This Week’s Superior Tech Tales From Across the Net (Via February 10)

Sam Altman Seeks Trillions of {Dollars} to Reshape Enterprise of Chips and AI
Keach Hagey | The Wall Road Journal
“The OpenAI chief government officer is in talks with buyers together with the United Arab Emirates authorities to lift funds for a wildly formidable tech initiative that may increase the world’s chip-building capability, increase its capacity to energy AI, amongst different issues, and value a number of trillion {dollars}, in keeping with individuals acquainted with the matter. The undertaking may require elevating as a lot as $5 trillion to $7 trillion, one of many individuals stated.”

AI Is Rewiring Coders’ Brains. Yours Might Be Subsequent
Will Knight | Wired
“GitHub’s proprietor, Microsoft, stated in its newest quarterly earnings that there at the moment are 1.3 million paid Copilot accounts—a 30 % enhance over the earlier quarter—and famous that fifty,000 completely different firms use the software program. Dohmke says the newest utilization knowledge from Copilot exhibits that nearly half of all of the code produced by customers is AI-generated. On the identical time, he claims there may be little signal that these AI applications can function with out human oversight.”

Google Prepares for a Future The place Search Isn’t King
Lauren Goode | Wired
“[Sundar] Pichai is…experimenting with a brand new imaginative and prescient for what Google provides—not changing search, not but, however constructing a substitute for see what sticks. ‘That is how we’ve at all times approached search, within the sense that as search advanced, as cellular got here in and consumer interactions modified, we tailored to it,’ Pichai says, talking with Wired forward of the Gemini launch. ‘In some circumstances we’re main customers, as we’re with multimodal AI. However I need to be versatile concerning the future, as a result of in any other case we’ll get it flawed.’”

Turbocharged CAR-T Cells Soften Tumors in Mice—Utilizing a Trick From Most cancers Cells
Asher Mullard | Nature
“The staff handled mice carrying blood and stable cancers with a number of T-cell therapies boosted with CARD11–PIK3R3, and watched the animals’ tumors soften away. Researchers sometimes use round a million cells to deal with these mice, says Choi, however even 20,000 of the cancer-mutation-boosted T cells have been sufficient to wipe out tumors. ‘That’s an impressively small variety of cells,’ says Nick Restifo, a cell-therapy researcher and chief scientist of the rejuvenation start-up firm Marble Therapeutics in Boston, Massachusetts.”

OpenAI Desires to Management Your Laptop
Maxwell Zeff | Gizmodo
“OpenAI is reportedly growing ‘agent software program,’ that can successfully take over your machine and full complicated duties in your behalf, in keeping with The Info. OpenAI’s agent would work between a number of apps in your pc, performing clicks, cursor actions, and textual content typing. It’s actually a brand new kind of working system, and it may change the way in which you work together along with your pc altogether.”

The New Automotive Batteries That May Energy the Electrical Automobile Revolution
Nicola Jones | Nature
“Researchers are experimenting with completely different designs that would decrease prices, lengthen car ranges and supply different enhancements. …Chinese language producers have introduced funds vehicles for 2024 that includes batteries based mostly not on the lithium that powers right now’s finest electrical automobiles (EVs), however on low cost sodium—one of the vital considerable parts in Earth’s crust. And a US laboratory has stunned the world with a dream cell that runs partially on air and will pack sufficient power to energy airplanes.”

SECURITY

I Stopped Utilizing Passwords. It’s Nice—and a Whole Mess
Matt Burgess | Wired
“For the previous month, I’ve been changing as lots of my accounts as doable—round a dozen for now—to make use of passkeys and begin the transfer away from the password for good. Spoiler: When passkeys work seamlessly, it’s a glimpse of a safer future for tens of millions, if not billions, of individuals, and a reinvention of how we sign up to web sites and companies. However getting there for each account throughout the web remains to be prone to show a minefield and take a while.”

Momentary Fusion Breakthroughs Face Onerous Actuality
Edd Gent | IEEE Spectrum
“The dream of fusion energy inched nearer to actuality in December 2022, when researchers at Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory (LLNL) revealed that a fusion response had produced extra power than what was required to kick-start it. In accordance with new analysis, the momentary fusion feat required beautiful choreography and intensive preparations, whose excessive diploma of problem reveals a protracted highway forward earlier than anybody dares hope a practicable energy supply could possibly be at hand.”

Meet ‘Smaug-72B’: The New King of Open-Supply AI
Michael Nuñez | VentureBeat
“What’s most noteworthy about right now’s launch is that Smaug-72B outperforms GPT-3.5 and Mistral Medium, two of probably the most superior proprietary massive language fashions developed by OpenAI and Mistral, respectively, in a number of of the most well-liked benchmarks. Whereas the mannequin nonetheless falls wanting the 90-100 level common indicative of human-level efficiency, its start indicators that open-source AI might quickly rival Large Tech’s capabilities, which have lengthy been shrouded in secrecy.”

AI-Generated Voices in Robocalls Can Deceive Voters. The FCC Simply Made Them Unlawful
Ali Swenson | Related Press
“The [FCC] on Thursday outlawed robocalls that comprise voices generated by synthetic intelligence, a choice that sends a transparent message that exploiting the know-how to rip-off individuals and mislead voters gained’t be tolerated. …The company’s chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, stated unhealthy actors have been utilizing AI-generated voices in robocalls to misinform voters, impersonate celebrities, and extort members of the family. ‘It looks like one thing from the far-off future, however this menace is already right here,’ Rosenworcel advised The AP on Wednesday because the fee was contemplating the rules.”

Picture Credit score: NASA Hubble Area Telescope / Unsplash