Lifeboat Foundation

The 2023 edition of the exclusive Longevity Investors Conference is fast approaching, bringing together investors, companies and researchers in Gstaad, Switzerland in September. One of the speakers at this year’s conference is scientist, writer and presenter Dr Andrew Steele, the author of the best-selling book Ageless: The new science of getting older without getting old. When it comes to his views on longevity, Steele sits firmly in the camp that aging, like cancer, is something that humanity should be focused on curing.

Longevity. Technology: Last year, Steele told us he was “absolutely convinced” curing aging is possible, but that significant questions remain around how quickly we can get there. As he prepares to speak to more than 100 investors at LIC, we caught up with Steele to see how his views on longevity have evolved, and what he would say to those considering investing in the field.

First and foremost, Steele, who recently published a new, free chapter of Ageless on the moral, ethical and social consequences of treating aging, believes that longevity represents a huge “human opportunity” for investors.

Science fiction often paints a terrifying picture of the future—think aliens decimating humanity, à la The War of the Worlds. But sometimes the future becoming the present can be pretty amazing—who doesn’t love successful space launches majestically catapulting humans skyward?

Or take Earth’s oceans, which are currently in the middle of a technological revolution that, outside of some very nerdy circles, has gone largely unnoticed.

“We’re at the cusp of a proliferation of lots of autonomous vehicles in the ocean,” said Alex De Robertis, a biologist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “Things that were science fiction not so long ago are kind of routine now.” That includes saildrones, which look like oversized orange surfboards, each with a hard, carbon-fiber sail (called a wing) and a stash of scientific equipment.

Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11–12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Learn More

For Star Trek fans and tech nerds, the holodeck concept is a form of geek grail. The idea is an entirely realistic simulated environment where just speaking the request (prompt) seemingly brings to life an immersive environment populated by role-playing AI-powered digital humans. As several Star Trek series envisioned, a multitude of scenes and narratives could be created, from New Orleans jazz clubs to private eye capers. Not only did this imagine an exciting future for technology, but it also delved into philosophical questions such as the humanity of digital beings.

Continue reading “How ChatGPT and generative AI could bring the Star Trek holodeck to life” »

Launching today, AItopia will explore AI’s impact on design, architecture and humanity both today and in the future. Dezeen features editor Nat Barker introduces the series.

The future has arrived. Having been depicted countless times in sci-fi literature and cinema over the decades, machines that can think for themselves are becoming a reality.

Artificial intelligence (AI) – that is, computers or contraptions performing tasks that would usually require a human brain – is a concept that has captured the shared imagination in some form since ancient times. But it was the British polymath Alan Turing who first seriously addressed the matter in his seminal 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” Turing wrote.

Open-source AI can be defined as software engineers collaborating on various artificial intelligence projects that are open to the public to develop. The goal is to better integrate computing with humanity. In early March, the open source community got their hands on Meta’s LLaMA which was leaked to the public. In barely a month, there are very innovative OpenSource AI model variants with instruction tuning, quantization, quality improvements, human evals, multimodality, RLHF, etc.

Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that even market leaders are struggling with. One open-source solution, Vicuna, is an… More.

This article explores AI in the context of open-sourced alternatives and highlights market dynamics in play.

Continue reading “Is OpenSource AI Threatening The Tech Titans?” »

A video worth watching. An amazingly detailed deep dive into Sam Altman’s interviews and a high-level look at AI LLMs.

Missed by much of the media, Sam Altman (and co) have revealed at least 16 surprising things over his World Tour. From AI’s designing AIs to ‘unstoppable opensource’, the ‘customisation’ leak (with a new 16k ChatGPT and ‘steerable GPT 4), AI and religion, and possible regrets over having ‘pushed the button’.

Continue reading “Sam Altman’s World Tour, in 16 Moments” »

He hasn’t even made it to Mars yet, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s wandering eye is already on a new planet — this one completely outside our star system.

Over the weekend, Musk seemed to ideate on the prospect of visiting the relatively nearby Promixa Centauri B, an exoplanet that sits a little over four light-years away in Alpha Centauri, the star system that James Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise is based on. First discovered back in 2016, Proxima B is believed to be particularly viable as a potentially life-supporting world, and it looks like Musk is paying attention.

“Practically next door,” the Twitter owner tweeted on Sunday, in response to a tweet featuring a Space Academy blog post about the tantalizing planet.

The transition to renewable energy, critical for the world’s future, is limited today by energy storage and transmission challenges. Beaming solar power from space is an elegant solution that […] promises a remarkable payoff for humanity: a world powered by uninterruptible renewable energy.

The California Institute of Technology reports the first successful beaming of solar energy from space down to a receiver on the ground, via the MAPLE instrument on its SSPD-1 spacecraft.

Continue reading “First ever beaming of orbital solar power” »

Poems, essays and even books—is there anything the open AI platform ChatGPT can’t handle? These new AI developments have inspired researchers at TU Delft and the Swiss technical university EPFL to dig a little deeper: For instance, can ChatGPT also design a robot? And is this a good thing for the design process, or are there risks? The researchers published their findings in Nature Machine Intelligence.

What are the greatest future challenges for humanity? This was the first question that Cosimo Della Santina, assistant professor, and Ph.D. student Francesco Stella, both from TU Delft, and Josie Hughes from EPFL, asked ChatGPT.

“We wanted ChatGPT to design not just a robot, but one that is actually useful,” says Della Santina. In the end, they chose food supply as their challenge, and as they chatted with ChatGPT, they came up with the idea of creating a tomato-harvesting robot.