Lifeboat Foundation

Microsoft is said to be building an OpenAI competitor despite its multi-billion-dollar partnership with the firm — and according to at least one insider, it’s using GPT-4 data to do so.

First reported by The Information, the new large language model (LLM) is apparently called MAI-1, and an inside source told the website that Microsoft is using GPT-4 and public information from the web to train it out.

MAI-1 may also be trained on datasets from Inflection, the startup previously run by Google DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman before he joined Microsoft as the CEO of its AI department earlier this year. When it hired Suleyman, Microsoft also brought over most of Inflection’s staff and folded them into Microsoft AI.

Scientists in South Korea have developed a new technique for creating synthetic diamonds that works under ambient pressure.

A fusion reactor in southern France, called WEST, just achieved an important milestone that brings us one step closer to clean, sustainable, nearly limitless energy.

Scientists at New Jersey’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who collaborated on the project, announced today that the device created a super-hot material called a plasma that reached 90 million degrees Fahrenheit (50 million degrees Celsius) for 6 straight minutes.

The ultimate goal is to sustain a super-hot plasma for many hours, but 6 minutes is a new world record for a device like WEST. Other nuclear reactors similar to WEST have created hotter plasmas, but they haven’t lasted as long.

In a new paper published on May 1 in the journal Science Advances, researchers at Columbia Engineering used commercially available tabletop lasers to create tiny, atomically sharp nanostructures, or nanopatterns, in samples of a layered 2D material called hexagonal boron nitride (hBN).

Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and Princeton University have, for the first time, employed a tool often used in geology to detect the atomic fingerprints of cancer.

In this talk at Mindfest 2024, Hartmut Neven proposes that conscious moments are generated by the formation of quantum superpositions, challenging traditional views on the origins of consciousness. Please consider signing up for TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org.

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Here is a panel between David Chalmers and Scott Aaronson at Mindfest 2024. This discussion covers the philosophical implications of the simulation hypothesis, exploring whether our reality might be a simulation and engaging with various perspectives on the topic. This presentation was recorded at MindFest, held at Florida Atlantic University, CENTER FOR THE FUTURE MIND, spearheaded by Susan Schneider. YouTube: https://youtu.be/7PlmOXQ18jk Please consider signing up for TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org.

Support TOE: — Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) — Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE — PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE — TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch … see more.

Poirier M, Smith OE, Therrien J, et al. Resiliency of equid H19 imprint to somatic cell reprogramming by oocyte nuclear transfer and genetically induced pluripotency†. Biol Reprod. 2019;102:211–9.

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face_with_colon_three Year 2014

After decades of research, scientists are bioengineering penises in the lab, writes Dara Mohammadi.