Lifeboat Foundation

Whether the company’s actually getting closer to achieving this goal remains highly debatable. The company has also historically been highly secretive when it comes to its research, making it even more difficult to read the tea leaves over recent weeks.

But an interesting new twist to the story suggests OpenAI may have been on the verge of a major leap forward, and that it may indeed have been related to the shakeup.

Last week, Reuters and The Information reported that some OpenAI leaders may have gotten spooked by a powerful new AI the company was working on called Q*, pronounced “Q star.” This new system was apparently seen by some as a significant step towards the company’s goal of establishing AGI, and is reportedly capable of solving grade school math problems.

The AI, which takes orders from drive-thru customers at Checkers and Carl’s Jr, relies on humans for most of its customer interactions.

Scientists have discovered an impossibly large planet — so big, they say, that it should be too big to exist.

And yet. In a new study published in the journal Science, researchers out of Pennsylvania State described their whopper discovery: a Neptune-sized planet that’s 13 times the mass of Earth, which is orbiting a tiny ultracool star that’s nine times less massive than our Sun.

As a press release about the new research explains, this finding is exceptional because the mass ratio between the planet and the dwarf star, dubbed LHS 3,154, is 100 times greater than the same ratio Earth has with its Sun — which scientists didn’t think was possible until they saw it with their own eyes.

The world’s first factory mass-produced humanoid robots will soon be opening in the Pacific Northwest. God help us all.

Agility Robotics CEO Damion Shelton told Axios in an unsettling interview that the company is slated to make 10,000 robots at its “RoboFab” facility once it reaches its “peak.”

Shelton used the term “humanoids” to refer to its walking and working robots produced for companies like Amazon. The company’s forthcoming move from its smaller factory in the tiny town of Tangent, Oregon to the much larger “RoboFab” plant in the nearby city of Salem will see it going from a tangential player in the robotics sphere to, if successful, one of the largest-producing in the United States.

Elon Musk’s space exploration company is looking to sell shares that implies a valuation that’s $25 billion higher than the last funding round, Bloomberg reported.

Young workers are turning their backs on management and climbing the corporate ladder. So much so, Gen Z might kill off the middle manager position.

China’s Mars rover has uncovered underground polygon structures buried beneath the Red Planet’s surface — and it looks like they’re related to Mars’ long-lost water, too.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) say that using data from the Zhurong rover’s ground-penetrating radar capabilities, they’ve found several mysterious subterranean polygons located some 35 feet below its surface that are likely formed by ice.

Using this high-tech radar, the rover combed Utopia Planitia, a large plain in the planet’s northern hemisphere where Zhurong’s inactive husk still rests, to see what was happening below. The CAS team found, per Zhurong’s readings, a total of 16 “polygonal wedges” in an area of about three-quarters of a square mile, “suggesting a wide distribution of such terrain under Utopia Plainitia,” the Nature Astronomy paper explains.

For those of you for whom the grind never stops, the tech startup Prophetic is offering an unusual device that supposedly lets you work while you sleep — because when else are you supposed to get your side hustle in?

Called “Halo,” it’s a thick headband that Prophetic says is able to induce lucid dreams, the kind of dreams in which you’re aware that you’re dreaming and thus potentially able to take control of.

They can make for memorable if not life-changing experiences for some. But rather than wasting your time and dream power exploring your subconscious mind, Prophetic wants you to take lucid dreams by the reins and try being productive with them for a change.

The data collected by this research team confirms that mind-wandering is associated with an increase in alpha oscillations, which was also reported in previous works.

When humans are completing a specific task, their minds can shift from what they are doing to their own internal thoughts. This shift of attention from a task to internal events, known as off-task thinking or mind-wandering, is well-documented and has been studied extensively in the past.

A research question that remains unanswered is whether mind-wandering should be considered an adaptive/beneficial or maladaptive/undesirable process. Depending on the circumstances in which it occurs, in fact, this process could distract a person from an important task they are trying to complete or shift their attention onto something equally or more important for them.

Continue reading “Study suggests that the neural correlates of mind-wandering can vary across different tasks” »