COMPUTING

After Neuralink, Max Hodak Is Building Something Even WilderConnie Loizos | TechCrunch

“What makes this conversation remarkable is how concrete everything sounds. Hodak isn’t hand-waving about ‘someday.’ He’s got timelines, patient numbers, and regulatory pathways. ‘By 2035, [biohybrid neural interfaces] will be basically available for patients in need,’ he says. ‘And that will start to really deform the world in interesting ways.'”

Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI Co-Founder Sutskever Joins the SkepticsStephanie Palazzolo | The Information ($)

“There’s rising skepticism among researchers, including OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, about the effectiveness of RL [reinforcement learning] and whether it can advance AI to the level of artificial general intelligence, on par with human experts in scientific research, healthcare, and other domains. …[In a rare interview, Sutskever] said researchers use RL to help the models ace the evaluations, but that doesn’t improve the way the models generalize, or handle a wide variety of tasks.”

COMPUTING

AR Ski Goggles Show You the Hazards That Your Eyes Alone Can’t SeeMaryna Holovnova | New Atlas

“Since there was no product on the market for improving visibility in bad weather, he and his colleagues invented one. …[The goggles] capture landscape details and textures that the human eye cannot see, and the enhanced 3D video is shown to you instantly through the augmented-reality displays with a latency of less than 30 milliseconds—way below human perception (anything under 50 ms is essentially imperceptible).”

TECH

Cold Metal Fusion Makes It Easy to 3D Print TitaniumDrew Robb | IEEE Spectrum

“CADmore Metal has introduced a fresh take on 3D printing metal components to the North American market known as cold metal fusion (CMF). John Carrington, the company’s CEO, claims CMF produces stronger 3D printed metal parts that are cheaper and faster to make. That includes titanium components, which have historically caused trouble for 3D printers.”

Artificial Intelligence

AI Chatbots Can Sway Voters Better Than Political AdvertisementsMichelle Kim | MIT Technology Review ($)

“A multi-university team of researchers has found that chatting with a politically biased AI model was more effective than political advertisements at nudging both Democrats and Republicans to support presidential candidates of the opposing party. The chatbots swayed opinions by citing facts and evidence, but they were not always accurate—in fact, the researchers found, the most persuasive models said the most untrue things.”

Varda Says It Has Proven Space Manufacturing Works—Now It Wants to Make It BoringConnie Loizos | TechCrunch

“The Varda Space Industries CEO predicts that within 10 years, someone could stand at a landing site and watch multiple specialized spacecraft per night zooming toward Earth like shooting stars, each carrying pharmaceuticals manufactured in space. Within 15 to 20 years, he says, it will be cheaper to send a working-class employee to orbit for a month than to keep them on Earth.”

Energy

A Startup Says It Has Found a Hidden Source of Geothermal EnergyMolly Taft | Wired ($)

“Zanskar, which uses AI to find hidden geothermal resources deep underground, says that it has identified a new commercially viable site for a potential power plant. The discovery, the company claims, is the first of its kind made by the industry in decades. The find is the culmination of years of research on how to find these resources—and points to the growing promise of geothermal energy.”

TECH

One Day, AI Might Be Better Than You at Surfing the Web. That Day Isn’t Today.Victoria Song | The Verge

“The pitch is to reorient how we browse, to move us away from the search engines that have reigned for the past three decades. The central idea is the same as we’ve heard from all the other agents-all-the-way-down companies: AI will be just as good as you are at surfing the web. Possibly better. Big, if true.”

Robotics

California’s Ban on Self-Driving Trucks Could Soon Be OverKirsten Korosec | TechCrunch

“California regulators have released revised rules that would allow companies to test and eventually deploy self-driving trucks on public highways. …While robotaxis have become commonplace in the San Francisco Bay Area and parts of Los Angeles, autonomous trucks are absent because regulations ban any driverless vehicles weighing over 10,000 pounds from testing on public roads.”

Computing

Meta Could Ax Up to One-Third of Its ‘Metaverse’ Budget Next YearEmma Roth | The Verge

“Meta, which changed its name from Facebook to align itself with the metaverse, has poured billions into building out its vision for virtual worlds over the past few years. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since shifted the company’s focus to developing AI superintelligence with a series of high-profile hires.”

Astronomers Have Found 6,000 Exoplanets—but This Could Be the First Known ExomoonGayoung Lee | Gizmodo

“The object appears to be around 0.4 Jupiter masses, which is more than seven Neptune masses, and is still much smaller than HD 206893 B at 28 Jupiter masses. So it’s an absolutely gigantic exomoon orbiting an absolutely gigantic exoplanet. Well, if true. As the researchers themselves admit, the alleged exomoon will now have to face scrutiny from the wider astronomical community.”