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Blog – Page 3948

Everyone is now scrambling to integrate AI with as many facets of human life as possible. Neural nets and machine learning can offer greatly improved processing speeds, yet these aspects still rely on digital pathways that may never fully mimic the biological structure of the human brain. The next step in AI improvement would be to combine the best of both the digital world and the biological world. Some scientists are already experimenting with this possibility, as a new article published in the academic journal Frontiers of Science is deep diving into the realm of biocomputers and organoid intelligence (OI).

All AI applications today rely on computing power provided by powerful CPUs or GPUs. OI, on the other hand, is seeking to bring “unprecedented advances in computing speed, processing power, data efficiency and storage capabilities” by harnessing the complexity of lab-grown cell-cultures repurposed from adult skin cells that consist of 3D clusters of neurons and other brain cells.

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From physics to mind: the journey of cognition seen through the lens of embryonic development // Prof. Michael Levin (Tufts University)

Life Perceives is a symposium bringing together scientists and artists for an open exploration of how “perception” can be understood as a phenomenon that does not only belong to humans, or even the so-called “higher organisms”, but exists across the entire spectrum of life in a myriad of forms.

The programme can be found here: https://lifeperceives.org/programme.

The symposium invites leading practitioners from the arts and sciences to present unique insights through short talks, open discussions, and artistic interventions that bring us slightly closer to the life worlds of plants and fungi, microbial communities and immune systems, cuttlefish and crows.

Continue reading “From physics to mind — Prof. Michael Levin” | >

Tiny insects known as sharpshooters excrete by catapulting urine drops at incredible accelerations. Their excretion is the first example of superpropulsion discovered in a biological system.

Saad Bhamla was in his backyard when he noticed something he had never seen before: an insect urinating. Although nearly impossible to see, the insect formed an almost perfectly round droplet on its tail and then launched it away so quickly that it seemed to disappear. The tiny insect relieved itself repeatedly for hours.

It’s generally taken for granted that what goes in must come out, so when it comes to fluid dynamics in animals, the research is largely focused on feeding rather than excretion. But Bhamla, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), had a hunch that what he saw wasn’t trivial.

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Trying to make computers more like human brains isn’t a new phenomenon. However, a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University argues that there could be many benefits in taking this concept a bit more literally by using actual neurons, though there are some hurdles to jump first before we get there.

In a recent paper, the team laid out a roadmap of what’s needed before we can create biocomputers powered by human brain cells (not taken from human brains, though). Further, according to one of the researchers, there are some clear benefits the proposed “organoid intelligence” would have over current computers.

“We have always tried to make our computers more brain-like,” Thomas Hartung, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Environmental Health and Engineering department and one of the paper’s authors, told Ars. “At least theoretically, the brain is essentially unmatched as a computer.”

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The Commerce Department opened up its application process for companies vying for a share of chip funding to boost US competitiveness with China.

The Biden administration launched its massive effort to outcompete China in semiconductor manufacturing Tuesday, offering $39 billion in funding incentives for companies seeking to build manufacturing plants in the US.

Authorized by the CHIPS and Science Act last year, the Commerce Department opened the application process Tuesday for companies jockeying for a share of the funding.

The $39 billion Chips for America program is Biden’s plan to outcompete China.

Continue reading “President Joe Biden’s billion semiconductor project is open for business” | >

To coincide with the rollout of the ChatGPT API, OpenAI today launched the Whisper API, a hosted version of the open source Whisper speech-to-text model that the company released in September.

Priced at $0.006 per minute, Whisper is an automatic speech recognition system that OpenAI claims enables “robust” transcription in multiple languages as well as translation from those languages into English. It takes files in a variety of formats, including M4A, MP3, MP4, MPEG, MPGA, WAV and WEBM.

Countless organizations have developed highly capable speech recognition systems, which sit at the core of software and services from tech giants like Google, Amazon and Meta. But what makes Whisper different is that it was trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and “multitask” data collected from the web, according to OpenAI president and chairman Greg Brockman, which lead to improved recognition of unique accents, background noise and technical jargon.

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