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 goals to lift $30 billion in non-public fairness capital, which might later flip into $100 billion in whole funding when together with debt financing. The group will put money into information facilities and supporting energy infrastructure for AI growth. ‘The capital spending wanted for AI infrastructure and the brand new power to energy it goes past what any single firm or authorities can finance,’ Microsoft President Brad Smith stated in a press release.”

Challengers Are Coming for Nvidia’s Crown
Matthew S. Smith | IEEE Spectrum
“[Nvidia has] a deep, broad moat with which to defend its enterprise, however that doesn’t imply it lacks rivals able to storm the fort, and their ways fluctuate broadly. Whereas decades-old firms like Superior Micro Units (AMD) and Intel want to use their very own GPUs to rival Nvidia, upstarts like Cerebras and SambaNova have developed radical chip architectures that drastically enhance the effectivity of generative AI coaching and inference. These are the rivals probably to problem Nvidia.”

Moderna’s ‘Off-the-Shelf’ Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise in Early Human Trial Data
Ed Cara | Gizmodo
“The way forward for most cancers therapy is constant to look shiny. Over the weekend, researchers within the UK introduced encouraging outcomes from an early trial testing an mRNA vaccine in opposition to superior stable cancers. The vaccine, developed by Moderna, is designed to assist individuals’s immune programs higher acknowledge and kill cancerous cells.”

1X Releases Generative World Models to Train Robots
Ben Dickson| VentureBeat
“1X’s new system is impressed by improvements reminiscent of OpenAI Sora and Runway, which have proven that with the proper coaching information and methods, generative fashions can be taught some sort of world mannequin and stay constant via time. Nonetheless, whereas these fashions are designed to generate movies from textual content, 1X’s new mannequin is a part of a development of generative programs that may react to actions through the technology part.”

First Day of a ‘New Life’ for a Boy With Sickle Cell
Gina Kolata | The New York Instances
“Kendric Cromer, 12, is among the many first sufferers to be handled with gene remedy simply accepted by the FDA that many different sufferers face obstacles to receiving. …Final December, the Meals and Drug Administration gave approval to 2 firms, Bluebird Bio of Somerville, Mass., and Vertex Prescription drugs of Boston, to promote the primary gene therapies accepted for sickle cell illness. After 9 months, Kendric stays the primary Bluebird affected person to progress this far, with no less than just a few others advancing towards his tempo.”

OpenAI’s New Model Is Better at Reasoning and, Occasionally, Deceiving
Kylie Robison | The Verge
“Whereas AI fashions have been in a position to ‘lie’ prior to now, and chatbots ceaselessly output false info, o1 had a novel capability to ‘scheme’ or ‘pretend alignment.’ That meant it might faux it’s following the principles to finish a given activity, but it surely isn’t truly. To the mannequin, the principles could possibly be an excessive amount of of a burden, and it appears to have the power to ignore them if it means it may well extra simply full a activity.”

GOVERNANCE

AI-Generated Content Doesn’t Seem to Have Swayed Recent European Elections
Melissa Heikkiläarchive web page | MIT Know-how Overview
“For the reason that starting of the generative-AI growth, there was widespread concern that AI instruments might increase dangerous actors’ capability to unfold pretend content material with the potential to intervene with elections and even sway the outcomes. Such worries have been notably heightened this 12 months, when billions of individuals have been anticipated to vote in over 70 nations. These fears appear to have been unwarranted, says Sam Stockwell, the researcher on the Alan Turing Institute who performed the research.”

Every Fusion Startup That Has Raised Over $300M
Tim De Chant | TechCrunch
“During the last a number of years, fusion energy has gone from the butt of jokes—all the time a decade away!—to an more and more tangible and tantalizing expertise that has drawn traders off the sidelines. …Founders have constructed on that momentum lately, pushing the non-public fusion business ahead at a fast tempo. Fusion startups have raised $7.1 billion up to now, based on the Fusion Trade Affiliation, with nearly all of it going to a handful of firms.”

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 could confuse individuals. His announcement this week of the app learn slightly like a generative AI joke: ‘A personal social community the place you obtain tens of millions of AI-generated feedback providing suggestions, recommendation, and reflections.’ However, no, SocialAI is actual, if ‘actual’ applies to a web based universe through which each single individual you work together with is a bot.”

Here’s What I Made of Snap’s New Augmented-Reality Spectacles
Mat Honan | The Guardian
“Earlier than I get to Snap’s new Spectacles, a confession: I’ve an extended historical past of placing goofy new issues on my face and liking it. …[I spent] the higher a part of [a] 12 months with Google’s ridiculous Glass on my face and thought it was the longer term. Microsoft HoloLens? Liked it. Google Cardboard? Completely regular. Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional? A breakthrough, child. …I received to strive [Snap’s new AR glasses] out a few weeks in the past. They’re fairly nice! (But in addition: See above.)”

GOVERNANCE

There Are More Than 120 AI Bills in Congress Right Now
Scott J. Mulligan | MIT Know-how Overview
“US policymakers have an ‘every thing all over the place suddenly’ strategy to regulating synthetic intelligence, with payments which are as assorted because the definitions of AI itself. …That’s why, with assist from the Brennan Middle for Justice, which created a tracker with all of the AI payments circulating in numerous committees in Congress proper now, MIT Know-how Overview has taken a more in-depth look to see if there’s something we will be taught from this legislative smorgasbord.”

Picture Credit score: Shubham Dhage / Unsplash