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Schmidt has become an indispensable adviser to government, even as some of his investments have won federal contracts.

Eric Schmidt isn’t shy about his wealth and power: The former Google CEO recently won an auction for a superyacht seized from a Russian oligarch, he owns a big stake in a secretive and successful hedge fund and he spent $15 million for the Manhattan penthouse featured in Oliver Stone’s sequel to Wall Street.

He has also leveraged his $27 billion fortune to build a powerful influence machine in Washington that’s allowed him to shape public policy to reflect his worldview and benefit the industries in which he’s deeply invested — most recently, artificial intelligence. When senators meet next week to hear from tech executives and experts about how AI should be regulated, Schmidt will be at the table.

The long-promised more affordable Tesla electric car might debut alongside an automated robotaxi.

Tesla is reportedly preparing to build a $25,000 electric car built on the company’s next-generation engineering platform. Axios.

The $25,000 car reportedly has a futuristic design like the long-delayed Cybertruck — the angular pickup truck that Tesla first revealed in 2019. The Cybertruck will supposedly begin production this year, with production-at-scale beginning in 2024.

Continue reading “Tesla’s $25,000 ‘next-generation car’ will have a Cybertruck design” »

Roblox’s new AI assistant is one of a few new AI tools from the company.

Roblox announced a new conversational AI assistant at its 2023 Roblox Developers Conference (RDC) that can help creators more easily make experiences for the popular social app. The new tool, the Roblox Assistant, builds on previously announced features that let creators build virtual assets and write code with the help of generative AI.

With the Roblox Assistant, creators will be able to type in prompts to do things like generate virtual environments. In one demo, somebody types in “I want to make a game set in ancient ruins,” and Roblox drops in some stones, moss-covered columns, and broken architecture. “Make the… More.

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China-backed hackers stole a digital skeleton key allowing access to US government emails.

To recap, Microsoft disclosed in July that hackers it calls Storm-0558, which it believes are backed by China, “acquired” an email signing key that Microsoft uses to secure consumer email accounts like Outlook.com. The hackers used that digital skeleton key to break into both the personal and enterprise email accounts of government officials hosted by Microsoft. The hack is seen as a targeted espionage campaign aimed at snooping on the unclassified emails of U.S. government officials and diplomats, reportedly including U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns.

How the hackers obtained that consumer email signing key was a mystery — even to Microsoft — until this week when the technology giant belatedly laid out the five separate issues that led to the eventual leak of the key.

GPT-4, PaLM, Claude, Bard, LaMDA, Chinchilla, Sparrow – the list of large-language models on the market continues to grow. But behind their remarkable capabilities, users are discovering substantial costs. While LLMs offer tremendous potential, understanding their economic implications is crucial for businesses and individuals considering their adoption.

While LLMs offer tremendous potential, understanding their economic implications is crucial for businesses and individuals considering their adoption.

First, building and training LLMs is expensive. It requires thousands of Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs, offering the parallel processing power needed to handle the massive datasets these models learn from. The cost of the GPUs, alone, can amount to millions of dollars. According to a technical overview of OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model, training required at least $5 million worth of GPUs.

And Eye Disorders — Learn about from the MSD Manuals — Medical Consumer Version.

Research explores how the gut microbiota impacts critical areas of adolescent development, including mental health, metabolism, and skeletal growth. It suggests that understanding these interactions could lead to microbiome-based treatments for optimal growth and maturation.

TOKYO — Japan launched a lunar lander on Thursday, aiming to become the fifth nation to achieve a soft landing on the moon’s surface early next year following India’s success in a similar mission last month.

The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) was sent to space on an H-IIA rocket, the first launch since a high-profile launch failure of the next-generation H3 rocket in March.

A group of 12 researchers at Rice University in Houston have used 3D printing to create near-bulletproof material made out of plastic. The novel materials can withstand being shot at by bullets traveling at 5.8 kilometers per second and are highly compressible without falling apart.

Tubulanes are theoretical microscopic structures comprised of crosslinked carbon nanotubes and the researchers sought to test if they would have the same properties when scaled up enough to be 3D printed. It turns out they did.

The researchers proved this by shooting a bullet traveling at 5.8 kilometers per second through two cubes. One cube was made from a solid polymer and the other from a polymer printed with a tubulane structure.

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