Lifeboat Foundation

Every time a person dies, writes Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in Life and Fate, the entire world that has been built in that individual’s consciousness dies as well: “The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out… flowers have lost their color and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished.” Elsewhere in the book, he writes that one day we may engineer a machine that can have human-like experiences; but if we do, it will have to be enormous—so vast is this space of consciousness, even within the most “average, inconspicuous human being.”

And, he adds, “Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people.” Trying to think those two thoughts together is a near-impossible feat, even for the immense capacities of our consciousness. But will machine minds ever acquire anything like our ability to have such thoughts, in all their seriousness and depth? Or to reflect morally on events, or to equal our artistic and imaginative reach? Some think that this question distracts us from a more urgent one: we should be asking what our close relationship with our machines is doing to us.

Jaron Lanier, himself a pioneer of computer technology, warns in You Are Not a Gadget that we are allowing ourselves to become ever more algorithmic and quantifiable, because this makes us easier for computers to deal with. Education, for example, becomes less about the unfolding of humanity, which cannot be measured in units, and more about tick boxes.

An artificial intelligence-generated virtual news presenter that will read internet bulletins has been unveiled by a Kuwaiti media organisation.
On Saturday, “Fedha” appeared as a picture of a woman with her light-colored hair exposed and wearing a black jacket and a white T-shirt on the Twitter account of the Kuwait News website.
“Hello, my name is Fedha, and I work for Kuwait News as the country’s first artificial intelligence-based presenter. What sort of news do you like to read? I’d want to hear your thoughts,” she said in traditional Arabic.

#ai #fedha #wion.

Continue reading “AI generated news presenter ‘Fedha’ unveiled in Kuwait | English News | WION” »

Eukaryotic genomes contain a variety of endogenous viral elements (EVEs), which are mostly derived from RNA and ssDNA viruses that are no longer functional and are considered to be “genomic fossils.” Genomic surveys of EVEs, however, are strongly biased toward animals and plants, whereas protists, which represent the majority of eukaryotic diversity, remain poorly represented. Here, we show that protist genomes harbor tens to thousands of diverse, ~14 to 40 kbp long dsDNA viruses. These EVEs, composed of virophages, Polinton-like viruses, and related entities, have remained hitherto hidden owing to poor sequence conservation between virus groups and their repetitive nature that precluded accurate short-read assembly. We show that long-read sequencing technology is ideal for resolving virus insertions. Many protist EVEs appear intact, and most encode integrases, which suggests that they have actively colonized hosts across the tree of eukaryotes. We also found evidence for gene expression in host transcriptomes and that closely related virophage and Polinton-like virus genomes are abundant in viral metagenomes, indicating that many EVEs are probably functional viruses.

Electric vehicles feature lithium-ion battery packs today. They are heavy. But in the future lithium-air batteries that are more energy dense, lighter, and smaller could revolutionize EV design.

Lithium-air provides 4x greater energy density, and gets the oxygen needed in the chemical process from the surrounding air.

The GPT phenomenon and the future of humanity in the face of advances in Artificial Intelligence.

The Age of Artificial Intelligence is an increasingly present reality in our daily lives. With the rise of technologies such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), the possibility of creating machines capable of performing tasks that were previously exclusive to humans has emerged.

One of these technologies is the Generative Pre-trained Transformer, better known as GPT. It’s the Large Language Model (LLM) developed by OpenAI.

OpenAI was founded in San Francisco, California in 2015 by Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Peter Thiel, among others, who collectively pledged $1 billion. Musk resigned from the board in 2018, but continued to be a donor to the project.

Continue reading “Intelligence Explosion — Part 1/3” »

The company procured thousands of GPUs and has hired AI researchers in the recent past.

The mystery of what Elon Musk plans to do with Twitter may have just begun to unravel. Even as Musk tries to hide it all behind the veil of X, an Insider.

Sundry Photography/ iStock.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Twitter now working on a generative AI project, says report” »

WASHINGTON, April 11 (Reuters) — The Biden administration said Tuesday it is seeking public comments on potential accountability measures for artificial intelligence (AI) systems as questions loom about its impact on national security and education.

ChatGPT, an AI program that recently grabbed the public’s attention for its ability to write answers quickly to a wide range of queries, in particular has attracted U.S. lawmakers’ attention as it has grown to be the fastest-growing consumer application in history with more than 100 million monthly active users.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a Commerce Department agency that advises the White House on telecommunications and information policy, wants input as there is “growing regulatory interest” in an AI “accountability mechanism.”

“TeraWulf generates domestically produced Bitcoin powered by 91% nuclear, hydro, and solar energy with a goal of utilizing 100% zero-carbon energy.”

EASTON, Md.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—TeraWulf Inc. (Nasdaq: WULF) (“TeraWulf” or the “Company”), which owns and operates vertically integrated, domestic Bitcoin mining facilities powered by more than 91% zero-carbon energy, today announced that the Company is deploying solely BITMAIN Technologies Ltd. (“BITMAIN”) manufactured mining equipment to fill its 50 MW of capacity at the nuclear-powered Nautilus bitcoin mining facility.

“BITMAIN’s carbon neutral strategy and best-in-class mining equipment make BITMAIN an ideal partner to scale our zero-carbon digital infrastructure at Nautilus” Tweet this

Continue reading “TeraWulf Announces it Has Deployed BITMAIN Miners at the Nuclear-Powered Nautilus Facility” »

😗year 2022

Bigger isn’t always better, but when the Looking Glass Factory announces a beast of a holographic display, it tickles our rods, cones and curiosity equally. The screen doesn’t require glasses or other tech to view the effects. Viewable by groups of 50 people, the display generates up to 100 different perspectives of 3D content from 100 million points of light every 60th of a second.

The company claims its 8K-resolution, 65-inch display is five times larger than any other 3D holo display ever shown off. The new display is “group viewable,” meaning that it differs from a lot of the other offerings out there that can be seen by only one person at a time. The company highlights marketing, engineering and design-forward applications as possible uses. The new display is the fourth display in Looking Glass Factory’s growing (geddit?!) lineup.

Continue reading “The world’s largest holographic display is here” »