New research may upend our understanding of the brain, showing that travelling waves of neuronal excitation dominate the activity associated with our thoughts and feelings.
Robots are nothing new. They build our cars, vacuum our floors, prepare our e-commerce orders, and even help carry out surgeries. But now the sci-fi vision of a general-purpose humanoid robot seems to be edging closer.
While disembodied artificial intelligence has seen rapid improvements in performance in recent years, most robots are still relatively dumb. For the most part, they are used for highly specialized purposes, the environments they operate in are carefully controlled, and they are not particularly autonomous.
That’s because operating in the messy uncertainty of the real world remains difficult for current AI approaches. As impressive as the recent feats of large language models have been, they are dealing with a fairly limited palette of data types that are fed to them in predictable ways.
Like death and taxes, there seem to be few things more predictable than artificial intelligence going off the rails.
Case in point, remember that influencer who created a virtual version of herself to rent out as an “AI girlfriend”? In a new interview with Insider, Snapchat influencer Caryn Marjorie admitted that the voice-based chatbot she made to mimic her speech and be a paid virtual companion has gotten much hornier than intended.
“The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue,” she told Insider. “My team and I are working around the clock to prevent this from happening again.”
Stockholm-based learning platform Sana has announced a suite of generative AI tools along with an extension to its Series B round, bringing its total funding to $80 million.
Inside companies, information is often scattered across silos, buried in systems and locked in different formats, making it inaccessible to employees when they need it most, says Swedish entrepreneur Joel Hellermark. The 26-year-old hopes to help companies tackle this problem through his learning platform Sana, which uses AI to create an index for companies’ information, allowing employees to query and search it and perform tasks like creating training courses and summarizing and translating information.
Workplace collaboration tools are supposed to make things easier. I think they just make everything more complicated.
From my personal experience, these tools require quite a bit of manual input from users and are limited in their scopes of functionality. Strategy documents, proposals, roadmaps, meetings and notes may be found living in separate apps.
Notion hopes that AI can help cut down on the fragmentation within this space with its new product, Notion Projects. Projects aims to connect all aspects of collaboration in one place, making it easier for teams to plan, manage, and execute work, with the help of AI LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic.
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Vectara is continuing to grow as an AI powered conversational search platform with new capabilities announced today that aim to improve generative AI for business data.
The Santa Clara, Calif.- based startup emerged from stealth in Oct. 2022, led by the former CTO and founder of big data vendor Cloudera. Vectara originally branded its platform as a neural search-as-a-service technology. This approach combines AI-based large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), data integration pipelines and vector techniques to create a neural network that can be optimized for search.
Scientists Induce Hibernation-Like State Using Ultrasound Stimulation of the Brain
Chen’s team used ultrasound to safely, noninvasively induce a torpor-like state in mice, rats.
Credit: Video courtesy Chen laboratory, Washington University in St. Louis.
The Indicator from Planet Money
Posted in business, economics, space travel
Is this Mars thing really happening? SpaceX did its first test launch of Starship this spring, the rocket that it’s developing to send to Mars. But getting to Mars is still a long way off. So does SpaceX have the funding and business plan to pull it off?For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
A new study finds a chemical formed when we digest a widely used sweetener is “genotoxic,” meaning it breaks up DNA. The chemical is also found in trace amounts in the sweetener itself, and the finding raises questions about how the sweetener may contribute to health problems.
At issue is sucralose, a widely used artificial sweetener sold under the trade name Splenda®. Previous work by the same research team established that several fat-soluble compounds are produced in the gut after sucralose ingestion. One of these compounds is sucralose-6-acetate.
Our new work establishes that sucralose-6-acetate is genotoxic. We also found that trace amounts of sucralose-6-acetate can be found in off-the-shelf sucralose, even before it is consumed and metabolized.
Thinking of X-rays might trigger memories of broken bones or dental check-ups. But this extremely energetic light can show us more than just our bones: it is also used to study the molecular world, even biochemical reactions in real-time. One issue, though, is that researchers have never been able to study a single atom with X-rays. Until now.
Scientists have been able to characterize a single atom using X-rays. Not only they were able to distinguish the type of atoms they were seeing (there were two different ones), but they also managed to study the chemical behavior these atoms were showing.
“Atoms can be routinely imaged with scanning probe microscopes, but without X-rays, one cannot tell what they are made of. We can now detect exactly the type of a particular atom, one atom-at-a-time, and can simultaneously measure its chemical state,” senior author Professor Saw Wai Hla, from the University of Ohio and the Argonne National Laboratory, said in a statement.