Lifeboat Foundation

A new career is emerging with the spread of generative AI applications like ChatGPT: prompt engineering, the art (not science) of crafting effective instructions for AI models.

“In ten years, half of the world’s jobs will be in prompt engineering,” declared Robin Li, cofounder and CEO of Chinese AI giant, Baidu. “And those who cannot write prompts will be obsolete.”

That may be a bit of big tech hyperbole, but there’s no doubt that prompt engineers will become the wizards of the AI world, coaxing and guiding AI models into generating content that is not only relevant but also coherent and consistent with the desired output.

The announcement comes as the social media giant increasingly diverts its attention from creating a virtual reality-based Metaverse to embed AI features across its platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Editing photos, analyzing surveillance footage and understanding the parts of a cell. These tasks have one thing in common: you need to be able to identify and separate different objects within an image. Traditionally, researchers have had to start from scratch each time they want to analyze a new part of an image.

Meta aims to change this laborious process by being the one-stop-shop for researchers and web developers working on such problems.

Stirling converters could allow deep space missions to massively reduce their reliance on potentially scarce solar energy.

China’s Shenzhou-15 mission crew aboard the China Space Station (CSS) has reportedly completed testing on a free-piston Stirling thermoelectric converter, according to a report from state-owned media in China.

Continue reading “China’s space agency reportedly tested a Stirling converter in orbit” »

Chinese researchers used stem cells from macaques to culture embryo-like structures in a lab.

Using stem cells from a monkey embryo, a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) successfully cultured embryo-like structures in lab conditions, but they didn’t just stop there.

Continue reading “In a first, scientists create embryos in a lab from stem cells of monkey” »

Human memory has been shown to be highly fallible in recent years, but a new study on short term memory recall indicates that we can get details wrong within seconds of an event happening.

It has long been shown that human memory is highly fallible, with even ancient legal codes requiring more than one witness to corroborate accounts of a crime or events, but a new study reveals that people can create false memories within a second of the event being recalled.

The study, published this week in PLOS One, had hundreds of volunteers over the course of four experiments look at a sequence of letters and asked them to recall a single highlighted letter that they had been shown. In addition, some of the highlighted letters were reversed, meaning the respondent needed to recall that as well.

Artificial intelligence has become the world’s latest buzzword. And experts have been busy demonstrating its capabilities in virtually every field, including music. And it appears that AI did not fare well in the generation of music.

They recruited 50 participants for this study who have a strong understanding of music, particularly musical notes and other essential components.

Puhimec/iStock.

Continue reading “AI-generated music ‘inferior to human-composed’ work, finds study” »

Addresses doubts about data privacy and factual inaccuracies in AI responses.

OpenAI, the creator of the chatbot ChatGPT, has publicly spoken about the safety of AI and how it tries to keep its products safe for its users. The company had come under criticism following privacy breaches and started approaching the problem by rapidly releasing new iterations of its models.

Last week, Italy became the first Western country to put a temporary ban on the use of ChatGPT, citing privacy concerns.

Continue reading “AI Safety: OpenAI bares its efforts to ensure how its models work for humans” »

Critical security flaws in Cacti, Realtek, and IBM Aspera Faspex are being exploited by various threat actors in hacks targeting unpatched systems.

This entails the abuse of CVE-2022–46169 (CVSS score: 9.8) and CVE-2021–35394 (CVSS score: 9.8) to deliver MooBot and ShellBot (aka PerlBot), Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said in a report published this week.

CVE-2022–46169 relates to a critical authentication bypass and command injection flaw in Cacti servers that allows an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary code. CVE-2021–35394 also concerns an arbitrary command injection vulnerability impacting the Realtek Jungle SDK that was patched in 2021.

Aging is something that we all have to go through. Or at least we thought it was before tech CEOs started investing billions of dollars in anti-aging and longevity research start-ups. Sam Altman of ChatGPT fame turned out to be the mysterious $180 million investor that kickstarted Retro Sciences’ research on the topic.

A biotech company based in Silicon Valley, Retro Biosciences has taken on the mission of adding 10 more years to human life and they are planning to do so by using their collective knowledge of cellular reprogramming, autophagy, and plasma-inspired therapeutics. But they have an ace up their sleeve. They are going to use machine-learning-based computational biology and lab automation to help with the project. This must’ve sparked the interest of the OpenAI CEO if he went on to invest a good chunk of his liquid net worth in the project. This is not the first case of a tech billionaire investing in longevity and anti-aging.

Continue reading “This is Why the ChatGPT Founder is Investing $180M in Life Extension” »