Every Saturday we post a selection of our favorite science and technology articles from the week. With 2024 nearing its end, we dug through all those posts again to surface 25 stories worth revisiting. Here you’ll find meditations on AI’s evolution, a ChatGPT moment in robotics, first contact with whale civilization, the inaugural jet suit grand prix, and five sci-fi visions from the year 2149—among many more worth your time.
Happy reading. See you in 2025!
The GPT Era Is Already Ending
Matteo Wong | The Atlantic
“[OpenAI] has been unusually direct that the o1 series is the future: Chen, who has since been promoted to senior vice president of research, told me that OpenAI is now focused on this ‘new paradigm,’ and Altman later wrote that the company is prioritizing’ o1 and its successors. The company believes, or wants its users and investors to believe, that it has found some fresh magic. The GPT era is giving way to the reasoning era.”
Falcon 9 Reaches a Flight Rate 30 Times Higher Than Shuttle at 1/100th the Cost
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“Space enthusiast Ryan Caton also crunched the numbers on the number of SpaceX launches this year compared to some of its competitors. So far this year, SpaceX has launched as many rockets as Roscosmos has since 2013, United Launch Alliance since 2010, and Arianespace since 2009. This year alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more times than the Ariane 4, Ariane 5, or Atlas V rockets each did during their entire careers.”
Google’s New Project Astra Could Be Generative AI’s Killer App
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
“Last week I was taken through an unmarked door on an upper floor of a building in London’s King’s Cross district into a room with strong secret-project vibes. The word ‘ASTRA’ was emblazoned in giant letters across one wall. …’The pitch to my mum is that we’re building an AI that has eyes, ears, and a voice. It can be anywhere with you, and it can help you with anything you’re doing,’ says Greg Wayne, co-lead of the Astra team. ‘It’s not there yet, but that’s the kind of vision.’”
Is Robotics About to Have Its Own ChatGPT Moment?
Melissa Heikkilä | MIT Technology Review
“For decades, roboticists have more or less focused on controlling robots’ ‘bodies’—their arms, legs, levers, wheels, and the like—via purpose-driven software. But a new generation of scientists and inventors believes that the previously missing ingredient of AI can give robots the ability to learn new skills and adapt to new environments faster than ever before. This new approach, just maybe, can finally bring robots out of the factory and into our homes.”
Cheap Solar Panels Are Changing the World
Zoë Schlanger | The Atlantic
“‘In a single year, in a single technology, we’re providing as much new electricity as the entirety of global growth the year before,’ Kingsmill Bond, a senior energy strategist at RMI, a clean-energy nonprofit, told me. A decade or two ago, analysts ‘did not imagine in their wildest dreams that solar by the middle of the 2020s would already be supplying all of the growth of global electricity demand,’ he said. Yet here we are.”
The Race for the Next Ozempic
Emily Mullin | Wired
“These drugs are now wildly popular, in shortage as a result, and hugely profitable for the companies making them. Their success has sparked a frenzy among pharmaceutical companies looking for the next blockbuster weight-loss drug. Researchers are now racing to develop new anti-obesity medications that are more effective, more convenient, or produce fewer side effects than the ones currently on the market.”
SpaceX Catches Returning Rocket in Mid-Air, Turning a Fanciful Idea Into Reality
Stephen Clark | Ars Technica
“This achievement is the first of its kind, and it’s crucial for SpaceX’s vision of rapidly reusing the Starship rocket, enabling human expeditions to the moon and Mars, routine access to space for mind-bogglingly massive payloads, and novel capabilities that no other company—or country—seems close to attaining.”
Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! pic.twitter.com/6R5YatSVJX
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 13, 2024
Silicon Valley’s Trillion-Dollar Leap of Faith
Matteo Wong | The Atlantic
“These companies have decided that the best way to make generative AI better is to build bigger AI models. And that is really, really expensive, requiring resources on the scale of moon missions and the interstate-highway system to fund the data centers and related infrastructure that generative AI depends on. …Now a number of voices in the finance world are beginning to ask whether all of this investment can pay off.”
Apple Vision Pro Review: Magic, Until It’s Not
Nilay Patel | The Verge
“The Vision Pro is an astounding product. It’s the sort of first-generation device only Apple can really make, from the incredible display and passthrough engineering, to the use of the whole ecosystem to make it so seamlessly useful, to even getting everyone to pretty much ignore the whole external battery situation. …But the shocking thing is that Apple may have inadvertently revealed that some of these core ideas are actually dead ends—that they can’t ever be executed well enough to become mainstream.”
Hands On With Orion, Meta’s First Pair of AR Glasses
Alex Heath | The Verge
“They look almost like a normal pair of glasses. That’s the first thing I notice as I walk into a conference room at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The black Clark Kent-esque frames sitting on the table in front of me look unassuming, but they represent CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar bet on the computers that come after smartphones. They’re called Orion, and they’re Meta’s first pair of augmented reality glasses.”
People Are Worried That AI Will Take Everyone’s Jobs. We’ve Been Here Before.
David Rotman | MIT Technology Review
“[Karl T. Compton’s 1938] essay concisely framed the debate over jobs and technical progress in a way that remains relevant, especially given today’s fears over the impact of artificial intelligence. …While today’s technologies certainly look very different from those of the 1930s, Compton’s article is a worthwhile reminder that worries over the future of jobs are not new and are best addressed by applying an understanding of economics, rather than conjuring up genies and monsters.”
How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold
Ross Andersen | The Atlantic
“One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. …Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the sounds’ meaning using neural networks. I was immediately intrigued. For years, I had been toiling away on a book about the search for cosmic civilizations with whom we might communicate. This one was right here on Earth.”
8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story
Steven Levy | Wired
“They met by chance, got hooked on an idea, and wrote the ‘Transformers’ paper—the most consequential tech breakthrough in recent history. …Approaching its seventh anniversary, the ‘Attention’ paper has attained legendary status. The authors started with a thriving and improving technology—a variety of AI called neural networks—and made it into something else: a digital system so powerful that its output can feel like the product of an alien intelligence.”
The Best Qubits for Quantum Computing Might Just Be Atoms
Philip Ball | Quanta
“In the search for the most scalable hardware to use for quantum computers, qubits made of individual atoms are having a breakout moment. …’We believe we can pack tens or even hundreds of thousands in a centimeter-scale device,’ [Mark Saffman, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin] said.”
Why AI Could Eat Quantum Computing’s Lunch
Edd Gent | MIT Technology Review
“The scale and complexity of quantum systems that can be simulated using AI is advancing rapidly, says Giuseppe Carleo, a professor of computational physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). …Given the pace of recent advances, a growing number of researchers are now asking whether AI could solve a substantial chunk of the most interesting problems in chemistry and materials science before large-scale quantum computers become a reality.”
The Very First Jet Suit Grand Prix Takes Off in Dubai
Mike Hanlon | New Atlas
“A new sport kicked away this month when the first ever jet-suit race was held in Dubai. Each racer wore an array of seven 130-hp jet engines (two on each arm and three in the backpack for a total 1,050 hp) that are controlled by hand-throttles. After that, the pilots use the three thrust vectors to gain lift, move forward and try to stay above ground level while negotiating the course…faster than anyone else.“
What If Your AI Girlfriend Hated You?
Kate Knibbs | Wired
“It seems as though we’ve arrived at the moment in the AI hype cycle where no idea is too bonkers to launch. This week’s eyebrow-raising AI project is a new twist on the romantic chatbot—a mobile app called AngryGF, which offers its users the uniquely unpleasant experience of getting yelled at via messages from a fake person.”
Pocket-Sized AI Models Could Unlock a New Era of Computing
Will Knight | Wired
“When ChatGPT was released in November 2023, it could only be accessed through the cloud because the model behind it was downright enormous. Today I am running a similarly capable AI program on a Macbook Air, and it isn’t even warm. The shrinkage shows how rapidly researchers are refining AI models to make them leaner and more efficient. It also shows how going to ever larger scales isn’t the only way to make machines significantly smarter.”
On Self-Driving, Waymo Is Playing Chess While Tesla Plays Checkers
Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica
“Many Tesla fans see [limitations like remote operators and avoiding freeways] as signs that Waymo is headed for a technological dead end. …But I predict that when Tesla begins its driverless transition, it will realize that safety requires a Waymo-style incremental rollout. So Tesla hasn’t found a different, better way to bring driverless technology to market. Waymo is just so far ahead that it’s dealing with challenges Tesla hasn’t even started thinking about. Waymo is playing chess while Tesla is still playing checkers.”
World’s ‘Largest Solar Precinct’ Approved by Australian Government
Keiran Smith | Associated Press
“Australian company Sun Cable plans to build a 12,400-hectare solar farm and transport electricity to the northern Australian city of Darwin via an 800-kilometer (497-mile) overhead transmission line, then on to large-scale industrial customers in Singapore through a 4,300-kilometer (2,672-mile) submarine cable. The Australia-Asia PowerLink project aims to deliver up to six gigawatts of green electricity each year.”
The Year Is 2149 and…
Sean Michaels | MIT Technology Review
“Novelist Sean Michaels envisions what life will look like 125 years from now: ‘The year is 2149 and people mostly live their lives “on rails.” That’s what they call it, “on rails,” which is to live according to the meticulous instructions of software. Software knows most things about you—what causes you anxiety, what raises your endorphin levels, everything you’ve ever searched for, everywhere you’ve been. Software sends messages on your behalf; it listens in on conversations. ‘”
Geothermal Energy Could Outperform Nuclear Power
Editorial Staff | The Economist
“How big could EGS [or enhanced geothermal systems] get? Big enough. Though DOE analyses suggest only around 40GW of conventional geothermal resource exist in America, new techniques expand the theoretical potential to a whopping 5,500GW across much of the country, with strong potential in over half of states. The heat is definitely on.”
Hidden ‘BopSpotter’ Microphone Is Constantly Surveilling San Francisco for Good Music
Jason Koebler | 404 Media
“Bop Spotter is a project by technologist Riley Walz in which he has hidden an Android phone in a box on a pole, rigged it to be solar powered, and has set it to record audio and periodically sends it to Shazam’s API to determine which songs people are playing in public. Walz describes it as ShotSpotter, but for music. ‘This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it’s not about catching criminals,’ Walz’s website reads. ‘It’s about catching vibes.’”
Two Students Created Face Recognition Glasses. It Wasn’t Hard.
Kashmir Hill | The New York Times
“Mr. Nguyen and a fellow Harvard student, Caine Ardayfio, had built glasses used for identifying strangers in real time, and had demonstrated them on two ‘real people’ at the subway station, including Mr. Hoda, whose name was incorrectly transcribed in the video captions as ‘Vishit.’ Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Ardayfio, who are both 21 and studying engineering, said in an interview that their system relied on widely available technologies.”
Electric Cars Could Last Much Longer Than You Think
James Morris | Wired
“Rather than having a shorter lifespan than internal combustion engines, EV batteries are lasting way longer than expected, surprising even the automakers themselves. …A 10-year-old EV could be almost as good as new, and a 20-year-old one still very usable. That could be yet another disruption to an automotive industry that relies on cars mostly heading to the junkyard after 15 years.”
Image Credit: SpaceX