Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Using advanced neuroimaging techniques, researchers discovered distant brain regions oscillate together in time.

Source: champalimaud centre for the unknown.

It’s been over 20 years since neuroimaging studies – using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a widely-used technology to capture live videos of brain activity – have been detecting brain-wide complex patterns of correlated brain activity that appear disrupted in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

It seems more companies will be using AI to write their articles and other content. 😀

Over the holidays, while most media executives were perhaps looking to get a reprieve from work, Jonah Peretti was online, fully immersed in experimenting with artificial intelligence.

NEW YORK (AP) — A major 7.8 magnitude earthquake followed by another strong quake devastated wide swaths of Turkey and Syria Monday, killing thousands of people.

Thousands are under a mandatory evacuation order after a train carrying potentially harmful chemicals derailed in Ohio. Emergency responders blew holes in some of the cars in a planned release to burn away the hazardous material. NBC News’ Ron Allen reports.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SIwcB56x2ek

He has never been on a leash and eats only human food.

Bobi, aged 30 years and 268 days, was crowned as the world’s oldest living dog by the Guinness World Records last week. Bobi also holds the enviable record of being officially the oldest dog to have lived on the planet.

Continue reading “A 30-year-old canine in Portugal is officially the world’s oldest dog” »

The Microsoft cofounder talked to Forbes about his work with AI unicorn OpenAI and back on Microsoft’s campus, AI’s potential impact on jobs and in medicine, and much more.

In 2020, Bill Gates left the board of directors of Microsoft, the tech giant he cofounded in 1975. But he still spends about 10% of his time at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, meeting with product teams, he says. A big topic of discussion for those sessions: artificial intelligence, and the ways AI can change how we work — and how we use Microsoft software products to do it.

Q&A platform Quora has opened up public access to its new AI chatbot app, Poe, which lets users ask questions and get answers from a range of AI chatbots, including those from ChatGPT maker, OpenAI, and other companies like Anthropic. Beyond allowing users to experiment with new AI technologies, Poe’s content will ultimately help to evolve Quora itself, the company says.

Quora first announced Poe’s mobile app in December, but at the time, it required an invite to try it out. With the public launch on Friday, anyone can now use Poe’s app. For now, it’s available only to iOS users, but Quora says the service will arrive on other platforms in a few months.

In an announcement, the company explained it decided to launch Poe as a standalone product that’s independent of Quora itself because of how quickly AI developments and changes are now taking place. However, there will be some connections between the Q&A site and Poe. If and when Poe’s content meets a high enough quality standard, it will be distributed on Quora’s site itself, where it has the ability to reach Quora’s 400 million monthly visitors, the company noted.

Magic, a startup developing a code-generating platform similar to GitHub’s Copilot, today announced that it raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led by Alphabet’s CapitalG with participation from Elad Gil, Nat Friedman and Amplify Partners. So what’s its story?

Magic’s CEO and co-founder, Eric Steinberger, says that he was inspired by the potential of AI at a young age. In high school, he and his friends wired up the school’s computers for machine learning algorithm training, an experience that planted the seeds for Steinberger’s computer science degree and his job at Meta as an AI researcher.

“I spent years exploring potential paths to artificial general intelligence, and then large language models (LLMs) were invented,” Steinberger told TechCrunch in an email interview. “I realized that combining LLMs trained on code with my research on neural memory and reinforcement learning might allow us to build an AI software engineer that feels like a true colleague, not just a tool. This would be extraordinarily useful for companies and developers.”

Google is rushing to take part in the sudden fervor for conversational AI, driven by the pervasive success of rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Bard, the company’s new AI experiment, aims to “combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models.” Not short on ambition, Google!

The model, or service, or AI chatbot, however you wish to describe it, was announced in a blog post by CEO Sundar Pichai. He pointedly notes Google’s recentering around AI some years back, as well as the fact that the most influential concept (the Transformer) was created by the company’s researchers in 2017.

“It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people,” Pichai writes. It’s hard not to wonder while reading this how Google managed to get leapfrogged so decisively by OpenAI, the latter of which is now synonymous with the technologies the former pioneered.