Thursday, December 19

Tag: fast forward

To Build a Better AI Supercomputer, Let There Be Light
5Apr By adminNo Comments
Technology

To Build a Better AI Supercomputer, Let There Be Light

GlobalFoundries, a company that makes chips for others, including AMD and General Motors, previously announced a partnership with Lightmatter. Harris says his company is “working with the largest semiconductor companies in the world as well as the hyperscalers,” referring to the largest cloud companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.If Lightmatter or another company can reinvent the wiring of giant AI projects, a key bottleneck in the development of smarter algorithms might fall away. The use of more computation was fundamental to the advances that led to ChatGPT, and many AI researchers see the further scaling-up of hardware as being crucial to future advances in the field—and to hopes of ever reaching the vaguely-specified goal of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, meaning pro...
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Google’s Gemini Is the Real Start of the Generative AI Boom
10Dec By adminNo Comments
Technology

Google’s Gemini Is the Real Start of the Generative AI Boom

The history of artificial intelligence has been punctuated by periods of so-called “AI winter,” when the technology seemed to meet a dead end and funding dried up. Each one has been accompanied by proclamations that making machines truly intelligent is just too darned hard for humans to figure out.Google’s release of Gemini, claimed to be a fundamentally new kind of AI model and the company’s most powerful to date, suggests that a new AI winter isn’t coming anytime soon. In fact, although the 12 months since ChatGPT launched have been a banner year for AI, there is good reason to think that the current AI boom is only getting started.OpenAI didn’t have high expectations when it launched the “low key research preview” called ChatGPT in November 2022. It was simply a test of a new interface...
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Why Read Books When You Can Use Chatbots to Talk to Them Instead?
26Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

Why Read Books When You Can Use Chatbots to Talk to Them Instead?

When I asked the chatbot if it identifies with the monster, it responded with a familiar chatbot excuse for dodging tricky questions: “As an artificial intelligence, I don't have personal feelings or identities, so I don't have the capacity to identify with any characters.”Then, in a twist that Mary Shelley might have enjoyed, the chatbot suggested that perhaps I might identify with the monster instead: “Many readers might identify with the monster's feelings of loneliness, rejection, and desire for companionship. These are universal human experiences that Shelley explores in depth through the character of the monster.” Touché.Since I’ve written plenty about AI myself, from impressive robot breakthroughs to predictions of AI doom, I created a chatbot trained on some of my past and asked i...
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The Chatbots Are Now Talking to Each Other
12Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

The Chatbots Are Now Talking to Each Other

Lena Anderson isn’t a soccer fan, but she does spend a lot of time ferrying her kids between soccer practices and competitive games.“I may not pull out a foam finger and painted face, but soccer does have a place in my life,” says the soccer mom—who also happens to be completely made up. Anderson is a fictional personality played by artificial intelligence software like that powering ChatGPT.Anderson doesn’t let her imaginary status get in the way of her opinions, though, and comes complete with a detailed backstory. In a wide-ranging conversation with a human interlocutor, the bot says that it has a 7-year-old son who is a fan of the New England Revolution and loves going to home games at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts. Anderson claims to think the sport is a wonderful way for kids to...
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A Letter Prompted Talk of AI Doomsday. Many Who Signed Weren’t Actually AI Doomers
17Aug By adminNo Comments
Technology

A Letter Prompted Talk of AI Doomsday. Many Who Signed Weren’t Actually AI Doomers

This March, nearly 35,000 AI researchers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and concerned citizens signed an open letter from the nonprofit Future of Life Institute that called for a “pause” on AI development, due to the risks to humanity revealed in the capabilities of programs such as ChatGPT.“Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves ... Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?”I could still be proven wrong, but almost six months later and with AI development faster than ever, civilization hasn’t crumbled. Heck, Bing Chat, Microsoft’s “revolutionary,” ChatGPT-infused search oracle, hasn’t even displaced Google as the leader in search. So what should we make of the letter...
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The Dream of Geothermal Energy Is Alive in Utah
3Aug By adminNo Comments
Technology

The Dream of Geothermal Energy Is Alive in Utah

If you haven’t already, go and read the WIRED feature article “A Vast Untapped Green Energy Source Is Hiding Beneath Your Feet,” which details the quest to tap into geothermal energy using drilling techniques originally developed for fracking gas.WIRED senior writer Gregory Barber followed Joseph Moore, a geologist at the University of Utah, on his quest to work out how to drill down thousands of feet into hot, dense granite, before using water to extract geothermal energy.I asked Barber to tell me more about the story, and whether “enhanced” geothermal systems (EGS) are really going to uncork a clean-energy bonanza.Will Knight: I really enjoyed the story. Tell me how you first came across the technology at the heart of it.Gregory Barber: I initially heard about it because I was looking i...
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