The project that resulted has helped slash the district’s annual energy consumption by 1.6 million kilowatts and in three years generated enough savings to transform the district’s $250,000 budget deficit into a $1.8 million surplus.
Just as Hester envisioned at the outset, a major chunk of the money is going toward teachers’ salaries — fueling pay raises that average between $2,000 and $3,000 per educator per month.
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This process is no less relevant to humans than any other species in nature, but since our species is such an evolutionary newcomer, the extent of its influence — and how it might work today — is still difficult to pin down.
The challenge: A team of researchers in Greece and Ireland, led by Nikolaos Vakirlis at the Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center in Athens, argues that a key to understanding human evolution lies with short sequences of DNA named “open reading frames” (ORFs). These structures are small sections of the genome that encode tiny protein molecules — microproteins — which can perform a diverse range of crucial biological tasks, from regulating muscle performance to alerting cells to damaging stresses.
Due to their minuscule sizes, ORFs are notoriously difficult to study. Because of this, their full relevance has gone under the radar in mainstream genomics research until recently, and even today, they still aren’t considered to be proper genes in themselves. For Vakirlis’ team, this potential oversight masks the fact that the microproteins encoded by ORFs can develop their own de novo sequences over generations, which may eventually develop into new genes.
Also weighing in with an online essay was the Rev. Russell Moore, formerly head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy division and now editor-in-chief of the evangelical magazine Christianity Today. He confided to his readers that his first sermon, delivered at age 12, was a well-intentioned mess.
“Preaching needs someone who knows the text and can convey that to the people — but it’s not just about transmitting information,” Moore wrote. “When we listen to the Word preached, we are hearing not just a word about God but a word from God.”
“Such life-altering news needs to be delivered by a human, in person,” he added. “A chatbot can research. A chatbot can write. Perhaps a chatbot can even orate. But a chatbot can’t preach.”
“OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it ‘Open’ AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” Musk tweeted (Opens in a new window) today. “Not what I intended at all.”
OpenAI this week acknowledged that its process for “fine-tuning” ChatGPT is “imperfect.”
“Sometimes the fine-tuning process falls short of our intent (producing a safe and useful tool) and the user’s intent (getting a helpful output in response to a given input),” OpenAI says (Opens in a new window). “Improving our methods for aligning AI systems with human values is a top priority (Opens in a new window) for our company, particularly as AI systems become more capable.”
Today, Roblox provides creators with a platform that enables end-to-end tools, services, and support to help them build the most immersive 3D experiences. With Roblox Studio, creators have everything they need, out-of-the-box and for free, to build their experiences and publish immediately on all popular platforms, reaching 61 million people daily worldwide. With the advent of generative AI techniques, however, we are seeing an opportunity to revolutionize creation on the platform, both by augmenting Roblox Studio to make creation dramatically faster and easier, and also by enabling every user on Roblox to be a creator.
As we all know, generative AI learns the underlying patterns and structures of data and generates new content, such as images, audio, code, text, 3D models, or other forms of media, that have not been seen before. With a dramatic acceleration in these tools’ effectiveness for everyday content creation, this technology is at an inflection point. It now has the capability to capture the creator’s intent, provide a broad range of digital editing capabilities, help create the content, and allow for fast iteration. We have already heard from Roblox creators about how they are using this technology to create. However, these off-the-shelf AI systems are not integrated with our platform and they often do not produce “Roblox ready” output that requires substantial follow on work from a creator. We see an incredible opportunity to build generative AI tools and APIs focused on Roblox.
Nothing sucks more than a supermassive black hole, but according to a group of researchers, the enormous objects found at the heart of many galaxies may be driving the expansion of the cosmos.
The radical claim comes from an international team who compared growth rates of black holes in different galaxies. They conclude that the spread of masses observed could be explained by black holes bearing cores of “dark energy”, the mysterious force behind the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Large language models still struggle with basic reasoning tasks. Two new papers that apply machine learning to math provide a blueprint for how that could change.
“The inevitability of death is what makes life worth living.” — Henry.
“Would we need to extend the years everyone should continue to be in the workforce, in order to pay for those not contributing?” — Marianne.
“Imagine you have people with all the prejudices they grew up with and they never die. Or you have someone who is a dictator and they get to live forever and be dictator forever. Or you have Congress where you have 80 and 90 year olds holding office forever but now they never die so nobody new can take over.” — Avram.
