Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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FallenKingdomReads’ list of The Top 5 Science Fiction Books That Explore the Ethics of Cloning.

Cloning is a topic that has been explored in science fiction for many years, often raising questions about the ethics of creating new life forms. While the idea of cloning has been discussed in various forms of media, such as movies and TV shows, some of the most interesting and thought-provoking discussions on the topic can be found in books. Here are the top 5 science fiction books that explore the ethics of cloning.

Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns is a space opera that explores the ethics of cloning on a grand scale. The book follows the journey of a group of cloned human beings known as “shatterlings” who travel the galaxy and interact with various other sentient beings. The book raises questions about the nature of identity and the value of individuality, as the shatterlings face challenges that force them to confront their own existence and the choices they have made.

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Its Up!

We’ve created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. For example, it passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5’s score was around the bottom 10%. We’ve spent 6 months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from our adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in our best-ever results (though far from perfect) on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails.

Over the past two years, we rebuilt our entire deep learning stack and, together with Azure, co-designed a supercomputer from the ground up for our workload. A year ago, we trained GPT-3.5 as a first “test run” of the system. We found and fixed some bugs and improved our theoretical foundations. As a result, our GPT-4 training run was (for us at least!) unprecedentedly stable, becoming our first large model whose training performance we were able to accurately predict ahead of time. As we continue to focus on reliable scaling, we aim to hone our methodology to help us predict and prepare for future capabilities increasingly far in advance—something we view as critical for safety.

We are releasing GPT-4’s text input capability via ChatGPT and the API (with a waitlist). To prepare the image input capability for wider availability, we’re collaborating closely with a single partner to start. We’re also open-sourcing OpenAI Evals, our framework for automated evaluation of AI model performance, to allow anyone to report shortcomings in our models to help guide further improvements.

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The Big Bang may have not been alone.

The Big Bang may not have been alone. The appearance of all the particles and radiation in the universe may have been joined by another Big Bang that flooded our universe with dark matter particles. And we may be able to detect it.

In the standard cosmological picture, the early universe was a very exotic place. Perhaps the most momentous thing to happen in our cosmos was the event of inflation, which at very early times after the Big Bang, sent our universe into a period of extremely rapid expansion. When inflation ended, the exotic quantum fields that drove that event decayed, transforming themselves into the flood of particles and radiation that remains today.

Continue reading “A Second Big Bang May Have Flooded the Universe With Dark Matter” | >

Dr. Emily Rice, an Associate Professor of Astrophysics at the Macaulay Honors College of CUNY and resident research associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), is one of the keynote speakers at the TEDxCUNY conference to be hosted on March 10, 2023.

Dr. Rice is extremely involved in the scientific community through her role as a researcher and professor. Dr. Rice co-founded the research group Brown Dwarfs in New York City (BDNYC) with Dr. Kelle Cruz from CUNY Hunter College and Dr. Jackie Faherty from AMNH. Brown Dwarfs are objects that have masses between giant exoplanets and low mass stars. Dr. Rice explained there was a lot about Brown Dwarfs that scientists were yet to explore and understand.

“The three of us started this research group following a small project we had collaborated on,” Dr. Rice said. In 2010, Dr. Cruz had started their work with Hunter College, Dr. Rice was wrapping up her postdoctoral work, and Dr. Faherty was finishing up graduate school. “We all happened to be in New York City at the time, and we were all working with Brown Dwarfs, so we decided to create a research group focused on these substellar objects,” Dr. Rice remarked.

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A green bullet train capable of touching 200 miles per hour

The proposed 218-mile high-speed network will connect Las Vegas and Southern California with technology that allows it to maintain a cruising speed of 200 miles per hour (321 km/h). This means the travel time between the cities will be just over an hour. In comparison, a journey by car takes over four hours.

The expenditure on the project is expected to provide a much-needed boost to the economy, including the creation of nearly 35,000 jobs during the construction phase and around 10,000 permanent jobs. According to Brightline, the fully electric, emission-free system will be one of the greenest forms of transportation in the U.S., removing 3 million cars and 400,000 tons of CO2 each year.

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You’re going to have strong feelings about this redesign.

Gustav Söderström has worked at Spotify for a long time; his first big project was leading the launch of its mobile app back in 2009. That makes him the perfect company leader to talk to about Spotify’s recent redesign, which introduces a visual, TikTok-like feed for discovering new content on the app’s homepage. As his boss, CEO Daniel Ek, put it last week, it’s the biggest change Spotify has undergone since we introduced mobile.

Spotify is launching a feed that will help you discover new artists, podcasts, and audiobooks.

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Google will soon offer ways to generate text and images using machine learning in its Workspace products as part of a scramble to catch up with rivals in the new AI race.

Google has announced a suite of upcoming generative AI features for its various Workspace apps, including Google Docs, Gmail, Sheets, and Slides.

Google is pumping its productivity apps full of AI.

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