Submission Statement

OpenAI has been hinting at a big leap forward for LLMs with its upcoming release of its GPT-4. We'll see. In the meantime, it's extraordinary watching some people defend Galactica. They are convinced it's the beginning of an emergent form of reasoning intelligence. Its severe limitation, as with all LLMs, is that they frequently produce utter nonsense, and have no way of telling the difference between nonsense and reality.

I'll be curious to see if GPT-4 has acquired even the rudiments of reasoning ability. I'm sure AI will acquire this ability at some point. But it seems strange to blindly believe one particular approach will make it happen, when there is no evidence of it at present.

Submission Statement

Someone is going to need to develop a search engine that only references trusted sources of information. An internet populated with useless AI generated text will be a waste of time. What is the point of searching for science information if all you can find is useless garbage like this?

AI generated content is so easy to create we will soon reach a point where it outnumbers human content. One day, perhaps not long after, it will vastly outnumber human content. All while being full of mistakes, errors and misinformation.

> Lake Nyos tragedy

The size of Energy Dome's C02 bladders are miniscule in comparison to the amount of C02 released at Lake Nygos.

That tragedy released 1.2 cubic kilometer of gas. Here's a 1 cubic kilometer cube for scale; it dwarves the whole of Lower Manhattan.

>>That’s sounds super inefficient.

They claim the opposite.

In a research paper here they speak of an RTE (Radiative Transfer Efficiency) of 77%, and say the system's simplicity contributes to its efficiency, as it has only only two thermodynamic transformations: one compression and one expansion.

Submission Statement

There are bold claims about cost, but the really interesting thing about Energy Dome is its potential speed of deployment. As it uses existing common off-the-shelf materials it can overcome many of the supply chain bottlenecks that bedevil other grid storage battery solutions.

More details are here.

Submission Statement

Here's the rumor statement from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

It's worth noting The Turing Test is considered obsolete. It only requires an AI to appear to be intelligent enough to fool a human. In some instances, GPT-3 already does that with some of the more credulous sections of the population.

The Winograd Schema Challenge is regarded as a much better test of true intelligence. It will require genuine reasoning ability from an AI. The answer won't be available from scanning the contents of the internet and applying statistical methods that frequently correlate with what a truly intelligent, independently reasoned answer to a question is.

In any case, if the leap to GPT-4 is as great as the one from GPT-2 to GPT-3 was, we can expect even more human-like intelligence from AI.

Submission Statement

This puts Waymo in the global lead when it comes to robo-taxis. Cruise in San Francisco is trialing a service with no safety drivers, but it only operates from 10pm-6am. Baidu is trialing operations in two Chinese cities without safety drivers, but are still basically in test mode, with very few operational cars.

If I were Uber or Lyft, I would be worried. You need these companies a lot more than they need you, if they need you at all.

Submission Statement

This is great news, but it's worth remembering that of the 725,000 human deaths every year from mosquitoes, 600,000 of those are from malaria, and this technique doesn't work with the mosquitoes that cause it.

Still, what is hopeful about this technique is that it's so cheap and easy to operate. The boxes with the eggs can be easily distributed and take no special knowledge to operate. It really is as simple as just adding the right amount of water to the right schedule.

Submission Statement

Here's a Twitter thread from lead researcher Deepak Pathak explaining more of this.

When sci-fi writers imagine future widespread robot adoption in society, it's usually with humanoid-type robots. The Will Smith movie "I, Robot" is a good example of this.

Perhaps it's quadrupeds that will get there first. Boston Dynamics Spot is useful enough that you could imagine it selling in tens or hundreds of millions of units around the world; if the price was right, however they cost $74,500. This version was built for $6,000 and the Unittree Go1sells for only $2,700.

If someone brings the functionality demonstrated here in something costing less than $3,000 I would imagine you will start seeing robot dogs everywhere, and they'll have to update any remake of I, Robot.

>>This technology is very expansive

Actually the opposite is the case, as you are replacing human workers with robots. Apis Cor claim a 30% reduction in prices compared to traditional methods.

It's reasonable to assume if the industry matured and was in widespread use, and its robots continued technologically advancing, and were able to do more and more of the work, costs would go down even more.

Submission Statement

The US capital markets regularly throw billions, if not tens of billions, at technology companies whose business models stretch credulity. Uber has raised $25 billion, and never once turned a profit.

Which raises the question, why aren't they interested in 3D printing of houses? There is a massive shortage of houses around the world and the construction staff to build them. Country after country on every continent lacks housing, poor and rich countries alike. It seems reasonable to assume global demand for 3D printed houses could be counted in the tens of millions, perhaps even more.

Apis Cor has a demonstrable record of achievement with its technology. Their most famous construction in Dubai looks of a standard many people would be perfectly happy with as a dwelling.

Yet they and the rest of this sector are shunned by capital markets - what gives?

>> They’ve been 3D printing massive, space-bound structures for years.

Relativity Space, like several others, has used 3D printing to build parts for rockets on Earth.

3D printing has been tested onboard the ISS, but as far as I know no one has tested a 3D printer in orbit outside the ISS, as Redwire plans to do.