Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI’s New ChatGPT Agent Tries to Do It AllReece Rogers | Wired
“An agent, in this context, refers to an AI tool that is able to—or at least attempts to—navigate third-party software and websites and make decisions on its journey to complete digital tasks, following an initial set of instructions from the user. ‘Agent’ is the buzziest of buzzwords right now for companies looking to sell generative AI tools, especially those with an eye on enterprise customers.”
Robotics
Chinese Robotaxis Are Gunning for Global DominationTony Peng | IEEE Spectrum
“The measure of robotaxi success isn’t flashy demos or tech-day reveals—it’s large-scale, commercial, fully autonomous public service. By that standard, Tesla remains far behind. Globally, only Alphabet’s Waymo and a handful of Chinese firms have overcome this barrier.”
Artificial Intelligence
Where Are All the AI Drugs?Veronique Greenwood | Wired
“What’s special about this molecule, Ray says, isn’t just that it has survived the gauntlet thus far. It’s that REC-3565 ‘wouldn’t have come by human design.’ Ray’s team, he believes, would not have made the logical leaps required to reach this point without using artificial intelligence. As the world’s pharma giants get caught up on AI, Recursion is among a group of startups betting everything on the technology.”
A Solar System Internet? Space Laser Test Moves Us CloserPassant Rabie | Gizmodo
“Scientists at the European Space Agency used a laser to communicate with a spacecraft 165 million miles (265 million kilometers) away in deep space for the first time, marking a major step forward in their efforts to build optical communication systems for future missions to the moon and beyond.”
Future
A Flying Taxi Finally Nears Takeoff With an Unlikely Boost From ToyotaSteve LeVine | The Information
“We all grew up with wide-eyed ideas of flying cars—you know, one day zipping around town like the Jetsons. Their failure to materialize so disappointed investor Peter Thiel that he quipped: ‘We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.’ You’re free not to believe him, but JoeBen Bevirt is here to tell you we are now close—very close—to having flying cars.”
Robotics
Uber to Invest Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Lucid and Nuro in Massive Robotaxi DealAndrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“Uber’s decision to pour hundreds of millions of dollars in both companies underscores its desire to become a clearinghouse for both electric and autonomous vehicles of all stripes. The ridehail company has said it wants to use its size and scale to aid in the proliferation of autonomous vehicles across the world.”
Energy
The US Is Testing Tiny Nuclear Reactors That Can Go Practically AnywhereGayoung Lee | Gizmodo
“[Upcoming] experiments, featuring two trailer-sized microreactors, will be ‘the first of their kind in the world’ and will assist in meeting ‘the nation’s demand for more abundant, affordable, and reliable power,’ the DOE stated in a press release.”
Artificial Intelligence
Former Top Google Researchers Have Made a New Kind of AI AgentWill Knight | Wired
“The company’s CEO, Misha Laskin, says the ideal way to build supersmart AI agents is to have them truly master coding, since this is the simplest, most natural way for them to interact with the world. While other companies are building agents that use human user interfaces and browse the web, Laskin, who previously worked on Gemini and agents at Google DeepMind, says this hardly comes naturally to a large language model.”
Future
A Major AI Training Data Set Contains Millions of Examples of Personal DataEileen Guo | MIT Technology Review
“Thousands of images—including identifiable faces—were found in a small subset of DataComp CommonPool, a major AI training set for image generation scraped from the web. Because the researchers audited just 0.1% of CommonPool’s data, they estimate that the real number of images containing personally identifiable information, including faces and identity documents, is in the hundreds of millions.”
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