The rapid advancement of technology, specifically in the development of sex robots with AI capabilities, could potentially lead to the replacement of real-life partners and have a detrimental effect on meaningful romantic relationships.
Questions to inspire discussion.
How long have sex robots been around?
—Sex robots have been around for about 10 years, and despite their initial hilariously bad appearance, there is a market for them and people are buying them.
Through the looking glass: Researchers now have a way to conduct experiments on biological neurons in vitro. These human brain organoids – there are 16 in total – are aimed at developing the world’s first living processor and can be accessed remotely through an online platform for $500 a month if you are a university or educational institution.
The platform was developed by FinalSpark, a Swiss biocomputing startup, which reports that three dozen universities have expressed interest in using their platform. FinalSpark highlights the significant energy savings it could offer in the training and operation of large artificial neural networks, such as those used in large language models. However, this achievement is still a ways off: the project is just in its beginning phases, and co-founder Fred Jordan states that such an ambitious goal can only be achieved through international collaboration.
The biological component uses forebrain organoids derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. These organoids can survive for years and contain neurons, oligodendrocytes, and astrocytes characteristic of the forebrain region, according to a paper published in the scientific journal Frontiers.
Researchers at NCI and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses routine clinical data to predict whether someone’s cancer will respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy drug that helps immune cells kill cancer cells.
AI tool uses routine clinical data to predict whether someone’s cancer will respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors.
In the brain, timekeeping is done with neurons that relax at different rates after receiving a signal; now memristors—hardware analogs of neurons—can do that too.
Artificial neural networks may soon be able to process time-dependent information, such as audio and video data, more efficiently. The first memristor with a ‘relaxation time’ that can be tuned is reported today in Nature Electronics, in a study led by the University of Michigan.
Energy Efficiency and AI.
Scientists used machine learning to discover what they say could be a new way to speed up the process of breaking down plastic significantly, Vice reports.
As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature, a research team from the University of Texas at Austin modified an enzyme to break down the individual components of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a commonly used plastic that makes up a staggering 12 percent of global waste.
Impressively, the modified enzyme also reduced the amount of time it takes for the plastic to degrade from months to a just single week.
AMD on Monday announced its new artificial intelligence chips for everything from cutting-edge data centers to advanced laptops, ramping up its challenge to the runaway market leader Nvidia.
Demand has exploded in the past two years for the specialized processors that help develop, train and run AI applications such as ChatGPT.
AMD has emerged as one of Nvidia’s most serious contenders and CEO Lisa Su said the firm’s next-generation processors will rival the top offerings from competitors.
NVIDIA today announced the general availability of NVIDIA ACE generative AI microservices to accelerate the next wave of digital humans, as well as new generative AI breakthroughs coming soon to the platform.