Lifeboat Foundation

Never mind the cost of computing, OpenAI said the Upwork contractors alone cost $160,000. Though to be fair, manually labeling the whole data set would’ve run into the millions and taken considerable time to complete. And while the computing power wasn’t negligible, the model was actually quite small. VPT’s hundreds of millions of parameters are orders of magnitude less than GPT-3’s hundreds of billions.

Still, the drive to find clever new approaches that use less data and computing is valid. A kid can learn Minecraft basics by watching one or two videos. Today’s AI requires far more to learn even simple skills. Making AI more efficient is a big, worthy challenge.

In any case, OpenAI is in a sharing mood this time. The researchers say VPT isn’t without risk—they’ve strictly controlled access to algorithms like GPT-3 and DALL-E partly to limit misuse—but the risk is minimal for now. They’ve open sourced the data, environment, and algorithm and are partnering with MineRL. This year’s contestants are free to use, modify, and fine-tune the latest in Minecraft AI.

Parents of the future rejoice! Scientists in China have developed an AI nanny that they say could one day take care of human fetuses in a lab.

Researchers in Suzhou, China, claim to have created a system that can monitor and care for embryos as they grow into fetuses while growing inside an artificial womb, The South China Morning Post reports.

Technology won’t be a problem for its future application, but legal and ethical concerns might, warns Beijing-based researcher.

After announcing at the beginning of the month that the company would be cutting 10 percent of its workforce due to CEO Elon Musks’s “bad feeling” about the economy, Tesla’s job slash is in full swing. According to Insider, many newer employees — including workers who had not even begun their newly-accepted positions just yet — are bearing the brunt of the mass layoffs.

“Damn, talk about a gut punch,” wrote Iain Abshier, a brand-new Tesla recruiter, in a LinkedIn post last week. “Friday afternoon I was included in the Tesla layoffs after just two weeks of work.”

Continue reading “As Crisis Deepens, Tesla Rescinds Job Offers to People Who’d Already Accepted Them” »

Suspended Google engineer Blake Lemoine made some serious headlines earlier this month when he claimed that one of the company’s experimental AIs called LaMDA had achieved sentience — prompting the software giant to place him on administrative leave.

“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” he told the Washington Post at the time.

The subsequent news cycle swept up AI experts, philosophers, and Google itself into a fierce debate about the current and possible future capabilities of machine learning, other ethical concerns around the tech, and even the nature of consciousness and sentience. The general consensus, it’s worth noting, was that the AI is almost certainly not sentient.

Straight from the depths of AI hell hails Crungus — or somewhere like that, because until a few days ago, nobody knew this thing existed.

An electrochemically powered artificial muscle made from twisted carbon nanotubes contracts more when driven faster thanks to a novel conductive polymer coating. Developed by Ray Baughman of the University of Texas at Dallas in the US and an international team, the device overcomes some of the limitations of previous artificial muscles, and could have applications in robotics, smart textiles and heart pumps.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are rolled-up sheets of carbon with walls as thin as a single atom. When twisted together to form a yarn and placed in an electrolyte bath, CNTs expand and contract in response to electrochemical inputs, much like a natural muscle. In a typical set-up, a potential difference between the yarn and an electrode drives ions from the electrolyte into the yarn, causing the muscle to actuate.

While such CNT muscles are highly energy efficient and extremely strong – they can lift loads up to 100,000 times their own weight – they do have limitations. The main one is that they are bipolar, meaning that the direction of their movement switches whenever the potential drops to zero. This reduces the overall stroke of the actuator. Another drawback is that the muscle’s capacitance decreases when the potential is changed quickly, which also causes the stroke to decrease.

TV robot fights are not just entertainment – they can also help turn students on to physics and engineering, as Robert P Crease finds out.

The two 110 kg combat robots squared off. One, known as Poison Arrow, was armed with a toothed spinning drum. Its adversary, Son of Wyachi (SOW), had whirling hammers. Poison Arrow smashed into SOW, sending it flying across the arena. SOW broke its radio receiver as it crash-landed, lying motionless as the referee declared a knockout.

Continue reading “Combat robotics” »

Pedram Roushan, from Google’s Quantum AI team in California, describes this elusive form of matter – and how it could be simulated on the company’s Sycamore quantum processor.

With their enchanting beauty, crystalline solids have captivated us for centuries. Crystals, which range from snowflakes to diamonds, are made up of atoms or molecules that are regularly arranged in space. They have provided foundational insights that led to the development of the quantum theory of solids. Crystals have also helped develop a framework for understanding other spatially ordered phases, such as superconductors, liquid crystals and ferromagnets.

Periodic oscillations are another ubiquitous phenomenon. They appear at all scales, ranging from atomic oscillations to orbiting planets. For many years, we used them to mark the passage of time, and they even made us ponder the possibility of perpetual motion. What is common between these periodic patterns – either in space or time – is that they lead to systems with reduced symmetries. Without periodicity, any position in space, or any instance of time, is indistinguishable from any other. Periodicity breaks the translational symmetry of space or time.