Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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NASA is using an AI-powered technique called “generative design” to dramatically speed up the process of designing hardware for upcoming missions — and one of the first AI-designed missions will use a massive balloon to lift a telescope to the stratosphere.

The need: Weight is one of the most important considerations when NASA engineers are designing parts for new spacecraft — the heavier the final object is, the more fuel will be needed to launch it, and the more expensive the mission will be.

However, engineers can’t sacrifice strength in the name of keeping weight down — if a part breaks once it’s in space, replacing or repairing it typically isn’t an option.

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Like Gates, Leslie doesn’t dismiss doomer scenarios outright. “Bad actors can take advantage of these technologies and cause catastrophic harms,” he says. “You don’t need to buy into superintelligence, apocalyptic robots, or AGI speculation to understand that.”

“But I agree that our immediate concerns should be in addressing the existing risks that derive from the rapid commercialization of generative AI,” says Leslie. “It serves a positive purpose to sort of zoom our lens in and say, ‘Okay, well, what are the immediate concerns?’”

In his post, Gates notes that AI is already a threat in many fundamental areas of society, from elections to education to employment. Of course, such concerns aren’t news. What Gates wants to tell us is that although these threats are serious, we’ve got this: “The best reason to believe that we can manage the risks is that we have done it before.”

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Meta researchers are trying to “loosen up” the model so that it could at least provide context to a query it deems controversial.

Meta Platforms is planning to release the newest version of its artificial-intelligence large language model Llama 3 in July which would give better responses to contentious questions posed by users, The Information reported on Wednesday.

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OpenAI is accusing the New York Times of “hacking” its products in the ongoing copyright dispute.

In a legal filing, OpenAI claims that an individual paid by the Times used “deceptive prompts” to create copies of NYT articles. These prompts would violate OpenAI’s terms of service.

The NYT demonstrated that OpenAI’s GPT models could generate copies of NYT articles when it filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for copyright infringement.

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Trappist-1e is the fourth planet from the red dwarf star at the heart of this fascinating planetary system of rocky worlds. Astronomers have previously discovered that Trappist-1b, the closest exoplanet to the star, seems to have already lost its atmosphere.

The team thinks voltage-driven Joule heating could also be impacting Trappist-1f and Trappist-1g, stripping them of their atmospheres as well, albeit to a lesser extent than they see happening with Trappist-1e. That’s because, at 0.038 and 0.04683 times the distance between Earth and the sun from their star respectively, these planets are moving slower through the red dwarf’s stellar winds than Trappist-1e is.

“Closer-in planets of Trappist-1 will have an even more extreme fate, and further out ones a bit milder,” Garraffo said. “I would imagine that all Trappist-1 planets are going to have a hard time holding on to any atmosphere.”

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