Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI Is Throwing Everything Into Building a Fully Automated ResearcherWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)
“The San Francisco firm has set its sights on building what it calls an AI researcher, a fully automated agent-based system that will be able to go off and tackle large, complex problems by itself. OpenAI says that the new goal will be its ‘North Star’ for the next few years, pulling together multiple research strands, including work on reasoning models, agents, and interpretability.”
Robotics
Humanoid Robot Gets Surprisingly Good at TennisLoz Blain | New Atlas
“This ain’t teleoperation. Chinese researchers have tested a new, much quicker and easier method of teaching robots to play tennis, and the results look like a breakthrough in machine learning and real-world AI.”
Computing
This Is Not a Fly Uploaded to a ComputerRobert Hart | The Verge
“Aran Nayebi, a professor of machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said that the group was ‘not even close’ to capturing the full brain of the fly, showing connections between cells but not crucial details like neurotransmitters or how strong the connections between different nerve cells are. The motor system isn’t a ‘true upload’ either, he said. ‘We are not even faithfully simulating its brain in silico.'”
Energy
This May Be the World’s First Quantum BatteryGayoung Lee | Gizmodo
“Researchers finally believe they’ve found the right blueprint for scalable quantum batteries, publishing their findings in a recent study in Light: Science & Applications. ‘My ultimate ambition is a future where we can charge electric cars much faster than [fueling] petrol cars or charge devices over long distances wirelessly,’ James Quach, the study’s senior author and a researcher at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, said in a statement.”
Future
My Tesla Was Driving Itself Perfectly—Until It CrashedRaffi Krikorian | The Atlantic ($)
“The problem is bigger than one company’s self-driving system. It’s about how we’re building every AI system, every algorithm, every tool that asks for our trust and trains us to give it. The pattern is everywhere: Condition people to rely on the system. Erode their vigilance. Then, when something breaks, point to the terms of service and blame them for not paying attention.”
Space
A Private Space Company Has a Radical New Plan to Bag an AsteroidEric Berger | Ars Technica
“[TransAstra CEO Joel Sercel] envisions aggregating dozens, and then hundreds, of small asteroids at the ‘New Moon’ processing facility, which could potentially be located at the Earth-Sun L2 point, about 1.5 million km from Earth. Such asteroids could provide water for use as propellant and minerals for everything from solar panels to radiation shielding.”
Artificial Intelligence
Val Kilmer Set to Be Be Resurrected With AI for New FilmOwen Myers | The Guardian
“The film-maker is working in conjunction with the late actor’s estate and his daughter, Mercedes, to bring Kilmer back to life with state-of-the-art, generative AI. …The AI-generated version of Kilmer will appear in a ‘significant’ portion of the film, says Voorhees. The film will use images of the actor taken throughout his life to re-create Kilmer through the decades.”
Future
Online Bot Traffic Will Exceed Human Traffic by 2027, Cloudflare CEO SaysSarah Perez | TechCrunch
“‘If a human were doing a task let’s say you were shopping for a digital camera—and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that’s doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit,’ Prince said. “So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that’s real traffic, and that’s real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account.”
Computing
World ID Wants You to Put a Cryptographically Unique Human Identity Behind Your AI AgentsKyle Orland | Ars Technica
“World now claims nearly 18 million unique humans have verified their identities on one of nearly 1,000 physical orbs around the world. Now, with Agent Kit, World wants to let those users tie their confirmed identity to any AI agent, letting it work on their behalf across the internet in a way other parties can trust.”
Space
New NASA Chief Aiming for Moon Landings Every Month in 2027Passant Rabie | Gizmodo
“The regular missions will be geared toward building a lunar base on the moon’s surface, which will act as a laboratory for astronauts to develop ways to live beyond Earth’s orbit. ‘If you’re building a moon base and you’re going there to stay, you’re gonna need lots of missions to and from the moon,’ Isaacman [told SpaceFlight Now in an interview].”
Space
Jeff Bezos Wants to Save Earth With This Freaky-Looking ProbePassant Rabie | GIzmodo
“The mission would be equipped with different techniques for mitigating the asteroid threat, including directing a powerful ion beam (a concentrated stream of charged particles) at the object to change its orbit. …[If that doesn’t work, then like the spacecraft in NASA’s DART mission], NEO Hunter can aim for a direct kinetic impact by ramming into the asteroid at high speed to redirect it from its Earth-bound trajectory.”
