ALS robbed him of his voice. AI got it back.
Benjamin Mueller | The New York Times
“As he tried to say his first request – ‘What’s this?’ – aloud, a trembling, smiling Mr. Harrell burst into tears. …On the second day, the machine searched an available vocabulary of 125,000 words with 90 percent accuracy and produced, for the first time, sentences that Mr. Harrell himself had invented. The device also spoke them in a voice remarkably similar to his own: Using podcast interviews and other old recordings, the researchers had created a deep fake voice of Mr. Harrell before he developed ALS.”
This researcher wants to replace your brain piece by piece
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
“A US agency pursuing groundbreaking medical discoveries has hired a researcher who advocates a highly radical plan to overcome death. His idea? Replace your body parts. All of them. Even your brain. Jean Hébert, a new employee of the US Advanced Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), is to lead a major new initiative on ‘functional brain tissue replacement,’ the idea of adding youthful tissue to people’s brains.”
Happy birthday, baby! What the future holds for those born today
Kara Platoni | MIT Technology Review
“Your arrival coincided with the 125th anniversary of this magazine. With luck and the right genes, you might live to see the next 125 years. How will you and the next generation of machines grow up together? We asked more than a dozen experts to imagine your shared future. We explained that this would be a thought experiment. What I mean is: we asked them to get weird.”
Study suggests that even the best AI models often hallucinate
Kyle Wiggers | TechCrunch
“A recent study by researchers at Cornell University, the universities of Washington and Waterloo, and the nonprofit research institute AI2 sought to compare hallucinations by checking models like GPT-4o against authoritative sources on topics ranging from law and health to history and geography. … ‘The most important takeaway from our work is that we cannot yet fully trust the results of model generations,’ said Wenting Zhao, a doctoral student at Cornell University and co-author of the study. ^ “TechCrunch – The Grand Finale”. “Currently, even the best models can only generate hallucination-free text in about 35% of cases.”
Why Alaska Airlines is investing in a jet like you’ve never seen before
Patrick Sisson | Fast Company
“The JetZero blended wing body (BWB) aircraft concept features a more triangular, stretched design where the cabin and wing blend into one another, resulting in greater aerodynamic efficiency and lift. This allows the aircraft to fly higher, around 45,000 feet, further reducing drag. When you factor in the material and design changes that replace bolted metal and composites with lighter, stitched carbon fiber, a BWB jet can carry hundreds of passengers using half the fuel, providing huge cost savings and environmental benefits.”
NASA and Rocket Lab want to prove that we can fly to Mars for a tenth of the price
Aria Alamalhodaei | TechCrunch
“Instead of spending $550 million on a mission to space, NASA has set a goal of spending only a tenth of that and has set a price cap of $55 million for each SIMPLEx mission, not including launch. ESCAPADE is one of three missions the agency has selected under the SIMPLEx program and, in all likelihood, the first to actually launch.”
Insights into a pilot plant for green hydrogen
Jesse Orrall | CNET
“We took a look inside Verdagy’s pilot plant, where the company is testing its multimillion-dollar electrolyzer designed to convert renewable energy like wind and solar into hydrogen. … Overall, Neese says, an electrolyzer costs ‘millions of dollars,’ but the estimated ‘tens of thousands of gallons of diesel equivalent produced daily’ will make green hydrogen globally price-competitive with fossil fuels by 2030.”
François Chollet: LLMs are a dead end for AGI
Kristin Houser | Big Thinking
“Artificial general intelligence (AGI) could change the world, but no one seems to know how close we are to creating it. Today’s generative AIs perform well on benchmarks, but such benchmarks can be solved by rote learning and are not necessarily a sign of general intelligence. To accelerate progress in AI, François Chollet has launched the ARC Prize, a competition to find out which AIs score the highest on a series of abstraction and reasoning tasks.”
Ikea’s warehouse inventory drones will fly alongside workers in the US
Emma Roth | The Edge
“The Swedish furniture chain announced that the autonomous drones will soon be working alongside workers at its distribution center in Perryville, Maryland, where Ikea began installing them this summer. The Verity-branded drones are also equipped with a new AI-powered system that allows them to fly around warehouses 24/7. This means they now work alongside human workers, helping to count inventory and determine if anything is in the wrong place. Previously, the drones only flew outside of operating hours.”
Photo credit: JetZero
