Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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July 17 — Around a decade after virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa burst onto the scene, a new wave of AI helpers with greater autonomy is raising the stakes, powered by the latest version of the technology behind ChatGPT and its rivals.

Experimental systems that run on GPT-4 or similar models are attracting billions of dollars of investment as Silicon Valley competes to capitalize on the advances in AI. The new assistants — often called “agents” or “copilots” — promise to perform more complex personal and work tasks when commanded to by a human, without needing close supervision.

“High level, we want this to become something like your personal AI friend,” said developer Div Garg, whose company MultiOn is beta-testing an AI agent.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed our world at an astounding pace. It’s like a vast ocean, and we’re just beginning to navigate its depths.

To appreciate its complexity, let’s embark on a journey through the seven distinct stages of AI, from its simplest forms to the mind-boggling prospects of superintelligence and singularity.

Picture playing chess against a computer. Every move it makes, every strategy it deploys, is governed by a predefined set of rules, its algorithm. This is the earliest stage of AI — rule-based systems. They are excellent at tasks with clear-cut rules, like diagnosing mechanical issues or processing tax forms. But their capacity to learn or adapt is nonexistent, and their decisions are only as good as the rules they’ve been given.

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Gum disease and tooth loss are linked to shrinkage of the hippocampus, an area of the brain crucial for memory. The corresponding study was published in Neurology.

Previous studies suggest that tooth loss and periodontitis may be linked to Alzheimer’s disease. However, recent studies have not found a significant link between tooth loss and periodontitis, and hippocampal atrophy. In the current study, researchers sought to understand more about how oral health affects hippocampal volume-and, thus, memory. To do so, they examined the relationship between number of teeth present and hippocampal atrophy in light of periodontitis severity among middle-aged and older adults.

For the study, the researchers included 172 people with an average age of 67 years old who did not have cognitive decline. At the start of the study, each underwent dental exams and memory tests. They also underwent MRI brain scans at the beginning of the study and four years later to assess their hippocampal volume.

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Nick had four surgeries and multiple radiation treatments to treat his ependymoma tumors. He shares what to expect during and after radiation and how cancer changed his outlook on life.

In 2004, when I was 12 years old, I had severe back pain and spasms. When I laid down at night, I experienced episodes where I couldn’t move for 10 to 15 minutes. Since my father was in the medical field, he knew something wasn’t normal.

An MRI showed a 12-centimeter grade I myxopapillary ependymoma inside my spinal column in my lower lumbar. After emergency surgery, the doctors reported they removed all the tumor except for a couple of very microscopic spots.

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Can human-aware artificial intelligence help accelerate science? In this article, the authors incorporate the distribution of human expertise by training unsupervised models on simulated inferences cognitively accessible to experts and show that this substantially improves the models’ predictions of future discoveries, but also enables AI to generate high-value alternatives that complement human discoveries.

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Large language models like GPT-4 have taken the world by storm thanks to their astonishing command of natural language. Yet the most significant long-term opportunity for LLMs will entail an entirely different type of language: the language of biology.

One striking theme has emerged from the long march of research progress across biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics over the past century: it turns out that biology is a decipherable, programmable, in some ways even digital system.

DNA encodes the complete genetic instructions for every living organism on earth using just four variables—A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine) and T (thymine). Compare this to modern computing systems, which use two variables—0 and 1—to encode all the world’s digital electronic information. One system is binary and the other is quaternary, but the two have a surprising amount of conceptual overlap; both systems can properly be thought of as digital.

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There may soon be another option for an Alzheimer’s drug capable of slowing the progression of the devastating disease.

An experimental Alzheimer’s drug from drugmaker Eli Lilly helped slow cognitive decline in patients in the early stages of the illness, according to the results of a late-stage clinical trial. Side effects of the drug, called donanemab, however, were serious in some cases, and included brain swelling and brain bleeds.

Lilly representatives presented the results at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Amsterdam on Monday. The research was published simultaneously in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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