Lifeboat Foundation

AI startup Reka unveils Yasa-1, a multimodal AI assistant that could rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

AI startup Reka, founded by researchers from DeepMind, Google, Baidu, and Meta, has announced Yasa-1, a multimodal AI assistant that can understand and interact with text, images, video, and audio.

The assistant is available in private beta and competes with, among others, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has received its own multimodal upgrades with GPT-4V and DALL-E 3. Reka’s team says it has been involved in the development of Google Bard, PaLM, and Deepmind Alphacode, to name a few.

Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have successfully applied reinforcement learning to a video game problem. The research team created a new complicated movement design software based on an approach that has proven effective in board games like Chess and Go. In a single testing, the movements from the new approach appeared to be superior to those of top human players.

These findings could possibly impact robotics and automation, ushering in a new era of movement design. The team’s article in Advanced Intelligence Systems is titled “A Phase-Change Memristive Reinforcement Learning for Rapidly Outperforming Champion Street Fighter Players.”

“Our findings demonstrate that reinforcement learning can do more than just master simple board games. The program excelled in creating more complex movements when trained to address long-standing challenges in movement science,” said principal investigator Desmond Loke, Associate Professor, SUTD.

Non-invasive — just reading brainwaves.

🔗🔗 Links 🔗🔗

Continue reading “Not Sci-Fi Anymore: Brain Waves to Speech using AI” »

What would we do without compression?

Those music libraries and personal photo and video collections that would force us to purchase one hard drive after another can instead be squeezed into portions of a single drive.

Compression allows us to pull up volumes of data from the Internet virtually instantaneously.

Picture a smartphone clad in a casing that’s not just for protection but also doubles as a reservoir of electricity, or an electric car where the doors and floorboard store energy to propel it forward. Such technologies may one day be a reality, thanks to recent work by engineers at the University of California San Diego.

The researchers have developed what’s called a structural supercapacitor—a device that provides both structural support and energy storage capabilities. Such a device could add more power to electronic gadgets and vehicles without adding extra weight, allowing them to last longer on a single charge.

While the concept of structural supercapacitors is not entirely new, it has been a longstanding challenge to create a single device that excels at both bearing mechanical loads and storing electrical energy efficiently. Traditional supercapacitors are great at energy storage but lack the mechanical strength to serve as structural components. On the flip side, structural materials can provide support but fall short when it comes to energy storage.

Tesla is stacking a massive supply of Cybertruck castings at Gigafactory Texas, hinting the production is near, which means deliveries aren’t far behind either.

Tesla Cybertruck production has been nearing for months as the company has shown early-stage validation, public road testing, crash assessments, and some of the best-built Cybertruck units, all within the past few months.

Production is obviously getting close, especially when we base this thought on the fact that public-road testing of RC-labeled, or release candidate, Cybertrucks have been spotted throughout the country over the past month and a half.

Over the past few years, we have taken a gigantic leap forward in our decades-long quest to build intelligent machines: the advent of the large language model, or LLM.

This technology, based on research that tries to model the human brain, has led to a new field known as generative AI — software that can create plausible and sophisticated text, images and computer code at a level that mimics human ability.

Businesses around the world have begun to experiment with the new technology in the belief it could transform media, finance, law and professional services, as well as public services such as education. The LLM is underpinned by a scientific development known as the transformer model, made by Google researchers in 2017.

Missions to the Moon, missions to Mars, robotic explorers to the outer Solar System, a mission to the nearest star, and maybe even a spacecraft to catch up to interstellar objects passing through our system. If you think this sounds like a description of the coming age of space exploration, then you’d be correct! At this moment, there are multiple plans and proposals for missions that will send astronauts and/or probes to all of these destinations to conduct some of the most lucrative scientific research ever performed. Naturally, these mission profiles raise all kinds of challenges, not the least of which is propulsion.

Simply put, humanity is reaching the limits of what conventional (chemical) propulsion can do. To send missions to Mars and other deep space destinations, advanced propulsion technologies are required that offer high acceleration (delta-v), specific impulse (I_sp), and fuel efficiency. In a recent paper, Leiden Professor Florian Neukart proposes how future missions could rely on a novel propulsion concept known as the Magnetic Fusion Plasma Drive (MFPD). This device combines aspects of different propulsion methods to create a system that offers high energy density and fuel efficiency significantly greater than conventional methods.

Florian Neukart is an Assistant Professor with the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) at Leiden University and a Board Member of the Swiss quantum technology developer Terra Quantum AG. The preprint of his paper recently appeared online and is being reviewed for publication in Elsevier. According to Neukart, technologies that can surmount conventional chemical propulsion (CCP) are paramount in the present era of space exploration. In particular, these technologies must offer greater energy efficiency, thrust, and capability for long-duration missions.

WIRED asked experts from all corners of society and academia to answer questions about the future of technology, artificial intelligence, and humanity itself.

Still haven’t subscribed to WIRED on YouTube? ►► http://wrd.cm/15fP7B7
Listen to the Get WIRED podcast ►► https://link.chtbl.com/wired-ytc-desc.
Want more WIRED? Get the magazine ►► https://subscribe.wired.com/subscribe/splits/wired/WIR_YouTu…ription_ZZ

Continue reading “Experts Predict the Future of Technology, AI & Humanity” »