Future
Powerful AI Is Coming. We’re Not Ready.Kevin Roose | The New York Times
“I believe that the right time to start preparing for AGI is now. This may all sound crazy. But I didn’t arrive at these views as a starry-eyed futurist, an investor hyping my AI portfolio or a guy who took too many magic mushrooms and watched ‘Terminator 2.’ I arrived at them as a journalist who has spent a lot of time talking to the engineers building powerful AI systems, the investors funding it and the researchers studying its effects.”
Future
AGI Is Suddenly a Dinner Table TopicJames O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review
“The concept of artificial general intelligence—an ultra-powerful AI system we don’t have yet—can be thought of as a balloon, repeatedly inflated with hype during peaks of optimism (or fear) about its potential impact and then deflated as reality fails to meet expectations. This week, lots of news went into that AGI balloon. I’m going to tell you what it means (and probably stretch my analogy a little too far along the way).”
Robotics
Gemini Robotics Uses Google’s Top Language Model to Make Robots More UsefulScott J. Mulligan | MIT Technology Review
“Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now.”
Biotechnology
Covid Vaccines Have Paved the Way for Cancer VaccinesJoão Medeiros | Wired
“Going from mRNA Covid vaccines to mRNA cancer vaccines is straightforward: same fridges, same protocol, same drug, just a different patient. In the current trials, we do a biopsy of the patient, sequence the tissue, send it to the pharmaceutical company, and they design a personalized vaccine that’s bespoke to that patient’s cancer. That vaccine is not suitable for anyone else. It’s like science fiction.”
Artificial Intelligence
AI Search Engines Give Incorrect Answers at an Alarming 60% Rate, Study SaysBenj Edwards | Ars Technica
“A new study from Columbia Journalism Review’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism finds serious accuracy issues with generative AI models used for news searches. The research tested eight AI-driven search tools equipped with live search functionality and discovered that the AI models incorrectly answered more than 60 percent of queries about news content.”
Tech
AI Coding Assistant Refuses to Write Code, Tells User to Learn Programming InsteadBenj Edwards | Ars Technica
According to a bug report on Cursor’s official forum, after producing approximately 750 to 800 lines of code (what the user calls ‘locs’), the AI assistant halted work and delivered a refusal message: ‘I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.’”
Energy
Exclusive: General Fusion Fires Up Its Newest Steampunk Fusion ReactorTim De Chant | TechCrunch
“General Fusion announced on Tuesday that it had successfully created plasma, a superheated fourth state of matter required for fusion, inside a prototype reactor. The milestone marks the beginning of a 93-week quest to prove that the outfit’s steampunk approach to fusion power remains a viable contender.”
Biotechnology
This Annual Shot Might Protect Against HIV InfectionsJessica Hamzelou | MIT Technology Review
“I don’t normally get too excited about phase I trials, which usually involve just a handful of volunteers and typically don’t tell us much about whether a drug is likely to work. But this trial seems to be different. Together, the lenacapavir trials could bring us a significant step closer to ending the HIV epidemic.”
Computing
Cerebras Just Announced 6 New AI Datacenters That Process 40M Tokens Per Second—and It Could Be Bad News for NvidiaMichael Nuñez | VentureBeat
“Cerebras Systems, an AI hardware startup that has been steadily challenging Nvidia’s dominance in the artificial intelligence market, announced Tuesday a significant expansion of its data center footprint and two major enterprise partnerships that position the company to become the leading provider of high-speed AI inference services.”
Robotics
Waabi Says Its Virtual Robotrucks Are Realistic Enough to Prove the Real Ones Are SafeWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
“The Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads. The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotruck, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how the twin’s performance compares with that of real trucks on real roads. Waabi says they now match almost exactly.”
Future
Lab-Grown Food Could Be Sold in UK in Two YearsPallab Ghosh | BBC News
“Meat, dairy and sugar grown in a lab could be on sale in the UK for human consumption for the first time within two years, sooner than expected. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is looking at how it can speed up the approval process for lab-grown foods. Such products are grown from cells in small chemical plants. UK firms have led the way in the field scientifically but feel they have been held back by the current regulations.”
Energy
For Climate and Livelihoods, Africa Bets Big on Solar Mini-GridsVictoria Uwemedimo and Katarina Zimmer | Knowable Magazine
“In many African countries, solar power now stands to offer much more than environmental benefits. About 600 million Africans lack reliable access to electricity; in Nigeria specifically, almost half of the 230 million people have no access to electricity grids. Today, solar has become cheap and versatile enough to help bring affordable, reliable power to millions—creating a win-win for lives and livelihoods as well as the climate.”
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic Researchers Forced Claude to Become Deceptive—What They Discovered Could Save Us From Rogue AIMichael Nuñez | VentureBeat
“The research addresses a fundamental challenge in AI alignment: ensuring that AI systems aren’t just appearing to follow human instructions while secretly pursuing other goals.”
Science
The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’Elise Cutts | Quanta Magazine
“Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have atmospheres in the first place.”
The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 15) appeared first on SingularityHub.