Artificial Intelligence
China’s Moonshot AI Releases Model to Challenge Top US SystemsTracy Qu and Raffaele Huang | The Wall Street Journal ($)
“Moonshot said Friday that it planned to fully open-source the model, called Kimi K3, by late this month, where people will be generally free to download and adapt. With 2.8 trillion parameters dictating its decision-making, Kimi K3 is the world’s biggest open-source model, according to the Beijing-based startup.”
Robotics
The Fight Over Humanoid Robots Has Shut Down a Car Factory for the First TimeJiyoung Sohn | The Wall Street Journal ($)
“The union’s response [to Hyundai’s new Atlas robot] was blunt: Atlas would never step onto a production line without workers agreeing first. This week, Hyundai’s auto workers in South Korea have gone on a partial strike. It is the car industry’s first factory stoppage addressing humanoid robots.”
Computing
Psiquantum Has a Plan to Make a Massive Quantum Computer Out of LightJames O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review ($)
“PsiQuantum has attracted unusual investment and scrutiny for two reasons: It is one of the few companies aiming directly at building a large and useful machine, and it is already working with a major chip manufacturer to build its systems using existing semiconductor fabs.”
Tech
Generative AI Is an Engineering DisasterAlex Reisner | The Atlantic ($)
“I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even outside the world of software, it’s hard to find a comparable example, given that economy of scale is the principle that has made light bulbs, cars, and clothing so affordable. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.”
Space
How Hard Is It to Build Orbital Data Centers, Actually?Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“You need unprecedented heavy lift: reusable and rapid launch. You need the ability to manufacture the largest satellites humans have ever built and to build 100 times more of them than humans ever have for a single constellation. You have to hope that radiation’s impacts on chips are manageable and that radiational cooling scales. You also need a few trillion bucks.”
Future
Once Again We Are Told AI May Be Conscious—I Study Consciousness, and I Have My DoubtsAnil Seth | The Guardian
“The information processing unfolding inside Claude is no more likely to result in consciousness than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a real hurricane. AI systems are getting more powerful every day. But to give ourselves the best chance of navigating this new world, we should remember how different we are from our almost-magical creations. When we sell our minds too cheaply to our machines, we not only overestimate them, we underestimate ourselves.”
Biotechnology
AI Teaches a Bitter Biology LessonReed Albergotti | Semafor
“Future discoveries and therapies will come not from a human-like understanding of science, but by simple pattern recognition of new biological information at scale. …[Richard] Sutton’s bitter lesson is applicable to biology because so much of the human body—not just the mind—is still beyond our understanding. And we’ll find the way forward by industrializing trial-and-error experimentation until the breakthroughs materialize.”
Future
Want Experts in 10 Years? Keep AI Away From Your Beginners TodayLaëtitia Vitaud | Fast Company
“A Nordic public school system and a 300-person American law firm aren’t pursuing the same goals. But they arrived at the same conclusion: Beginners must first learn without assistance in order to be, later on, well assisted.”
Space
Astronomers Find an Atmosphere on a Nearby Earthlike PlanetKatrina Miller | The New York Times ($)
“New data collected by the astronomers strongly suggests that LHS 1140b has a helium-rich atmosphere. The detection, published in the journal Science, is the first clear evidence of a potentially habitable planet with an atmosphere, and it reinforces the idea that there exists a population of worlds similar to our own with the properties necessary to sustain life.”
Future
The Big Reason Einstein Would Never Have Used AIEthan Siegel | Big Think
“Irrespective of whether AI counts as actual ‘intelligence’ or not, the fact is that outsourcing the growth and refinement of your critical thinking skills means you not only don’t develop those skills yourself, the ones you already have begin to decay. …This is where humans are needed most. Einstein was uncompromising about humans developing those exact skills.”
Artificial Intelligence
Simulating Everything, Sort Of: The Promise and Limits of World ModelsSamuel Axon | Ars Technica
“Instead of or in addition to working with language, world models aim to lay the groundwork for AI systems that are capable of simulating the physical world, or at least a useful approximation of it. To examine what’s different and important about this idea, Ars spoke with three expert practitioners working on world models and related technologies.”
Artificial Intelligence
Meet GPT-Red: An LLM Super-Hacker OpenAI Built to Make Its Models SaferWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review ($)
“GPT-Red automates a type of safety evaluation for software systems known as red-teaming, which is typically done by a team of human testers. The aim is to find as many different ways to break or hijack a system as possible. The weak spots can then be patched before the final version of the software is released.”
