Lifeboat Foundation

Writing a report on the state of AI must feel a lot like building on shifting sands: By the time you hit publish, the whole industry has changed under your feet. But there are still important trends and takeaways in Stanford’s 386-page bid to summarize this complex and fast-moving domain.

The AI Index, from the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, worked with experts from academia and private industry to collect information and predictions on the matter. As a yearly effort (and by the size of it, you can bet they’re already hard at work laying out the next one), this may not be the freshest take on AI, but these periodic broad surveys are important to keep one’s finger on the pulse of industry.

This year’s report includes “new analysis on foundation models, including their geopolitics and training costs, the environmental impact of AI systems, K-12 AI education, and public opinion trends in AI,” plus a look at policy in a hundred new countries.

There’s enough trouble on this planet already that we don’t need new problems coming here from the sun. Unfortunately, we can’t yet destroy this pitiless star, so we are at its mercy. But NASA at least may soon be able to let us know when one of its murderous flares is going to send our terrestrial systems into disarray.

Understanding and predicting space weather is a big part of NASA’s job. There’s no air up there, so no one can hear you scream, “Wow, how about this radiation!” Consequently, we rely on a set of satellites to detect and relay this important data to us.

One such measurement is of solar wind, “an unrelenting stream of material from the sun.” Even NASA can’t find anything nice to say about it! Normally this stream is absorbed or dissipated by our magnetosphere, but if there’s a solar storm, it may be intense enough that it overwhelms the local defenses.

The amazing.

But maybe the future of these models is more focused than the boil-the-ocean approach we’ve seen from OpenAI and others, who want to be able to answer every question under the sun.

The amazing abilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT wouldn’t be possible without large language models. These models are trained on billions, sometimes trillions of examples of text. The idea behind ChatGPT is to understand language so well, it can anticipate what word plausibly comes next in a split second. That takes a ton of training, compute resources and developer savvy to make happen.

Continue reading “Generative AI’s future in enterprise could be smaller, more focused language models” »

“The eyes are the windows to the soul.” It’s an ancient saying, and it illustrates what we know intuitively to be true — you can understand so much about a person by looking them deep in the eye. But how? And can we use this fact to understand disease?

One company is making big strides in this direction. Israel’s NeuraLight, which just won the Health and Medtech Innovation award at SXSW, was founded to bring science and AI to understanding the brain through the eyes.

A focal disease for NeuraLight is ALS, which is currently diagnosed through a subjective survey of about a dozen questions, followed by tests such as an EEG and MRI.

Continue reading “How AI Can Look Into Your Eyes And Diagnose A Devastating Brain Disease” »

In 1942 The Manhattan Project was established by the United States as part of a top-secret research and development (R&D) program to produce the first nuclear weapons. The project involved thousands of scientists, engineers, and other personnel who worked on different aspects of the project, including the development of nuclear reactors, the enrichment of uranium, and the design and construction of the bomb. The goal: to develop an atomic bomb before Germany did.

The Manhattan Project set a precedent for large-scale government-funded R&D programs. It also marked the beginning of the nuclear age and ushered in a new era of technological and military competition between the world’s superpowers.

Today we’re entering the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI)—an era arguably just as important, if not more important, than the age of nuclear war. While the last few months might have been the first you’ve heard about it, many in the field would argue we’ve been headed in this direction for at least the last decade, if not longer. For those new to the topic: welcome to the future, you’re late.

Several asteroids are set to dash past Earth in the coming days, according to a list released by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, close encounters that are almost certain to pass harmlessly and come days after the White House announced new plans to defend the planet against threats from space.

Two asteroids, one bus-sized and the other the size of a house, will make relatively close approaches to Earth on Wednesday, according to NASA’s Asteroid Watch Dashboard.

Three more, all approximately airplane-sized, are also set to whizz past Earth on Thursday, the agency said.

Continue reading “4 Large Asteroids Are Whizzing Towards Earth. Here’s What You Need To Know” »

NASA’s plan to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon during the first crewed lunar flyby of the 21st century took one giant leap this week with the unveiling of four astronauts for the Artemis II mission.

In a news conference Monday at Ellington Field near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston the space agency announced the first black man, the first woman and the first Canadian on any crewed Moon mission—the agency’s first since Apollo 17 in 1972.

The Apollo 8-style Artemis 2 mission will see NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glove and Christina Hammock Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, embark on a 10-day trip around the Moon.

Continue reading “NASA Names Astronauts For First Crewed Moon Mission In Over 50 Years” »

After almost two years of waiting for Elon Musk’s Mars rocket to fly again, things are really starting to move quickly now, it seems.

The Super Heavy first stage booster section of Starship was moved to the launch site over the weekend and now the Federal Aviation Administration lists Monday, April 10 as the target launch date for Starship in its current Operations Plan Advisory for air traffic controllers.

The advisory also lists next Tuesday and Wednesday as potential backup launch dates.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. after an eleventh-hour scramble to secure further funding failed, the satellite company announced on Tuesday, marking the end of a sudden spiral that followed a botched high-profile launch attempt out of Britain in January.

Virgin Orbit has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, documents show.

Virgin Orbit said it had failed to secure sufficient funding to stay in business and the decision comes less than a week after it laid off most of its staff and ceased operations.

Continue reading “Billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit Files For Bankruptcy After Failed Satellite Launch” »