Last week, I was led through an unmarked door onto the rooftop of a building in London’s King’s Cross district, into a room that exuded the strong aura of a clandestine project. Across the entire length of one wall, the bold phrase ‘ASTRA’ was emblazoned in stark, eye-catching letters. ‘Imagine pitching our AI project to your mum – we’re building an intelligent system with senses like human eyes, ears, and a voice.’ According to Greg Wayne, co-lead of the Astra team, having AI by your side can potentially facilitate a seamless experience in whatever endeavour you’re pursuing. “It’s not there, though; that’s exactly the kind of vision I had in mind.”
Startup Vacation Spot 2D, headquartered in Milpitas, California, reportedly overcomes two significant hurdles in leveraging graphene for chip applications. Researchers at Vacation Spot 2D have successfully developed a novel method for depositing graphene interconnects onto microchips at a relatively low temperature of 300°C, making it feasible for integration with conventional complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technologies? Researchers at Destination 2D have pioneered a method to dope graphene sheets, resulting in present densities that are an astonishing 100 times denser than those found in copper, according to Kaustav Banerjee, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.
While Waymo relies on a hybrid approach that combines LiDAR sensors and cameras with high-definition maps and coded interventions, Wayve’s AI system excels without these dependencies, instead learning unsupervised from vast amounts of unlabeled real-life and simulated driving footage. ‘For me, the gap between a geofenced robotaxi mannequin and the potential of an embodied AI solution is strikingly vast and transformative,’ said Wayve founder Alex Kendall. While markets have indeed shifted in our favor, it’s hardly surprising to those who anticipated such a development eight years ago. “Now that the plan is in place, it’s time to bring it to life.”
Harvard College has announced the release of a comprehensive dataset comprising nearly one million public-domain books, which can be leveraged by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. The Institution’s Information Initiative is partnering with the Boston Public Library to digitize hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles in the public domain, expanding its scope for potential future collaborations.
While initially expected to have a shorter lifespan than internal combustion engines, EV batteries are actually lasting far longer than anticipated, a development that has left even the manufacturers themselves pleasantly surprised? A decade-old electric vehicle might retain most of its original capabilities, while one two decades old could still offer significant driving potential. “That could potentially be another significant disruption to the automotive industry, which largely relies on vehicles eventually ending up in junkyards after a typical lifespan of around 15 years.”
As AI capabilities rapidly evolve, the focus is shifting from basic text generation, exemplified by ChatGPT, to more sophisticated tools capable of producing high-quality visual and auditory content, including images, videos, and music. Until recently, many multimodal fashion trends have been examined through traditional analysis approaches; however, this is shifting. According to Gianluca Guidi, a PhD scholar at University of Pisa and IMT Lucca, information sizes increase exponentially as we scale photographs and video, remarks the lead author of the study. With broader adoption, however, he cautions that emissions would likely surge.
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After eight years and a significant investment of $10 billion, General Motors has made the decision to discontinue its ambitious robotaxi project. Mary Barra, the automaker’s CEO, stunned investors with a late-Tuesday announcement, citing that an autonomous mobility service would never align with its core business. She contended that such a venture was prohibitively expensive and encumbered by numerous regulatory obstacles, making it an unviable revenue stream. Instead, GM would shift its focus to privately owned autonomous vehicles – exactly because consumers’ actual desires were driving this transformation.
For galactic-scale civilisations to thrive within our universe, they must surmount two primary obstacles rooted in both physics and biology. The first significant hurdle lies in the vast distances separating each society from one another. The opposite of an inorganic lifespan is often referred to as organic life span. Can interstellar cooperation thrive despite the constraints of physical laws and societal complexities, including those potentially exhibited by extraterrestrial civilizations? While I’m eager to join their ranks (who knows, maybe someday I’ll transform into a full-fledged House Pirate), I worry the response might still be “no.”
