Lifeboat Foundation

Good news for anyone with a hankerin’ for going back in time to kill their grandfather before he had kids: a physicist named Germain Tobar from the University of Queensland in Australia says go for it since time travel paradoxes aren’t real. So feel free to kill your grandpappy without fear of deleting your own existence.

He didn’t explicitly frame it that way, but he does think that time travel paradoxes are bullshit. Tobar’s work uses Einstein’s theory of general relativity as a foundation and then builds from there. He says that, according to his calculations, events can exist both in the past and in the future simultaneously, independent of one another. Space-time will adjust itself to avoid paradoxes, thus allowing you to cause whatever mayhem you want throughout time without creating contradictions.

If true, famous time travel stories like The Terminator and Back to the Future wouldn’t be possible. A Terminator sent to the past to kill John Connor would not be killing John Connor in the future, theoretically. It would only kill John Connor in the past and space-time would find some way to adjust to ensure that John Connor is still alive in the future to continue to be a pain in every robot’s shiny metal ass.

In today’s AI news, Nvidia has three anonymous customers, referred to as Customers A, B, and C, who have each spent over $10 Billion on the company’s AI chips so far this year.

However, Hassabis’ true breakthrough came just a month ago, when he and two colleagues from DeepMind won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of AlphaFold, an AI tool capable of predicting the structure of the 200 million known proteins. This achievement would have been nearly impossible without AI, and solidifies Hassabis’ belief that AI is set to become one of the main drivers of scientific progress in the coming years.

Hassabis — the son of a Greek-Cypriot father and a Singaporean mother — reflects on the early days of DeepMind, which he founded in 2010, when “nobody was working on AI.” Over time, machine learning techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning began to take shape, providing AI with a significant boost. In 2017, Google scientists introduced a new algorithmic architecture that enabled the development of AGI. “It took several years to figure out how to utilize that type of algorithm and then integrate it in hybrid systems like AlphaFold, which includes other components,” he explains.

“During our first years, we were working in a theoretical space. We focused on games and video games, which were never an end in themselves. It gave us a controlled environment in which to operate and ask questions. But my passion has always been to use AI to accelerate scientific understanding. We managed to scale up to solving a real-world problem, such as protein folding,” recalls the engineer and neuroscientist.

Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy.

That’s now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

As we move into 2025, mental health continues to be a vital aspect of overall well-being in an increasingly fast-paced and complex world.

- CBT-based exercises that help users manage anxiety, depression, and emotional stress.

- Daily check-ins with an AI chatbot to track moods and thoughts, enabling users to gain insights into their emotional health.

Continue reading “Top 5 AI Therapists in 2025” »

For my presentation at the 7th Eurosymposium on Healthy Aging in Brussels tomorrow, I’ve significantly updated my slides “Solving Aging: Is AI all we need?” — It’s still possible to register and attend remotely today and/or tomorrow.

:The Eurosymposium on Healthy Ageing (EHA) is a unique biennial meeting of scientists working on the biology of ageing.

Coming out of stealth, cybersecurity startup Twine announced today $12 million in seed funding, co-led by Ten Eleven Ventures and Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from angel investors including the founders of Wiz. Twine plans to address cybersecurity’s critical talent shortage by developing AI agents or “digital employees” to augment companies’ security teams. Alex, Twine’s first digital employee, is an expert in identity and access management or IAM.

Alex is deployed as a SaaS platform, connecting to different systems within the customer’s environment. “The user interacts with the Alex interface in order to ask him questions or assign tasks,” explains Benny Porat, Twine’s co-founder and CEO. “For any task assigned, Alex creates a plan, seeks approval, provides full visibility, and proceeds with an A-to-Z execution of the plan.”

In a report published a few months ago, the World Economic Forum warned that the “cybersecurity industry faces a critical global shortage of nearly 4 million professionals.” This at a time when the rapid adoption of cloud computing, remote work and new AI solutions has significantly increased the number of cyber attacks.

A startup from former Google X employees is building an AI app that acts as a “second brain.”

An international team of astronomers has reported the detection of a new super-Jupiter exoplanet as part of the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). The newfound alien world, located some 1,430 light years away, is nearly four times as massive as Jupiter and is estimated to be only millions of years old. The discovery was detailed in a paper published November 13 on the pre-print server arXiv.

NGTS is a wide-field photometric survey focused mainly on the search for Neptune-sized and smaller exoplanets transiting bright stars. The project uses an array of small, fully robotic telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, operating at red-optical wavelengths. It uses the transit photometry method to find new exoworlds, which precisely measures the dimming of a star to detect the presence of a planet crossing in front of it.

Now, a group of astronomers led by Douglas R. Alves has found another extrasolar world with NGTS photometry. The new planet was identified around NGTS-33—a fast-rotating massive hot star.