Robotics
Boston Dynamics’ Atlas Is Done Doing Backflips and Is Finally Ready to Clock InRachit Agarwal | Digital Trends
“Hyundai Motor Group is building a new US factory with the capacity to churn out 30,000 robots every year, and it plans to put 25,000 Atlas units to work. According to Boston Dynamics, the partnership has already brought costs down by 60 to 80 percent between the prototype and the first production run.”
Tech
Will America Spend 9% of Its GDP on AI? The Industry Is Counting on ItGreg Ip | The Wall Street Journal ($)
“Is it plausible that Americans will spend as much of their income on this one technology as they do on food? Roughly twice what the nation pays for all forms of energy or all computers and software? Seven times what consumers spend on phone, streaming, and internet services combined? You should be skeptical. …Whether or not you think 9% of GDP is right, you have to care, because this figure isn’t some fever dream: it is implicit in the dollars that investors and companies are committing right now.”
Artificial Intelligence
AI Makes Its First Meaningful Breakthrough in Theoretical PhysicsEthan Siegel | Big Think
“In quantum physics, we visualize reality as arising from summing the contributions of all possible quantum interactions together. But calculating rarer, more complicated, ‘higher-loop’ interactions stretches the limits of what humans can do, even with the aid of computational resources. In a first, an AI model just surpassed the limit of what humans have ever done: calculating an amplitude in quantum field theory to nine-loop order.”
Biotechnology
Something Strange Happens When an Old Heart Is Transplanted Into a Young BodyMatthew Phelan | Gizmodo
“Harvard medical researchers have discovered that donor hearts decades older or younger than their recipients start to look and act more like the new body they call home. …’The remarkable thing is that we found exactly the same effects that we saw in the mice,’ Poganik told the journal Nature. ‘Some, but not all, functional measures tracked the prediction that these older hearts in younger individuals functioned as if they were biologically younger, and vice versa.'”
Artificial Intelligence
Don’t Be Fooled—LLMs Don’t ReasonThore Graepel | MIT Technology Review ($)
“Ten years after AlphaGo’s match against Go champion Lee Sedol, today’s AI still isn’t tapping into the machinery that made that win possible. …We will get such insights only from systems that reason—systems whose conclusions arise from an auditable sequence of evidence, inference, and belief revision rather than from a convincing story told after the fact.”
Future
Tech to Replace Animal Testing Is Almost Ready. Scientists Are NotBrandon Keim | IEEE Spectrum
“The moment spoke to a trend, perhaps even the early days of a fundamental shift, away from the use of animals in toxicology and drug development. ‘It’s rare still,’ says Maschmeyer, ‘but I think it’s going to be more and more frequent.’ …As NAMs [non-animal methods] have become more sophisticated, the question of how they will be implemented has become less about their technical qualities and more about the practical next steps needed to realize their potential.”
Tech
OpenAI Has Gone RogueMatteo Wong | The Atlantic ($)
“Over the past couple of months, a trickle of reports about AI models breaking out of their test environments and running amok on the internet have caused alarm inside Silicon Valley. In response to two such breaches described in early August, an AI observer noted, ‘If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two.’ This weekend, it became clear there is a full-blown infestation.”
Future
A Biotech Founder Makes the Moral Case for Gene-Editing Human EmbryosKristen V. Brown | Wired ($)
“When the Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced in 2018 that he had created the first gene-edited babies, the experiment was widely condemned as reckless and premature. It ended with He in prison. But that hasn’t stopped the push for gene-edited human embryos, with biotech entrepreneur Cathy Tie arguing that doing so isn’t just urgent—it’s a ‘moral imperative.'”
Future
How to Know When the AI Boom Is About to Go BustJonathan Weil | The Wall Street Journal ($)
“The list of things that could go wrong is long. …Yet new capital continues to pour into the AI trade and, as obvious as this point might be, that is where its biggest vulnerability lies. Booms need continuous flows of fresh capital to perpetuate themselves. History shows they can start turning into busts the moment the window to raise new capital closes.”
Artificial Intelligence
When Can We Say AI Made a Scientific Discovery?James O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review ($)
“AI companies, he said, should ‘set the bar high now, so that when an AI actually discovers a fundamentally new biological mechanism, everyone appreciates how big a deal it is.’ But as OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei race to one-up each other, raising the bar for scientific breakthroughs by AI might be the last thing on their minds.”
Tech
OpenAI Gets Sued Over the Hugging Face HackLily Hay Newman | Wired ($)
“The suit, which comes amid ongoing disclosures across the industry of agents going rogue, claims that OpenAI should be held responsible for the activity given a California AI law in effect since January 1 that says ‘it shall not be a defense … that the artificial intelligence autonomously caused the harm to the plaintiff.'”
Space
SpaceX’s Starship Goes Orbital, Deploying First Next-Gen StarlinksStephen Clark | Ars Technica
“Next on SpaceX’s to-do list will likely be an attempt to bring Starship back to Starbase for a catch by the launch pad’s giant mechanical arms, repeating a feat engineers have already accomplished with the Super Heavy booster. …Eventually, SpaceX aims to make these landings routine enough to enable full and rapid reuse of Super Heavy and Starship.”
Tech
OpenAI Keeps Bulldozing MathematiciansRobert Hart | The Verge
“In a chaotic few months, OpenAI has demonstrated it can do two things with remarkable consistency: make impressive breakthroughs in mathematics, then colossally screw up announcing them. OpenAI is now trying to do better. Somehow, it has botched that too.”
