Lifeboat Foundation

Robotaxi company Cruise is “just days away” from getting regulatory approval that would pave the way for mass production of its purpose-built driverless vehicle, CEO Kyle Vogt said on Thursday in comments reported by the Detroit Free Press.

General Motors-backed Cruise unveiled the vehicle — called Origin — in early 2020, presenting the kind of driverless car that we all dreamed of when R&D in the sector kicked off years ago; a vehicle without a steering wheel and without pedals. A vehicle with passenger seats only.

Quantum technology’s future rests on the exploitation of fascinating quantum mechanics concepts—such as high-dimensional quantum states. Think of these states as basic ingredients of quantum information science and quantum tech. To manipulate these states, scientists have turned to light, specifically a property called orbital angular momentum (OAM), which deals with how light twists and turns in space. Here’s a catch: making super bright single photons with OAM in a deterministic fashion has been a tough nut to crack.

Now, enter quantum dots (QDs), tiny particles with big potential. A team of researchers from Sapienza University of Rome, Paris-Saclay University, and University of Naples Federico II combined the features of OAM with those of QDs to create a bridge between two cutting-edge technologies.

Their results are published in Advanced Photonics.

Many believe the future of humanity is to go Digital, uploading our minds to computers, living in virtual worlds that are vastly more efficient and compact. If we might do this, might distant alien empires too? And if so, might this be the reason we don’t see them?

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Continue reading “The Fermi Paradox: Digital Empires & Miniaturization” »

The startup, one of very few woman-led AI unicorns, has a $1 billion valuation and access to 10,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, but its founders say it could be years away from revealing a product.

It was at a San Francisco party hosted by Greg Brockman nearly a decade ago — around the time the Stripe CTO would leave to co-found an AI research lab called OpenAI — that entrepreneurs Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht met a crypto mogul named Jed McCaleb.

As Qiu and Albrecht launched two now-defunct startups, and McCaleb became a regular at The Archive, their group house for founders and AI researchers near Dolores Park, they talked periodically about launching their own AI lab. Several of their housemates had… More.

Continue reading “AI Research Lab Imbue Nabs $200 Million For Speculative Bet To Build AI ‘Agents’” »

September is the start to a new academic year. For many students, this means a fresh start and perhaps a chance to acquire some new study habits. Maybe this is the year you will stop putting everything off until the night before the exam? Now, there is some new evidence to explain why last-minute high-pressure cramming might not be the best way to retain information in the long term.

Imagine you’re an art thief planning an art heist. That was the role people played in a computer game under guidance of researchers from Duke University. But what they remembered about it one day later depended on the instructions they got when they started the game.

In this study, published in Proceedings of the… More.

Continue reading “Curiosity-Driven Exploration Makes Things More Memorable” »

Alternative chemistries could address one of the greatest concerns about lithium-ion batteries.

I’d be willing to bet that you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about the liquid that sloshes around inside batteries.

But this liquid—called the electrolyte—is one of their key ingredients, and it dictates a lot about how they work, as well as how safe they are. And I’ve seen a growing number of alternative battery makers talk about using an interesting ingredient in their electrolyte: water.

Alice Parker is working on how to mimic disorders such as schizophrenia.

People have expected great things from Alice Parker, who was raised in a family of distinguished scientists and engineers. And Parker, emerita professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California has delivered. She helped develop high-level (behavioral) synthesis, an automated computer design process that assists with the transformation of a behavioral description of hardware into a model of its logic and memory circuits.

Her father, a chemist, was on the team that first synthesized vitamin B1 at pharmaceutical company Merck in New Jersey. In 1941 her uncle Edward Wenk Jr., was… More.

Chief scientist Bill Dally explains the 4 ingredients that brought Nvidia so far.

Nvidia is riding high at the moment. The company has managed to increase the performance of its chips on AI tasks a thousandfold over the past 10 years, it’s raking in money, and it’s reportedly very hard to get your hands on its newest AI-accelerating GPU, the H100.

How did Nvidia get here? The company’s chief scientist, Bill Dally, managed to sum it all up in a single slide during his keynote address to the IEEE’s Hot Chips 2023 symposium in Silicon Valley on high-performance microprocessors last week. Moore’s Law was a surprisingly small part of Nvidia’s magic and new number formats a very large part. Put it… More.

But don’t think about replacing your doctor with a chatbot now, or ever.

Could ChatGPT someday assist doctors in diagnosing patients? It might one day be possible. In a recent study, researchers fed ChatGPT information from fictional patients found in a online medical reference manual to find out how well the chatbot could make clinical decisions such as diagnosing patients and prescribing treatments. The researchers found that ChatGPT was 72 percent accurate in its decisions, although the bot was better at some kinds of clinical tasks than others. It also showed no evidence of bias based on age or gender. Though the study was small and did not use real patient data, the findings point to the… More.