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Category: robotics/AI – Page 326

Artificial-intelligence tech company OpenAI said it has raised $6.6 billion in new funding, giving it a massive post-money valuation of $157 billion, almost double its previous reported valuation of $80 billion earlier this year.

The new round of funding was led by venture-capital firm Thrive Capital, with additional investors including Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank, Fidelity, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, United Arab Emirates-based MGX and Tiger Global. In 2024, OpenAI is projecting a $5 billion net loss on $3.7 billion in revenue, CNBC reported. Next year, the company is targeting $11.6 billion in revenue, per the report.

“We are making progress on our mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” OpenAI said in a statement announcing the funding. “Every week, over 250 million people around the world use ChatGPT to enhance their work, creativity and learning. Across industries, businesses are improving productivity and operations, and developers are leveraging our platform to create a new generation of applications. And we’re only getting started.”

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We’re joined by Dr. Denis Noble, Professor Emeritus of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford, and the father of ‘systems biology’. He is known for his groundbreaking creation of the first mathematical model of the heart’s electrical activity in the 1960s which radically transformed our understanding of the heart.

Dr. Noble’s contributions have revolutionized our understanding of cardiac function and the broader field of biology. His work continues to challenge long-standing biological concepts, including gene-centric views like Neo-Darwinism.

In this episode, Dr. Noble discusses his critiques of fundamental biological theories that have shaped science for over 80 years, such as the gene self-replication model and the Weissmann barrier. He advocates for a more holistic, systems-based approach to biology, where genes, cells, and their environments interact in complex networks rather than a one-way deterministic process.

We dive deep into Dr. Noble’s argument that biology needs to move beyond reductionist views, emphasizing that life is more than just the sum of its genetic code. He explains how AI struggles to replicate even simple biological systems, and how biology’s complexity suggests that life’s logic lies not in DNA alone but in the entire organism.

The conversation covers his thoughts on the flaws of Neo-Darwinism, the influence of environmental factors on evolution, and the future of biology as a field that recognizes the interaction between nature and nurture. We also explore the implications of his work for health and longevity, and how common perspectives on genetics might need rethinking.

All the topics we covered in the episode:

Continue reading “Denis Noble — Why The Last 80 Years of Biology was Wrong” | >

The dockworkers striking up and down the East Coast are, culturally and geographically, a world apart from the Hollywood actors and writers who staged a four-month walkout last year. But their protests share a common core principle: They don’t want bots taking their jobs.

It’s a fight you can expect to see playing out a lot more as advanced automation and AI creep into virtually every workforce.

Here’s the deal: The East Coast port strike is getting a lot of attention for its potential disruption to the economy — which is precisely the point. Longshore work can be grueling, and the people working at ports are vital to getting all of the stuff we want to buy onto store shelves. No dockworkers means no bananas (or whatever), which means no profits for the companies that produce and ship them.

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In the ongoing journey to create and understand AI (artificial intelligence), a key challenge has been determining if and when a machine has achieved consciousness.

While early AI research focused on mimicking human behavior, modern advancements have revealed the limitations of traditional evaluations like the Turing Test.

As we push the boundaries of AI development, we must redefine how we measure machine intelligence, moving beyond surface-level interactions to explore deeper levels of awareness, creativity and self-consciousness.

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Nvidia has released a powerful open-source artificial intelligence model that competes with proprietary systems from industry leaders like OpenAI and Google.

The company’s new NVLM 1.0 family of large multimodal language models, led by the 72 billion parameter NVLM-D-72B, demonstrates exceptional performance across vision and language tasks while also enhancing text-only capabilities.

“We introduce NVLM 1.0, a family of frontier-class multimodal large language models that achieve state-of-the-art results on vision-language tasks, rivaling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access models,” the researchers explain in their paper.

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