Lifeboat Foundation

How expensive and difficult does hyperscale-class AI training have to be for a maker of self-driving electric cars to take a side excursion to spend how many hundreds of millions of dollars to go off and create its own AI supercomputer from scratch? And how egotistical and sure would the company’s founder have to be to put together a team that could do it?

Like many questions, when you ask these precisely, they tend to answer themselves. And what is clear is that Elon Musk, founder of both SpaceX and Tesla as well as a co-founder of the OpenAI consortium, doesn’t have time – or money – to waste on science projects.

Continue reading “Inside Tesla’s Innovative And Homegrown ‘Dojo’ AI Supercomputer” »

Tesla’s Technoking Elon Musk is scheduled to speak at the ONS 2022 Conference along with a few world leaders and energy company CEOs.

The CHIPS Act of 2022 was signed into law on Aug. 9. It provides tens of billions of dollars in public support for revitalization of domestic semiconductor manufacturing, workforce training, and “leap ahead” wireless technology. Because we outsource most of our device fabrication — including the chips that go into the Navy’s submarines and ships, the Army’s jeeps and tanks, military drones and satellites — our industrial base has become weak and shallow. The first order of business for the CHIPS Act is to address a serious deficit in our domestic production capacity.

Notoriously absent from the language of the bill is any mention of chip security. Consequently, the U.S. is about to make the same mistake with microelectronics that we made with digital networks and software applications: Unless and until the government demands in-device security, our competitors will have an easy time of manipulating how chips function and behave. Nowhere is this more dangerous than our national security infrastructure.

If a machine makes art, is it even art? And what does this mean for actual artists?

Getting good at chess is one thing. Surpassing the human brain is quite another.

By studying how electric organs arose in different lineages of fish, scientists gain new insights into a long-standing question of evolutionary biology.

Astronomers have reconstructed the history of star formation at the center of the Milky Way for the first time, finding that starbirth radiated outwards from the galaxy’s heart.

The results also revealed that most young stars in the densely packed galactic center formed with only loose associations and drifted further apart over the course of millions of years.

New data from Qatalag and GitLab puts a number on it: Knowledge workers waste an extra 67 minutes online each day doing menial tasks for the express purpose of proving to their managers and colleagues that they’re available and working.

It’s taking a strain. The survey polled 2,000 knowledge workers and found that more than half of them (54%) reported feeling pressure to show their online status by replying to emails and Slack messages, adding comments to Google Docs, or updating project management tools.

It’s a new twist in the developing saga of remote work, and it shows that escaping the culture of presenteeism isn’t as simple as escaping the (physical) office.

Motor skills learning is classically associated with brain regions including cerebral and cerebellar cortices and basal ganglia nuclei. Less is known about the role of the hippocampus in the acquisition and storage of motor skills. Here, we show that mice receiving a long-term training in the accelerating rotarod display marked hippocampal transcriptional changes and reduced pyramidal neurons activity in the CA1 region when compared with naive mice. Then, we use mice in which neural ensembles are permanently labeled in an Egr1 activity-dependent fashion. Using these mice, we identify a subpopulation of Egr1-expressing pyramidal neurons in CA1 activated in short-term (STT) and long-term (LTT) trained mice in the rotarod task. When Egr1 is downregulated in the CA1 or these neuronal ensembles are depleted, motor learning is improved whereas their chemogenetic stimulation impairs motor learning performance. Thus, Egr1 organizes specific CA1 neuronal ensembles during the accelerating rotarod task that limit motor learning. These evidences highlight the role of the hippocampus in the control of this type of learning and we provide a possible underlying mechanism.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT It is a major topic in neurosciences the deciphering of the specific circuits underlying memory systems during the encoding of new information. However, the potential role of the hippocampus in the control of motor learning and the underlying mechanisms has been poorly addressed. In the present work we show how the hippocampus responds to motor learning and how the Egr1 molecule is one of the major responsible for such phenomenon controlling the rate of motor coordination performances.