Lifeboat Foundation

There are many pain points that warrant discussions between the two nations but AI could be the thing that brings them to the table.

Relations between the United States and China have been downward recently. Topics like artificial intelligence (AI) and such technology in automated weapons could be common points of interest to get the two countries talking again.

Tensions between the two nations have been on the rise for a host of issues. Recently, the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, China’s burgeoning presence in the South China Sea, and the supply of powerful chips in the technology space have been areas of disagreement on both sides.

Continue reading “Talking about AI could help US-China cool off say experts” »

Sales slowed in 2023, but heat pumps are gaining ground on fossil fuels.

Heat pumps are still a hot technology, though sales in the US, one of the world’s largest markets, fell in 2023.

Generative AI has emerged as the next wave of innovation amidst the ongoing evolution of the technological landscape, attracting the attention of both researchers and investors.

Even as vector databases and Retrieval-Augmented Generation models become mainstream, offering innovative ways to handle and process data, traditional ETL processes retain their importance in the data management ecosystem. Traditional ETL is fundamental for preparing and structuring data from diverse sources into a coherent, standardized format, making it accessible and usable for various applications. This structured data is crucial for maintaining the accuracy and reliability of information within vector databases, which excel at handling similarity searches and complex queries by converting data into vector space.

Similarly, RAG models, which leverage vast databases to augment content generation with relevant information retrieval, depend on well-organized, high-quality data to enhance their output’s relevance and accuracy. By ensuring data is accurately extracted, cleaned and loaded into databases, traditional ETL processes complement the capabilities of vector databases and RAG models, providing a solid foundation of quality data that enhances their performance and utility. This symbiotic relationship underscores the continuing value of traditional ETL in the age of AI-driven data management, ensuring that advancements in data processing technologies are grounded in reliable and well-structured data sources.

Continue reading “Is Generative AI Overshadowing The Proven Workhorses Of Modern Tech?” »

There’s an episode of the show “Black Mirror” where a woman, trapped by grief, starts a relationship with an AI trained on her dead boyfriend’s data.

“You’re not enough of him,” she eventually decides. “You’re nothing.”

But even an empty happily-ever-after is tantalizing in the bleakness of 2024. AI platforms like ChatGPT claim to offer infinite solutions to infinite problems, from parking tickets to homework — and apparently now heartbreak as well. That’s right: if you’re still hung up after a breakup, now you can plug your ex’s emails and texts into a large language model, and date the simulacrum instead of moving on.

Join the discussion on this paper page.

Google’s philanthropy arm is setting aside millions of dollars for European nonprofits to train workers how to use AI. But it’s unclear whether AI training will help save jobs.

A chemical element so visually striking it was named for a goddess shows a “Goldilocks” level of reactivity—neither too much nor too little—that makes it a strong candidate as a carbon scrubbing tool.

The element is vanadium, and research by Oregon State University scientists, published in Chemical Science, has demonstrated the ability of vanadium peroxide molecules to react with and bind carbon dioxide —an important step toward improved technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The study is part of a $24 million federal effort to develop new methods for direct air capture, or DAC, of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that’s produced by the burning of fossil fuels and is associated with climate change.

It’s what we expected, but now it’s confirmed.

San Francisco is fed up with all those robotaxis crowding its streets — and on Lunar New Year, some folks let off some steam about it.