This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 19)

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.”

Meta’s AI Chief Says World Models Are Key to ‘Human-Level AI’—But It Might Be 10 Years Out
Maxwell Zeff | TechCrunch
“Are today’s AI models truly remembering, thinking, planning, and reasoning, just like a human brain would? Some AI labs would have you believe they are, but according to Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, the answer is no. He thinks we could get there in a decade or so, however, by pursuing a new method called a ‘world model.’”

This Lab Robot Mixes Chemicals
Kristel Tjandra | MIT Technology Review
“Lab scientists spend much of their time doing laborious and repetitive tasks, be it pipetting liquid samples or running the same analyses over and over again. But what if they could simply tell a robot to do the experiments, analyze the data, and generate a report? Enter Organa, a benchtop robotic system devised by researchers at the University of Toronto that can perform chemistry experiments.”

Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Team Up on Robots
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“The partnership aims to make Atlas into a general-purpose humanoid …Boston Dynamics has an exceptionally capable humanoid platform capable of advanced and occasionally painful-looking whole-body motion behaviors along with some relatively basic and brute force-y manipulation. Meanwhile, TRI has been working for quite a while on developing AI-based learning techniques to tackle a variety of complicated manipulation challenges.”

Watch: Jetson Founder Pushes the Limits of ‘Freestyle’ eVTOL Agility
Loz Blain | New Atlas
“It’s some of the most dynamic flight we’ve seen from an eVTOL with a human on board, and some of the closest we’ve seen to answering the question that probably launched the eVTOL sector: Hey, what would it be like to ride around in a racing drone?”

Ultra-Deep Fracking for Limitless Geothermal Power Is Possible: EPFL
David Szondy | New Atlas
“The prospect of virtually unlimited clean geothermal power is now substantially brighter. EPFL’s Laboratory of Experimental Rock Mechanics (LEMR) has shown that the semi-plastic, gooey rock at supercritical depths can still be fractured to let water through. …Companies like Fervo and Sage Geosystems are proving that a fracking approach to geothermal energy can extract much more power than traditional methods—this research proves that the concept could do the same for ultra-deep supercritical geothermal projects as well.”

Apple Engineers Show How Flimsy AI ‘Reasoning’ Can Be
Kyle Orland | Wired
“For a while now, companies like OpenAI and Google have been touting advanced ‘reasoning’ capabilities as the next big step in their latest artificial intelligence models. Now, though, a new study from six Apple engineers shows that the mathematical ‘reasoning’ displayed by advanced large language models can be extremely brittle and unreliable in the face of seemingly trivial changes to common benchmark problems.”

GOVERNANCE

US Treasury Says AI Tools Prevented $1 Billion of Fraud in 2024
Todd Feathers | Gizmodo
“During the most recent fiscal year, which ended in September, the agency’s new data-driven approach to rooting out bad actors contributed to the prevention and recovery of more than $4 billion in fraudulent payments, according to a press release. That’s a more than sixfold increase over the $652.7 million in fraudulent payments detected or recovered during the 2023 fiscal year.”

INTERNET

SpaceX Tells FCC It Has a Plan to Make Starlink About 10 Times Faster
Jon Brodkin | Ars Technica
“In an application submitted to the Federal Communications Commission on October 11, SpaceX claims the requested ‘modification and its companion amendment will enable the Gen2 system to deliver gigabit-speed, truly low-latency broadband and ubiquitous mobile connectivity to all Americans and the billions of people globally who still lack access to adequate broadband.’”

Image Credit: SpaceX