Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Sam Altman was already trying to lead the development of human-level artificial intelligence. Now he has another great ambition: raising trillions of dollars to reshape the global semiconductor industry.

The OpenAI chief executive officer is in talks with investors including the United Arab Emirates government to raise funds for a wildly ambitious tech initiative that would boost the world’s chip-building capacity, expand its ability to power AI, among other things, and cost several trillion dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. The project could require raising as much as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of the people said.

The fundraising plans, which face significant obstacles, are aimed at solving constraints to OpenAI’s growth, including the scarcity of the pricey AI chips required to train large language models behind AI systems such as ChatGPT. Altman has often complained that there aren’t enough of these kinds of chips—known as graphics processing units, or GPUs—to power OpenAI’s quest for artificial general intelligence, which it defines as systems that are broadly smarter than humans.

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— Anti-aging vaccine shows promise in mice — will it work in humans?

“This research is still in the early stages and may be a number of years from being available to patients,” Dr. David Pinato, a clinician scientist at Imperial College London’s Department of Surgery & Cancer and a consultant medical oncologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, said in the statement. “But this trial is laying crucial groundwork that is moving us closer towards new therapies that are potentially less toxic and more precise.”

The first person treated in the U.K. arm of the trial wishes to remain anonymous, but said “I was pleased to be offered a chance to take part in a new trial.”

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Could cannabis use lead to anxiety disorders? This is what a recent study published in EClinicalMedicine hopes to address as a team of researchers led by the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute examine the connection between cannabis use and anxiety disorders by patients who have had emergency department visits. While this study was limited to Canada, it holds the potential to help researchers, legislators, and the public better understand the long-term risks of cannabis on mental health disorders throughout the world.

For the study, the researchers analyzed health records from 2008 to 2019 for 12,099,144 individuals between 10 and 105 years of age across Ontario, Canada who had no prior history of being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder from any hospital visit and compared this to the general population. In the end, the researchers found that 27.5 percent of individuals who visited a hospital for cannabis use were diagnosed with an anxiety disorder within three years of their hospital visit, whereas only 5.6 percent of the general population experienced the same. Additionally, they found that individuals who visited a hospital for cannabis use also visited a hospital for an anxiety disorder within three years of the initial hospital visit, whereas only 1.2 percent of the general population experienced the same.

“Our results suggest that individuals requiring emergency department treatment for cannabis use were both at substantially increased risk of developing a new anxiety disorder and experiencing worsening symptoms for already existing anxiety disorders,” said Dr. Daniel Myran, who is a Faculty of Medicine in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa and lead author of the study.

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