Summary
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 18)
Every week, we scour the web for important, insightful, and fascinating stories in science and technology.
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China’s Moonshot AI Releases Model to Challenge Top US SystemsTracy Qu and Raffaele Huang | The Wall Street Journal ()
“The union’s response [to Hyundai’s new Atlas robot] was blunt: Atlas would never step onto a production line without workers agreeing first. This week, Hyundai’s auto workers in South Korea have gone on a partial strike. It is the car industry’s first factory stoppage addressing humanoid robots.”
Psiquantum Has a Plan to Make a Massive Quantum Computer Out of LightJames O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review ()
“I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. Even outside the world of software, it’s hard to find a comparable example, given that economy of scale is the principle that has made light bulbs, cars, and clothing so affordable. By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed.”
How Hard Is It to Build Orbital Data Centers, Actually?Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“You need unprecedented heavy lift: reusable and rapid launch. You need the ability to manufacture the largest satellites humans have ever built and to build 100 times more of them than humans ever have for a single constellation. You have to hope that radiation’s impacts on chips are manageable and that radiational cooling scales. You also need a few trillion bucks.”
Once Again We Are Told AI May Be Conscious—I Study Consciousness, and I Have My DoubtsAnil Seth | The Guardian
“The information processing unfolding inside Claude is no more likely to result in consciousness than a simulation of a weather system is likely to generate a real hurricane. AI systems are getting more powerful every day. But to give ourselves the best chance of navigating this new world, we should remember how different we are from our almost-magical creations. When we sell our minds too cheaply to our machines, we not only overestimate them, we underestimate ourselves.”
AI Teaches a Bitter Biology LessonReed Albergotti | Semafor
“Future discoveries and therapies will come not from a human-like understanding of science, but by simple pattern recognition of new biological information at scale. …[Richard] Sutton’s bitter lesson is applicable to biology because so much of the human body—not just the mind—is still beyond our understanding. And we’ll find the way forward by industrializing trial-and-error experimentation until the breakthroughs materialize.”
Want Experts in 10 Years? Keep AI Away From Your Beginners TodayLaëtitia Vitaud | Fast Company
“A Nordic public school system and a 300-person American law firm aren’t pursuing the same goals. But they arrived at the same conclusion: Beginners must first learn without assistance in order to be, later on, well assisted.”
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Astronomers Find an Atmosphere on a Nearby Earthlike PlanetKatrina Miller | The New York Times ()
“GPT-Red automates a type of safety evaluation for software systems known as red-teaming, which is typically done by a team of human testers. The aim is to find as many different ways to break or hijack a system as possible. The weak spots can then be patched before the final version of the software is released.”
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