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Tencent, Alibaba in Talks to Invest in DeepSeek at $20 Billion-Plus Valuation

Chinese tech giants Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group are in talks to invest in DeepSeek, the AI upstart that recently started fundraising for the first time, according to four people with knowledge of the conversations. DeepSeek, owned by Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management, is…

This best-selling book is freaking out national security advisors

Our second video just won a Webby’s People’s Voice Award! → http://bit.ly/3OVCA1i.

Way more thoughts, our curated newsletter, and free books (until we run out) → https://80000hours.org/iabied/

If we build something vastly smarter than us, with goals we don’t share and without knowing how to control it, we lose. That’s the core claim in the book, and I don’t think it’s all that controversial. The real question is whether that’s where we’re headed.

If this matters to you, subscribe to AI in Context. We’re working through it too.

Correction: at 14:18 I say \.

Genome Music: Rare Disease Sequences Turn Into Songs

The performance garnered a huge media attendance, allowing the team to accomplish their goal of bringing attention to SCID. Frishkopf hopes to perform the piece in a concert in the future.

Genome Music Raises Rare Disease Awareness from Concerts to Contests

From a serendipitous idea to physical compositions, Kantipuly and her collaborators have demonstrated the power of music to bring people together and work for a good cause. Recently, the team connected with another composer, Casey McPherson, who also produces genetic music but in more modern styles and the founder of To Cure a Rose, a nonprofit organization focused on developing a cure for a rare genetic disease.

Sean Carroll, CalTech, John’s Hopkins, Santa Fe Institute

One of the great intellectual achievements of the twentieth century was the theory of quantum mechanics, according to which observational results can only be predicted probabilistically rather than with certainty. Yet, after decades in which the theory has been successfully used on an everyday basis, most physicists would agree that we still don’t truly understand what it means. Sean Carroll will discuss the source of this puzzlement, and explain why an increasing number of physicists are led to an apparently astonishing conclusion: that the world we experience is constantly branching into different versions, representing the different possible outcomes of quantum measurements. This could have important consequences for quantum gravity and the emergence of spacetime.

Sean Carroll is a research professor at CalTech, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at John’s Hopkins University, and Fractal Faculty at SFI. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, quantum gravity and spacetime, philosophy of science, and the evolution of entropy and complexity. He’s authored “Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime;” “The Big Picture;” “The Particle at the End of the Universe;” “From Eternity to Here;” and the textbook “Spacetime and Geometry.”

Scientists just created exotic new forms of matter that shouldn’t exist

A new quantum physics study reveals that simply changing a magnetic field over time can unlock entirely new forms of matter that don’t exist under normal conditions. By carefully “driving” materials with timed magnetic shifts, researchers created exotic quantum states that could be far more stable and resistant to errors—one of the biggest challenges in quantum computing. This breakthrough suggests that the future of quantum technology may depend not just on what materials are made of, but how they’re manipulated in time.

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