This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 28)

A Tiny New Open-Source AI Model Performs as Well as Powerful Big Ones
Melissa Heikkiläarchive page | MIT Technology Review
“[The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2)] claims that its biggest Molmo model, which has 72 billion parameters, outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which is estimated to have over a trillion parameters, in tests that measure things like understanding images, charts, and documents. Meanwhile, Ai2 says a smaller Molmo model, with 7 billion parameters, comes close to OpenAI’s state-of-the-art model in performance, an achievement it ascribes to vastly more efficient data collection and training methods.”

Hands On With Orion, Meta’s First Pair of AR Glasses
Alex Heath | The Verge
“They look almost like a normal pair of glasses. That’s the first thing I notice as I walk into a conference room at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The black Clark Kent-esque frames sitting on the table in front of me look unassuming, but they represent CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar bet on the computers that come after smartphones. They’re called Orion, and they’re Meta’s first pair of augmented reality glasses.”

Startup Says It Can Make a 100x Faster CPU
Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“Instead of trying to speed up computation by putting 16 identical CPU cores into, say, a laptop, a manufacturer could put 4 standard CPU cores and 64 of Flow Computing’s so-called parallel processing unit (PPU) cores into the same footprint, and achieve up to 100 times better performance.”

OpenAI to Become For-Profit Company
Deepa Seetharaman, Berber Jin, Tom Dotan | The Wall Street Journal
“OpenAI is planning to convert from a nonprofit organization to a for-profit company at the same time it is undergoing major personnel shifts including the abrupt resignation Wednesday of its chief technology officer, Mira Murati. Becoming a for-profit would be a seismic shift for OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 to develop AI technology ‘to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,’ according to a statement it published when it launched.”

Detachable Robotic Hand Crawls Around on Finger-Legs
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“One of the great things about robots is that they don’t have to be constrained by our constraints, and at ICRA@40 in Rotterdam this week, we saw a novel new Thing: a robotic hand that can detach from its arm and then crawl around to grasp objects that would be otherwise out of reach, designed by roboticists from EPFL in Switzerland.”

SECURITY

Remember That DNA You Gave 23andMe?
Kristen V. Brown | The Atlantic
“23andMe is not doing well. Its stock is on the verge of being delisted. It shut down its in-house drug-development unit last month, only the latest in several rounds of layoffs. Last week, the entire board of directors quit, save for Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder and the company’s CEO. Amid this downward spiral, Wojcicki has said she’ll consider selling 23andMe—which means the DNA of 23andMe’s 15 million customers would be up for sale, too.”

An Ultrathin Graphene Brain Implant Was Just Tested in a Person
Emily Mullin | Wired
“Twenty years [after its discovery], graphene is finally making its way into batteries, sensors, semiconductors, air conditioners, and even headphones. And now, it’s being tested on people’s brains. This [week], surgeons at the University of Manchester temporarily placed a thin, Scotch-tape-like implant made of graphene on the patient’s cortex—the outermost layer of the brain. Made by Spanish company InBrain Neuroelectronics, the technology is a type of brain-computer interface, a device that collects and decodes brain signals.”

First 3D-Printed Hotel Ever Is Underway in Texas
Evan Garcia | Reuters
“It looks like any other 3D printer—except it’s the size of a crane and is, layer by layer, building a hotel in the Texan desert. El Cosmico, an existing hotel and campground on the outskirts of the city of Marfa, is expanding. It is building 43 new hotel units and 18 residential homes over 60 acres (24 hectares)—all with a 3D printer.”

AI Bots Now Beat 100% of Those Traffic-Image CAPTCHAs
Kyle Orland | Ars Technica
“While there have been previous academic studies attempting to use image-recognition models to solve reCAPTCHAs, they were only able to succeed between 68 to 71 percent of the time. The rise to a 100 percent success rate ‘shows that we are now officially in the age beyond captchas,’ according to the new paper’s authors.”

Image Credit: Victor / Unsplash