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President Joe Biden’s executive order plans for standardized digital watermarking rules.

President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence is a first-of-its-kind action from the government to tackle some of the technology’s greatest challenges — like how to identify if an image is real or fake.

Among a myriad of other demands, the order, signed Monday, calls for a new set of government-led standards on watermarking AI-generated content. Like watermarks on photographs or paper money, digital watermarks help users distinguish between a real object and a fake one and determine who owns it.

Digital watermarks are easily broken and abused.

Continue reading “Watermarks aren’t the silver bullet for AI misinformation” | >

You can now register.ing domains as part of an early access program. Some aren’t cheap: th.ing, for example, will cost you $38,999.99 per year from GoDaddy.

You can now register.ing domains as part of Google’s early access period, though you’ll have to pay “an additional one-time fee,” Google’s Christina Yeh wrote in a blog post. That fee will go down daily through December 5th. At 16:00 UTC (noon ET) on that date,.ing domains will officially be publicly available.

A few of us at The Verge have had some fun plugging different words into GoDaddy’s domain search to see what.ing domains are up for grabs. Some common words with-ing endings are really expensive; think.ing and buy.ing cost $38,999.99 and $129,999.99, respectively, per year to register. But I’ve found a few good ones that are pretty affordable — good luck on the hunt!

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Nearly five years ago, DeepMind, one of Google’s more prolific AI-centered research labs, debuted AlphaFold, an AI system that can accurately predict the structures of many proteins inside the human body. Since then, DeepMind has improved on the system, releasing an updated and more capable version of AlphaFold — AlphaFold 2 — in 2020.

And the lab’s work continues.

Today, DeepMind revealed that the newest release of AlphaFold, the successor to AlphaFold 2, can generate predictions for nearly all molecules in the Protein Data Bank, the world’s largest open access database of biological molecules.

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It’s strange times we’re living in when a blockchain billionaire, not the usual Big Tech suspects, is the one supplying the compute capacity needed to develop generative AI.

It was revealed yesterday that Jed McCaleb, the co-founder of blockchain startups Stellar, Ripple and Mt Gox and aerospace company Vast, launched a 501©(3) nonprofit that purchased 24,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs to build data centers that’ll lease capacity to AI projects.

Already, the cluster of GPUs — worth an estimated half a billion dollars and among the largest in the world — is being used by startups Imbue and Character.ai for AI model experimentation, claims Eric Park, the CEO of a newly formed organization, Voltage Park, that’s charged with running and managing the data centers.

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IBM’s announcement of a 1,000+ qubit computer is expected in the next few weeks but the startup might be a few leaps ahead.

Boulder, Colorado-based Atom Computing has beaten tech giant IBM in developing a quantum computer with more than 1,000 qubits. This next-generation quantum computing platform will be available for interested users next year, a company press release said.

Developments in quantum computing have become a race of sorts as businesses from different parts of the world are looking to take the lead in this next frontier of technology. Giants such as Microsoft, Google, and IBM have been working on developing their versions of the complex computer in a domain that is equally accessible to startups.

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According to the Chinese Ministry of State Security, “certain countries” are likely working on incredibly potent ethnic bioweapons.

China has blown the whistle on the potential dangers of what it calls “genetic weapons” that could prove to be an incredibly potent weapon of mass destruction, the Global Times reports. On Monday, October 20, 2023, the Chinese Ministry of State Security released a statement on WeChat warning that a “certain” foreign non-governmental organization (NGO) had recruited Chinese “volunteers” to collect biodiversity distribution data under the guise of biological species research to steal China’s species data.

AnnaStills/iStock.

Bioweapon of mass destruction.

Continue reading “China warns a ‘certain country’ is making ethnic bioweapons” | >

This haunting formation is located 16,000 light-years from Earth.

Two powerful X-ray telescopes have joined forces to study an eerie-looking celestial entity referred to as the “cosmic hand.” NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) captured vivid and complex features of this haunting formation located 16,000 light-years from Earth.

As per the press release, the images revealed the skeletal-like structure of this ghostly hand-shaped formation in space, depicting its magnetic field patterns.

X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./R. Romani et al. (Chandra); NASA/MSFC (IXPE); Infared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DECaPS; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt)

Continue reading “NASA’s X-ray telescopes expose the ‘bones’ of a haunting cosmic hand” | >

Siemens and Microsoft team up to introduce the Siemens Industrial Copilot and enhance human-machine collaboration.

Microsoft and Siemens have unveiled a groundbreaking partnership aimed at leveraging generative AI to revolutionize industries on a global scale, Microsoft announced.

This collaboration introduces the Siemens Industrial Copilot, an AI-powered assistant designed to enhance human-machine cooperation, particularly in the manufacturing sector significantly. The joint initiative represents a substantial leap forward in AI technology, intending to accelerate innovation and streamline operations across diverse industries.

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NVIDIA looking to ramp up chip production in the face of supply shortage.

NVIDIA, the most profitable chip-making company in the world, has unveiled a custom large language model, the technology on which artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT are based, which the company has developed for their internal use.

Trained on NVIDIA’s proprietary data, “ChipNeMo” will generate and optimize software and provide assistance to human designers in building semiconductors. Developed by NVIDIA researchers, ChipNeMo would be highly beneficial in the context of the company’s work in graphics processing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies.

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The robot guide dog possesses the ability to respond to tugs on a leash.

Researchers have created a robot guide dog to make life easier for the visually impaired with its ability to respond to tugs on a leash. The team of engineers at Binghamton University’s Computer Science Department in New York State has been developing a robotic seeing-eye dog to improve accessibility for those who are visually impaired. Last year, they performed a trick-or-treating exercise with its quadruped robotic dog.

Now, they have demonstrated a robot dog leading a person down a lab hallway, confidently and carefully reacting to directive instructions. Engineers were surprised that throughout the visually impaired… More.

Stephen Folkerts ‘24.

Continue reading “Engineers create a robotic eye-seeing dog to aid the visually impaired” | >