Lifeboat Foundation

Musk is co-founder of OpenAI, the U.S. startup that developed ChatGPT — a so-called generative AI tool which returns human-like responses to user prompts.

ChatGPT is an advanced form of AI powered by a large language model called GPT-3. It is programmed to understand human language and generate responses based on huge bodies of data.

ChatGPT “has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become,” according to Musk. “The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people.”

I think we need to ensure that the chatbot can’t do what it said it can.

It’s only a chatbot, so it shouldn’t be able to access some networks.

In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript.

Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci demonstrated frictional forces slow down the motion of surfaces in contact. Friction, he determined, is proportional to normal force. When two objects are pressed together twice as hard, friction doubles.

“We see this principle with tectonic plate boundaries,” says Utah State University geophysicist Srisharan Shreedharan. “As surfaces slide against each other, we observe frictional properties, including frictional healing that describes the degree of fault restrengthening between earthquakes. However, we know little about how this phenomenon may affect future slip events, including earthquakes.”

He and colleagues Demian Saffer and Laura Wallace of the University of Texas at Austin, where Shreedharan was previously employed as a postdoctoral fellow, and Charles Williams of New Zealand’s GNS Science geoscience research institute, publish findings about ultralow frictional healing and slow slip events along the Hikurangi tectonic plate boundary in the Feb. 17, 2023, issue of the journal Science.

A very strange conversation with the chatbot built into Microsoft’s search engine led to it declaring its love for me.

When New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose recently “met” Sydney — the chatbot feature is not yet available to the public, but is being offered to a small group of testers, Roose reported — he walked away from the encounter “deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.” The technology behind Sydney is “created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT,” Roose noted.

Roose described Sydney as being “like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.” And he shared the full conversation he had with the chatbot over a two-hour period.

Some disturbing details that Roose pointed to and/or that could be gleaned from the transcript:

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A single drop of blood from a finger prick. A simple electronic chip. And a smartphone readout of test results that could diagnose a Covid-19 infections or others like HIV or Lyme disease.

It sounds a bit like science fiction, like the beginnings of the medical tricorder used by doctors on Star Trek. Yet researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have taken the first step to showing it can be done, and they’ve published their results in the journal Small.

Postdoctoral fellow Neda Rafat and Assistant Professor Aniruddh Sarkar created a small chip that harnesses the fundamental chemistry of the gold-standard lab method but uses electrical conductivity instead of optics to detect antibodies and indicate infection.

In a forward-looking article, George Church, PhD, from Harvard University and the Wyss Institute, proposes the use of picogram to nanogram-scale probes that can land, replicate, and produce a communications module at the destination to explore nearby stars.

The fascinating new article is published in a special issue on “Interstellar Objects in Astrobiology” of the peer-reviewed journal Astrobiology.

“One design is a highly reflective light sail, traveling a long straight line toward the gravitational well of a destination star, and the photo-deflected to the closest non-luminous mass – ideally a planet or moon with exposed liquid water,” states Dr. Church.

National Institutes of Health researchers have developed and released an innovative software tool to assemble truly complete (i.e., gapless) genome sequences from a variety of species.

This software, called Verkko, which means “network” in Finnish, makes the process of assembling complete genome sequences more affordable and accessible. A description of the new software was published today in Nature Biotechnology.

Verkko grew from assembling the first gapless human genome sequence, which was finished last year by the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium, a collaborative project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of NIH.