Lifeboat Foundation

Errors are the Achilles’ heel of quantum computation, cropping up at random and threatening to rui.

Meta has created an AI language model that (in a refreshing change of pace) isn’t a ChatGPT clone. The company’s Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) project can recognize over 4,000 spoken languages and produce speech (text-to-speech) in over 1,100. Like most of its other publicly announced AI projects, Meta is open-sourcing MMS today to help preserve language diversity and encourage researchers to build on its foundation. “Today, we are publicly sharing our models and code so that others in the research community can build upon our work,” the company wrote. “Through this work, we hope to make a small contribution to preserve the incredible language diversity of the world.”

Speech recognition and text-to-speech models typically require training on thousands of hours of audio with accompanying transcription labels. (Labels are crucial to machine learning, allowing the algorithms to correctly categorize and “understand” the data.) But for languages that aren’t widely used in industrialized nations — many of which are in danger of disappearing in the coming decades — “this data simply does not exist,” as Meta puts it.

Meta used an unconventional approach to collecting audio data: tapping into audio recordings of translated religious texts. “We turned to religious texts, such as the Bible, that have been translated in many different languages and whose translations have been widely studied for text-based language translation research,” the company said. “These translations have publicly available audio recordings of people reading these texts in different languages.” Incorporating the unlabeled recordings of the Bible and similar texts, Meta’s researchers increased the model’s available languages to over 4,000.

Seattle-based startup Jetoptera is designing vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicles with bladeless propulsion systems — potentially making the future of urban flight quiet, safer, and faster.

The challenge: The proportion of the global population living in cities is expected to increase from 50% today to nearly 70% by 2050, meaning our already crowded urban streets are likely to become even more congested.

On Wednesday, Google displayed how Bard, its new AI robot, could be used to write up job listings from a simple one line prompt. Microsoft has demonstrated how a ChatGPT-powered tool can write entire articles in Word.

“There are a tonne of sales representatives doing a lot of banal work to compose prospecting emails,” says Rob Seaman, a senior vice president at workplace messaging company Slack, which is working with OpenAI to embed ChatGPT into its app as a kind of digital co-worker.

New AI tools may remove some of the most tedious aspects of such roles. But based on past evidence, technology also threatens to create a whole new class of menial roles.

Metalenses migrate to smartphones.

Metalenz came out of stealth mode in 2021, announcing that it was getting ready to scale up production of devices. Manufacturing was not as big a challenge as design because the company manufactures metasurfaces using the same materials, lithography, and etching processes that it uses to make integrated circuits.

In fact, metalenses are less demanding to manufacture than even a very simple microchip because they require only a single lithography mask as opposed to the dozens required by a microprocessor. That makes them less prone to defects and less expensive. Moreover, the size of the features on an optical metasurface are measured in hundreds of nanometers, whereas foundries are accustomed to making chips with features that are smaller than 10 nanometers.

Solving a notorious quantum quandary could require abandoning some of science’s most cherished assumptions about the physical world.

A decent vid concerning the current space ideas. There are just a few misconceptions (You do not need the Moon to get to Mars) and generalities (There are many more than thousands of asteroids), but otherwise not bad.

Modern space exploration and the global competition to Mars sparks civil and military innovation.

Continue reading “The race to Mars” »

The Forever Healthy Foundation is pleased to announce the second edition of the Rejuvenation Startup Summit, following the inaugural Rejuvenation Startup Summit in 2022 with more than 400 participants from over 30 countries. It will take place on 10–11 May 2024 in Berlin. The Rejuvenation Startup Summit is the world’s largest in-person gathering of longevity startups. It brings together startups, members of the longevity venture capital / investor ecosystem, and researchers interested in starting or joining a startup – all with the goal of accelerating the development of the rejuvenation biotech industry.

At Blueprint we’ve explored and evaluated hundreds of anti-aging therapies.

Recently, we had a daring idea: what if my father, son and I completed the world’s first ever multi-generational plasma exchange?

Continue reading “Will My Son’s Blood Make Me Younger?” »