Toggle light / dark theme

In today’s AI news, this year coding might go from one of the most sought-after skills on the job market to one that can be fully automated. Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta and some of the biggest companies in the tech industry are already working toward this on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on Friday.

In other advancements, NovaSky, a team of researchers based out of UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, released Sky-T1-32B-Preview, a reasoning model that’s competitive with an earlier version of OpenAI’s o1. “Remarkably, Sky-T1-32B-Preview was trained for less than $450,” the team wrote in a blog post, “demonstrating that it is possible to replicate high-level reasoning capabilities affordably and efficiently.”

And, no company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. The world’s leading high-performance GPU maker has used its ballooning fortunes to significantly increase investments in all sorts of startups but particularly in AI startups.

Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer has green-lit a plan to use the immigration system to recruit a new wave of AI experts and loosen up data mining regulations to help Britain lead the world in the new technology. The recruitment of thousands of new AI experts by the government and private sector is part of a 50-point plan to transform Britain with the new technology.

In videos, newly deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, El Capitan — the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) first exascale supercomputer, is setting new benchmarks in computing power. At 2.79 exaFLOPs of peak performance El Capitan’s unprecedented capabilities are already impacting scientific computing and making the previously unimaginable a reality.

Then, François Chollet discusses the outcomes of the ARC-AGI (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) Prize competition in 2024, where accuracy rose from 33% to 55.5% on a private evaluation set. They explore two core solution paradigms—program synthesis (induction) and direct prediction (“transduction”)—and how successful solutions combine both.

And, in this entertaining and important talk, AI ethicist Nadia Lee shares the perils, pitfalls and opportunities that swirl around our emerging AI reality. Nadia Lee is an ethical AI advocate and the founder of ThatsMyFace, an AI company which detects key assets and people in malicious content for businesses.

Nanotechnology is moving from the realm of science fiction to reality, and in the process, these tiny technologies are offering giant opportunities.

Atch my exclusive video The Fermi Paradox: Air https://nebula.tv/videos/isaacarthur–
Get Nebula using my link for 40% off an annual subscription: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur.
Get a Lifetime Membership to Nebula for only $300: https://go.nebula.tv/lifetime?ref=isa
Use the link gift.nebula.tv/isaacarthur to give a year of Nebula to a friend for just $30.

Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net.
Join Nebula: https://go.nebula.tv/isaacarthur.
Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur.
Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a
Facebook Group: / 1583992725237264
Reddit: / isaacarthur.
Twitter: / isaac_a_arthur on Twitter and RT our future content.
SFIA Discord Server: / discord.

Credits:
Nanotechnology: The Future of Everything.
Episode 481a; January 12, 2025
Produced, Narrated \& Written: Isaac Arthur.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Stellardrone, \

Summary: Researchers have identified and mapped diverse cell types in the cochlear nucleus, the brainstem region responsible for processing sound. Using advanced molecular techniques, they uncovered distinct and newly identified cell types that process specific sound features, such as sharp noises or pitch changes.

These findings challenge existing ideas about hearing and pave the way for targeted treatments for auditory disorders. By creating a cellular and molecular atlas, scientists can now develop more precise therapies for conditions like hearing loss, advancing the field of personalized auditory medicine.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — We are anticipating a dry week ahead (not uncommon to have 1 or 2 weeks of dry weather before storms return) and we are nearly halfway through the rainy season.

Across the state, Northern California has seen flooding rains while Southern California has barely seen a drop of rain this winter.

We are doing quite well across much of the Bay Area. Majority of cities are above average/close to when it comes to rainfall. However, the South Bay is running significantly below average. This is due to the storm track favoring the North Bay (think flooding rains from weeks past).

Astronomers have identified two supermassive black holes, collectively known as PKS 2131-021, that are on the brink of a catastrophic collision. Located about 9 billion light-years from Earth, these black holes have been spiraling toward each other for 100 million years and now orbit one another every two years. The discovery, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, reveals a fascinating binary system that could help scientists understand how black holes form and merge.

PKS 2131-021 is a type of black hole known as a blazar, characterized by jets of supercharged plasma directed at Earth. These jets, which originate from the hot gas swirling around the black hole, travel at nearly the speed of light. When researchers observed the brightness of about 1,800 blazars across the universe, PKS 2131-021 stood out due to its regular fluctuations, akin to the ticking of a clock. This periodic dimming and brightening is believed to result from the gravitational influence of a second black hole in orbit.

To confirm this, scientists analyzed 45 years of data from five observatories. The findings matched predictions, confirming that the brightness variations were caused by a binary black hole system.