Lifeboat Foundation

Signaling its interest in text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, Quora this week launched a platform called Poe that lets people ask questions, get instant answers and have a back-and-forth dialogue with AI chatbots.

Short for “Platform for Open Exploration,” Poe — which is invite-only and currently only available on iOS — is “designed to be a place where people can easily interact with a number of different AI agents,” a Quora spokesperson told TechCrunch via text message.

“We have learned a lot about building consumer internet products over the last 12 years building and operating Quora. And we are specifically experienced in serving people who are looking for knowledge,” the spokesperson said. “We believe much of what we’ve learned can be applied to this new domain where people are interfacing with large language models.”

📄Link to paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.21.521526v1 (1/N)

NASA and Russian space agency Roscosmos answered questions about the Soyuz MS-22 leak. The capsule is supposed to bring a trio from the ISS home in March.

Summary: Remote fear memories, or memories of trauma formed in the distant past, are stored in the connections between neurons in the prefrontal cortex.

Source: UCR

A remote fear memory is a memory of traumatic events that occurred in the distant past—a few months to decades ago. A University of California, Riverside, mouse study published in Nature Neuroscience has now spelled out the fundamental mechanisms by which the brain consolidates remote fear memories.

Robots like Digit are purpose-built to do tasks in environments made for humans. We aren’t trying to just mimic the look of people or make a humanoid robot.

Every design and engineering decision is looked at through a function-first lens. To easily walk into warehouses and work alongside people, to do the kinds of dynamic reaching, carrying, and walking that we do, Digit has some similar characteristics.

Continue reading “What is Human-Centric Robotics?” »

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s AI studio Deep Voodoo said Wednesday that it has secured a $20 million in an investment round led by Connect Ventures. The South Park creators’ startup said it will use the capital to accelerate its development of deep-fake technology, VFX services and original synthetic media projects.

Connect Ventures is an investment partnership between CAA and venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates and represents the first outside capital raise for Deep Voodoo, which was previously funded by Parker and Stone’s entertainment company Park County.

Parker and Stone originally began building out their deep fake technology in early 2020, assembling a team of artists for a feature film they had developed. When the film was suspended amid the Covid shutdown, they pivoted to building out those deep-fake tools.

For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the immense human labor behind autonomous processes. There is the myth of universal automation, with technologies framed as a desituated force sweeping the globe. But this fiction ignores the social, cultural, and geographical forces that shape technologies at a local level. And, there is the myth of automating everyone, the generic figure of the human at the heart of automation claims. But labor is socially stratified and so automation’s fallout will be highly uneven, falling heavier on some (immigrants, people of color, women) than others. Munn moves from machine minders in China to warehouse pickers in the United States to explore the ways that new technologies do (and don’t) reconfigure labor. Combining this rich array of human stories with insights from media and cultural studies, Munn points to a more nuanced, localized, and racialized understanding of the future of work.

Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop
https://wellingtonsquarebooks.indiecommerce.com/book/9781503631427

Continue reading “Luke Munn — Automaton Is A Myth” »

From a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to an infusion that slowed down Alzheimer’s for some people with the disease, here are three momentous advances from 2022.

An RSV vaccine showed promise for the first time in 50-years

Two vaccines are poised to be approved for RSV by the end of 2023, according to their makers, after almost 50-years without any meaningful progress.

The world continues to burn coal in greater quantities than ever. But a plateau in this — the most polluting of fossil fuels — could soon be reached.

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