This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 21)

AI’s Hungry Maw Drives Massive $100B Investment Plan by Microsoft and BlackRock
Benj Edwards | Ars Technica
“The partnership initially aims to raise $30 billion in private equity capital, which could later turn into $100 billion in total investment when including debt financing. The group will invest in data centers and supporting power infrastructure for AI development. ‘The capital spending needed for AI infrastructure and the new energy to power it goes beyond what any single company or government can finance,’ Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a statement.”

Challengers Are Coming for Nvidia’s Crown
Matthew S. Smith | IEEE Spectrum
“[Nvidia has] a deep, broad moat with which to defend its business, but that doesn’t mean it lacks competitors ready to storm the castle, and their tactics vary widely. While decades-old companies like Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel are looking to use their own GPUs to rival Nvidia, upstarts like Cerebras and SambaNova have developed radical chip architectures that drastically improve the efficiency of generative AI training and inference. These are the competitors most likely to challenge Nvidia.”

Moderna’s ‘Off-the-Shelf’ Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise in Early Human Trial Data
Ed Cara | Gizmodo
“The future of cancer treatment is continuing to look bright. Over the weekend, researchers in the UK announced encouraging results from an early trial testing an mRNA vaccine against advanced solid cancers. The vaccine, developed by Moderna, is designed to help people’s immune systems better recognize and kill cancerous cells.”

1X Releases Generative World Models to Train Robots
Ben Dickson| VentureBeat
“1X’s new system is inspired by innovations such as OpenAI Sora and Runway, which have shown that with the right training data and techniques, generative models can learn some kind of world model and remain consistent through time. However, while those models are designed to generate videos from text, 1X’s new model is part of a trend of generative systems that can react to actions during the generation phase.”

First Day of a ‘New Life’ for a Boy With Sickle Cell
Gina Kolata | The New York Times
“Kendric Cromer, 12, is among the first patients to be treated with gene therapy just approved by the FDA that many other patients face obstacles to receiving. …Last December, the Food and Drug Administration gave approval to two companies, Bluebird Bio of Somerville, Mass., and Vertex Pharmaceuticals of Boston, to sell the first gene therapies approved for sickle cell disease. After nine months, Kendric remains the first Bluebird patient to progress this far, with at least a few others advancing toward his pace.”

OpenAI’s New Model Is Better at Reasoning and, Occasionally, Deceiving
Kylie Robison | The Verge
“While AI models have been able to ‘lie’ in the past, and chatbots frequently output false information, o1 had a unique capacity to ‘scheme’ or ‘fake alignment.’ That meant it could pretend it’s following the rules to complete a given task, but it isn’t actually. To the model, the rules could be too much of a burden, and it seems to have the ability to disregard them if it means it can more easily complete a task.”

GOVERNANCE

AI-Generated Content Doesn’t Seem to Have Swayed Recent European Elections
Melissa Heikkiläarchive page | MIT Technology Review
“Since the beginning of the generative-AI boom, there has been widespread fear that AI tools could boost bad actors’ ability to spread fake content with the potential to interfere with elections or even sway the results. Such worries were particularly heightened this year, when billions of people were expected to vote in over 70 countries. Those fears seem to have been unwarranted, says Sam Stockwell, the researcher at the Alan Turing Institute who conducted the study.”

Every Fusion Startup That Has Raised Over $300M
Tim De Chant | TechCrunch
“Over the last several years, fusion power has gone from the butt of jokes—always a decade away!—to an increasingly tangible and tantalizing technology that has drawn investors off the sidelines. …Founders have built on that momentum in recent years, pushing the private fusion industry forward at a rapid pace. Fusion startups have raised $7.1 billion to date, according to the Fusion Industry Association, with the majority of it going to a handful of companies.”

I Stared Into the AI Void With the SocialAI App
Lauren Goode | Wired
“Even the app’s creator, Michael Sayman, admits that the premise of SocialAI may confuse people. His announcement this week of the app read a little like a generative AI joke: ‘A private social network where you receive millions of AI-generated comments offering feedback, advice, and reflections.’ But, no, SocialAI is real, if ‘real’ applies to an online universe in which every single person you interact with is a bot.”

Here’s What I Made of Snap’s New Augmented-Reality Spectacles
Mat Honan | The Guardian
“Before I get to Snap’s new Spectacles, a confession: I have a long history of putting goofy new things on my face and liking it. …[I spent] the better part of [a] year with Google’s ridiculous Glass on my face and thought it was the future. Microsoft HoloLens? Loved it. Google Cardboard? Totally normal. Apple Vision Pro? A breakthrough, baby. …I got to try [Snap’s new AR glasses] out a couple of weeks ago. They are pretty great! (But also: See above.)”

GOVERNANCE

There Are More Than 120 AI Bills in Congress Right Now
Scott J. Mulligan | MIT Technology Review
“US policymakers have an ‘everything everywhere all at once’ approach to regulating artificial intelligence, with bills that are as varied as the definitions of AI itself. …That’s why, with help from the Brennan Center for Justice, which created a tracker with all the AI bills circulating in various committees in Congress right now, MIT Technology Review has taken a closer look to see if there’s anything we can learn from this legislative smorgasbord.”

Image Credit: Shubham Dhage / Unsplash