This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 23)

AI Can Now Create a Replica of Your Personality
James O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review
“Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy. That’s now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.”

This AI Taught Itself to Do Surgery by Watching Videos—and It’s Ready to Operate on Humans
Jesus Diaz | Fast Company
“For the first time in history, Kim and his colleagues managed to teach an artificial intelligence to use a robotic surgery machine to perform precise surgical tasks by making it watch thousands of hours of actual procedures happening in real surgical theaters. …According to their recently published paper, the researchers say the AI managed to achieve a performance level comparable to human surgeons without prior explicit programming.”

New Fastest Supercomputer Will Simulate Nuke Testing
Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“El Capitan was announced yesterday at the SC Conference for supercomputing in Atlanta, Georgia, and it debuted at #1 in the newest Top500 list, a twice-yearly ranking of the world’s highest performing supercomputers. …[The supercomputer], housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., can perform over 2700 quadrillion operations per second at its peak. The previous record holder, Frontier, could do just over 2000 quadrillion peak operations per second.”

A Chinese Lab Has Released a ‘Reasoning’ AI Model to Rival OpenAI’s o1
Kyle Wiggers | TechCrunch
“On Wednesday, DeepSeek, an AI research company funded by quantitative traders, released a preview of DeepSeek-R1, which the firm claims is a reasoning model competitive with o1. …Similar to o1, DeepSeek-R1 reasons through tasks, planning ahead, and performing a series of actions that help the model arrive at an answer. This can take a while. Like o1, depending on the complexity of the question, DeepSeek-R1 might ‘think’ for tens of seconds before answering.”

AI Could Cause ‘Social Ruptures’ Between People Who Disagree on Its Sentience
Robert Booth | The Guardian
“Significant ‘social ruptures’ between people who think artificial intelligence systems are conscious and those who insist the technology feels nothing are looming, a leading philosopher has said. …Last week, a transatlantic group of academics predicted that the dawn of consciousness in AI systems is likely by 2035 and one has now said this could result in ‘subcultures that view each other as making huge mistakes’ about whether computer programs are owed similar welfare rights as humans or animals.”

Get in, Loser—We’re Chasing a Waymo Into the Future
Wired Staff | Wired
“To provide the most useful dispatch from the future…we realized we needed a way to make self-driving cars feel strange again. A way to scare up the less superficial lessons of our city’s years with Waymo. …Our idea: We’ll pile a few of us into an old-fashioned, human-piloted hired car, then follow a single Waymo robotaxi wherever it goes for a whole workday. We’ll study its movements, its relationship to life on the streets, its whole self-driving gestalt. We’ll interview as many of its passengers as will speak to us, and observe it through the eyes of the kind of human driver it’s designed to replace.”

Microsoft and Atom Computing Combine for Quantum Error Correction Demo
John Timmer | Ars Technica
“The two companies [released] a draft manuscript describing their work on error correction [this week]. The paper serves as both a good summary of where things currently stand in the world of error correction, as well as a good look at some of the distinct features of computation using neutral atoms.”

OpenAI Considers Taking on Google With Browser
Erin Woo, Sahil Patel, and Amir Efrati | The Information
“OpenAI is preparing to launch a frontal assault on Google. The ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser that it would combine with its chatbot, and it has separately discussed or struck deals to power search features for travel, food, real estate and retail websites, according to people who have seen prototypes or designs of the products.”

INTERNET

Bluesky Says It Won’t Screw Things Up
Steven Levy | Wired
“In little more than a week, its numbers soared from 14 million to 20 million and were growing at a pace of a million a day. …When I spoke this week to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, she was gratified by the new users. ‘It’s been a wild week,’ she says. But she noted that this spike was one of several over the past few months. Bluesky, she says, is in it for the long haul. The idea is not to recreate classic Twitter, she says, but to reshape social media on the principle of openness and user control.”

All Life on Earth Today Descended From a Single Cell. Meet LUCA.
Jonathan Lambert | Quanta
“The [new analysis] sketched a surprisingly complex picture(opens a new tab) of the cell. LUCA lived off hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, boasted a genome as large as that of some modern bacteria, and already had a rudimentary immune system, according to the study. Its genomic complexity, the authors argue, suggests that LUCA was one of many lineages — the rest now extinct—living about 4.2 billion years ago, a turbulent time relatively early in Earth’s history and long thought too harsh for life to flourish.”

Image Credit: bharath kumar on Unsplash