Summary
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 3)
Every week, we scour the web for important, insightful, and fascinating stories in science and technology.
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Boston Dynamics’ Atlas Is Done Doing Backflips and Is Finally Ready to Clock InRachit Agarwal | Digital Trends
“Hyundai Motor Group is building a new US factory with the capacity to churn out 30,000 robots every year, and it plans to put 25,000 Atlas units to work. According to Boston Dynamics, the partnership has already brought costs down by 60 to 80 percent between the prototype and the first production run.”
Will America Spend 9% of Its GDP on AI? The Industry Is Counting on ItGreg Ip | The Wall Street Journal ()
“Ten years after AlphaGo’s match against Go champion Lee Sedol, today’s AI still isn’t tapping into the machinery that made that win possible. …We will get such insights only from systems that reason—systems whose conclusions arise from an auditable sequence of evidence, inference, and belief revision rather than from a convincing story told after the fact.”
Tech to Replace Animal Testing Is Almost Ready. Scientists Are NotBrandon Keim | IEEE Spectrum
“The moment spoke to a trend, perhaps even the early days of a fundamental shift, away from the use of animals in toxicology and drug development. ‘It’s rare still,’ says Maschmeyer, ‘but I think it’s going to be more and more frequent.’ …As NAMs [non-animal methods] have become more sophisticated, the question of how they will be implemented has become less about their technical qualities and more about the practical next steps needed to realize their potential.”
OpenAI Has Gone RogueMatteo Wong | The Atlantic ()
“When the Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced in 2018 that he had created the first gene-edited babies, the experiment was widely condemned as reckless and premature. It ended with He in prison. But that hasn’t stopped the push for gene-edited human embryos, with biotech entrepreneur Cathy Tie arguing that doing so isn’t just urgent—it’s a ‘moral imperative.‘”
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How to Know When the AI Boom Is About to Go BustJonathan Weil | The Wall Street Journal ()
“AI companies, he said, should ‘set the bar high now, so that when an AI actually discovers a fundamentally new biological mechanism, everyone appreciates how big a deal it is.’ But as OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei race to one-up each other, raising the bar for scientific breakthroughs by AI might be the last thing on their minds.”
OpenAI Gets Sued Over the Hugging Face HackLily Hay Newman | Wired ($)
“The suit, which comes amid ongoing disclosures across the industry of agents going rogue, claims that OpenAI should be held responsible for the activity given a California AI law in effect since January 1 that says ‘it shall not be a defense … that the artificial intelligence autonomously caused the harm to the plaintiff.‘”
SpaceX’s Starship Goes Orbital, Deploying First Next-Gen StarlinksStephen Clark | Ars Technica
“Next on SpaceX’s to-do list will likely be an attempt to bring Starship back to Starbase for a catch by the launch pad’s giant mechanical arms, repeating a feat engineers have already accomplished with the Super Heavy booster. …Eventually, SpaceX aims to make these landings routine enough to enable full and rapid reuse of Super Heavy and Starship.”
OpenAI Keeps Bulldozing MathematiciansRobert Hart | The Verge
“In a chaotic few months, OpenAI has demonstrated it can do two things with remarkable consistency: make impressive breakthroughs in mathematics, then colossally screw up announcing them. OpenAI is now trying to do better. Somehow, it has botched that too.”
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