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Whipping Up Worlds

Because the AI can learn from unlabeled online videos and is still a modest size—just 11 billion parameters—there’s ample opportunity to scale up. Bigger models trained on more information tend to improve dramatically. And with a growing industry focused on inference —the process of by which a trained AI performs tasks, like generating images or text—it’s likely to get faster.

DeepMind says Genie could help people, like professional developers, make video games. But like OpenAI—which believes Sora is about more than videos—the team is thinking bigger. The approach could go well beyond video games.

Saudi Arabia’s first male robot ‘Muhammad’ allegedly touched a woman inappropriately, sparking outrage on social media platforms with one user calling it a “pervert”. Recently, Muhammad was unveiled during the second edition of DeepFast in Riyadh.

Video of the incident went viral on social media forums. It shows the robot stretching its right hand toward a female reporter when she was giving a piece to the camera.

Some of the users have alleged that the movements of the robot looked intentional when the female reporter, identified as Rawya Kassem, was talking about it.

Radical Plan to Stop ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Melting to Cost $50 Billion.


Working on these next-gen intelligent AIs must be a freaky experience. As Anthropic announces the smartest model ever tested across a range of benchmarks, researchers recall a chilling moment when Claude 3 realized that it was being evaluated.

Anthropic, you may recall, was founded in 2021 by a group of senior OpenAI team members, who broke away because they didn’t agree with OpenAI’s decision to work closely with Microsoft. The company’s Claude and Claude 2 AIs have been competitive with GPT models, but neither Anthropic nor Claude have really broken through into public awareness.

That could well change with Claude 3, since Anthropic now claims to have surpassed GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini 1.0 model on a range of multimodal tests, setting new industry benchmarks “across a wide range of cognitive tasks.”

GreenPower has delivered an electric purpose-built Type D BEAST school bus to Arizona, its first in the state.

GreenPower’s BEAST – “battery electric automotive school transportation” – is a 40-foot electric school bus that seats up to 90 passengers. It features an aluminum body on a high-strength steel truss chassis.

The BEAST has a 194 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery pack and a range of up to 150 miles, and standard dual port charging, with Level 2 charging rates of up to 19.2 kW and DC fast charging rates of up to 85 kW. Wireless charging is also available as an option.

Crew-8 marks the fifth flight for Endeavour, the maximum number of flights Crew Dragon spacecraft have been qualified for. But this spacecraft, what NASA and SpaceX refer to as the “fleet leader,” could potentially prove itself worthy of more flights — possibly many more. According to NASA officials, Crew Dragon might be able to fly up to 15 times, depending on the results of a requalification campaign the agency and SpaceX will undertake this year and next.

Related: SpaceX launches Crew-8 astronaut mission to International Space Station for NASA (video)

During a press briefing on Feb. 28 to discuss the Crew-8 mission, Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said SpaceX is currently performing qualification tests of “every single” component on the Dragon spacecraft in order to determine how many flights the spacecraft might be capable of making.

The first was to continue with a legacy vendor. Three companies — Dominion, ES&S, and Hart InterCivic — control roughly 90 percent of the U.S. voting technology market. All three are privately held, meaning they’re required to reveal little about their financial workings and they’re also committed to keeping their source code from becoming fully public.

The second future was to gamble on VotingWorks, a nonprofit with only 17 employees and voting machine contracts in just five small counties, all in Mississippi. The company has taken the opposite approach to the Big Three. Its financial statements are posted on its website, and every line of code powering its machines is published on GitHub, available for anyone to inspect.

Most people know about solids, liquids, and gases as the main three states of matter, but a fourth state of matter exists as well. Plasma—also known as ionized gas—is the most abundant, observable form of matter in our universe, found in the sun and other celestial bodies.

Creating the hot mix of freely moving electrons and ions that compose a often requires extreme pressures or temperatures. In these , researchers continue to uncover the unexpected ways that plasma can move and evolve. By better understanding the motion of plasma, scientists gain valuable insights into solar physics, astrophysics, and fusion.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers from the University of Rochester, along with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, discovered a new class of plasma oscillations—the back-and-forth, wave-like movement of electrons and ions. The findings have implications for improving the performance of miniature particle accelerators and the reactors used to create fusion energy.