Lifeboat Foundation

Every academic field has its superstars. But a rare few achieve superstardom not just by demonstrating individual excellence but also by consistently producing future superstars. A notable example of such a legendary doctoral advisor is the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler. A dissertation was once written about his mentorship, and he advised Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, Hugh Everett (who proposed the “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics), and a host of others who could collectively staff a top-tier physics department. In ecology, there is Bob Paine, who discovered that certain “keystone species” have an outsize impact on the environment and started a lineage of influential ecologists. And in journalism, there is John McPhee, who has taught generations of accomplished journalists at Princeton since 1975.

Computer science has its own such figure: Manuel Blum, who won the 1995 Turing Award—the Nobel Prize of computer science. Blum’s métier is theoretical computer science, a field that often escapes the general public’s radar. But you certainly have come across one of Blum’s creations: the “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” better known as the captcha—a test designed to distinguish humans from bots online.

The Frontier Model Forum, an industry body focused on studying “frontier” AI models along the lines of GPT-4 and ChatGPT, today announced that it’ll pledge $10 million toward a new fund to advance research on tools for “testing and evaluating the most capable AI models.”

The fund, says the Frontier Model Forum — whose members include Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — will support researchers affiliated with academic institutions, research institutions and startups, with initial funding to come from both the Frontier Model Forum and its philanthropic partners, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Estonian billionaire Jaan Tallinn.

The fund will be administered by the Meridian Institute, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., which will put out a call for an unspecified number of proposals “within the next few months,” the Frontier Model Forum says. The Institute’s work will be supported by an advisory committee of external experts, experts from AI companies and “individuals with experience in grantmaking,” added the Frontier Model Forum — without specifying who exactly those experts and individuals are or the size of the advisory committee in question.

A number of news and media publishers are already blocking AI web crawlers from accessing their sites, worried about the impact on traffic when all their work is swept up into AI chatbot experiences. However, a startup called Direqt believes publishers should embrace AI chatbots — just on their own terms. The company, which has now raised its first outside capital of $4.5 million, offers media companies like ESPN, GQ, Wired, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and others, their own customizable chatbot solutions that provide a direct connection to their audience, increased engagement with their own published content, as well as monetization via ads.

The startup was originally founded in 2017 with a focus on chatbot monetization, before turning more recently to AI. In its earlier days, the company had built out the ability to serve promotions and ads inside a chatbot experience, which it licensed to a larger customer in the U.S. In 2021, the team pivoted to start building a chatbot platform for publishers, still slightly ahead of the GPT wave and the rise of ChatGPT.

“Part of that was, candidly, us being a little bit early to the market,” remarked Direqt co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Nick Martin. “Fortunately, things over the last couple of months have really broken the direction we did anticipate all these years,” he said.

Midjourney has solved one of the biggest problems with generative AI art with the option to upscale images to super-high resolutions. Until this week, Midjourney’s output was limited to a default resolution of 1,024 × 1,024 pixels. That was large enough for medium-sized web images, but not high resolution enough to print at anything greater than postcard size.

Now the company has added the option to upscale images by 2x or 4x, meaning the maximum image size is increased to 4,096 × 4,096 in the default square format. In other words, that’s a 4K resolution image.

Midjourney massively increases the resolution of its AI-generated images, with the option to upscale images to 4K.

Continue reading “Midjourney Releases Huge New AI Art Feature” »

NVIDIA wants to turn the Jetson family of devices into powerful edge computing devices capable of running state-of-the-art foundation models. It’s also investing in frameworks that combine the power of robotics with generative AI.

Here are three significant investments from NVIDIA that transform the Jetson family of devices:

The Jetson Generative AI Lab is a collection of tutorials and walkthroughs for running popular generative AI models such as LLama2, Stable Diffusion and Segment Anything Model on Jetson devices. Developers can clone the GitHub repository to download the scripts needed to run the models and the associated applications on devices such as Jetson AGX Orin and Jetson Orini Nano.

Motorola unveiled a flexible phone with an adaptive display that you can wear like a bracelet or watch yesterday at Lenovo Tech World ‘23 in Austin. The full HD phone can be bent into multiple shapes, including one that props it up on a table or desk for viewing, or a full U-shaped bracelet that straps on to your wrist.

The phone offers a 6.9 display when flat and a 4.6 display when curved to sit on a flat surface like a bedside clock or a standalone viewing screen. The flexible screen appears to be paired with a fabric backing, unusual in a smartphone. The phone does not just friction-fit to your wrist, which would be likely to slip off with movement, but magnetically clings to an… More.

The full HD flexible phone can be bent into multiple shapes, including one that props it up for viewing, or a full U-shaped bracelet that straps on to your wrist.

Continue reading “Motorola Teases Flexible Phone You Wear Like A Bracelet” »

Intricate details within the human brain, faint signals in outer space, say cheese!

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their collaborators revealed the creation of a superconducting camera in a statement.

Boasting an impressive 400,000 pixels, this innovative leap represents a four-hundred-fold increase in pixel count compared to any other device of its kind, revolutionizing the way scientists can capture faint light signals from the far reaches of space or explore intricate details within the human brain.

In this roundup of life science grants, researchers will create an interactive model of living cells and a multi-omics consortium is announced.

Only theoretical now but someday this could lead to lag free and error free quantum computers.

Quantum gates built out of braid group elements form the building blocks of topological quantum computation. They have been extensively studied in SUk quantum group theories, a rich source of examples of non-Abelian anyons such as the Ising (k = 2), Fibonacci (k = 3) and Jones-Kauffman (k = 4) anyons. We show that the fusion spaces of these anyonic systems can be precisely mapped to the product state zero modes of certain Nicolai-like supersymmetric spin chains. As a result, we can realize the braid group in terms of the product state zero modes of these supersymmetric systems. These operators kill all the other states in the Hilbert space, thus preventing the occurrence of errors while processing information, making them suitable for quantum computing.