphics processors.

“The cost of training is the actual bottleneck in AI,” said Anshumali Shrivastava, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering. “Companies are spending millions of dollars a week just to train and fine-tune their AI workloads.”

Shrivastava and collaborators from Rice and Intel will present research that addresses that bottleneck April 8 at the machine learning systems conference MLSys.

Automated matchmakers do what no human can.

Slick, viral videos from Boston Dynamics are impressive but teaching a robot to walk by itself is a lot harder.

Three years of underground robotics competitions culminate in a final event in September with $5 million in prize money.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Final Event is scheduled to take place at the Louisville Mega Cavern in Louisville, Kentucky, from September 21 to 23. We’ve followed SubT teams as they’ve explored their way through abandoned mines, unfinished nuclear reactors, and a variety of caves, and now everything comes together in one final course where the winner of the Systems Track will take home the $2 million first prize.

It’s a fitting reward for teams that have been solving some of the hardest problems in robotics, but winning isn’t going to be easy, and we’ll talk with SubT Program Manager Tim Chung about what we have to look forward to.

Continue reading “DARPA Prepares for the Subterranean Challenge Final” »

The new AI tool, developed by researchers at Stanford and Genenetech, runs simulated clinical trials using different eligibility criteria.