This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through September 14)
OpenAI Announces a New AI Model, Code-Named Strawberry, That Solves Difficult Problems Step by Step
Will Knight | Wired
“The corporate right this moment introduced a brand new advance that alerts a shift in method—a mannequin that may ‘purpose’ logically via many troublesome issues and is considerably smarter than current AI and not using a main scale-up. The brand new mannequin, dubbed OpenAI o1, can clear up issues that stump current AI fashions, together with OpenAI’s strongest current mannequin, GPT-4o.”
Google Says It’s Made a Quantum Computing Breakthrough That Reduces Errors
Sophia Chen | MIT Know-how Overview
“One main problem has been that quantum computer systems can retailer or manipulate info incorrectly, stopping them from executing algorithms which can be lengthy sufficient to be helpful. The brand new analysis from Google Quantum AI and its educational collaborators demonstrates that they’ll truly add elements to scale back these errors. …’This error correction stuff actually works, and I believe it’s solely going to get higher,’ wrote Michael Newman, a member of the Google staff, on X.”
Driverless Semis Could Be Months Away
Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica
“On a sunny morning in December, an 18-wheeler will pull right into a truck depot in Palmer, Texas, simply south of Dallas. The driving force will step out of the cab and assist switch his trailer to a second rig outfitted with highly effective sensors. This second truck will head south on Interstate 45 towards Houston. …Vehicles journey the 200 miles between Dallas and Houston on a regular basis. However there will probably be one thing particular concerning the center leg of this journey: There will probably be nobody within the automobile.”
Geothermal Energy Could Outperform Nuclear Power
Editorial Employees | The Economist
“How massive might EGS [or enhanced geothermal systems] get? Sufficiently big. Although DOE analyses counsel solely round 40GW of typical geothermal useful resource exist in America, new strategies develop the theoretical potential to a whopping 5,500GW throughout a lot of the nation, with robust potential in over half of states. The warmth is certainly on.”
CRISPR-Enhanced Viruses Are Being Deployed Against UTIs
Emily Mullin | Wired
“The worldwide rise in antibiotic resistance is making bacterial infections more durable to deal with and growing the danger of illness unfold, extreme sickness, and dying. As soon as thought of miracle medicine, antibiotics at the moment are shedding their effectiveness towards ever-evolving micro organism. One firm is aiming to deal with infections with a special technique: arming tiny viruses referred to as bacteriophages with CRISPR.”
OpenAI’s Fund-Raising Talks Could Value Company at $150 Billion
Cade Metz, Mike Isaac, Tripp Mickle, and Michael J. de la Merced | The New York Occasions
“If the brand new deal is accomplished, OpenAI will probably be extra useful than SpaceX, the personal rocket firm based by Elon Musk (who was additionally one in every of OpenAI’s co-founders). It might even be practically twice as useful as Intel, the venerable chip large, whose complete market worth has slipped to round $83 billion because it has been unable to maintain up with the AI increase.”
Transistor-Like Qubits Hit Key Benchmark
Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“A staff in Australia has just lately demonstrated a key advance in metal-oxide-semiconductor-based (or MOS-based) quantum computer systems. They confirmed that their two-qubit gates—logical operations that contain a couple of quantum bit, or qubit—carry out with out errors 99 % of the time. …What’s extra, these MOS-based quantum computer systems are appropriate with current CMOS know-how, which can make it extra simple to fabricate a lot of qubits on a single chip than with different strategies.”
Inside Google’s 7-Year Mission to Give AI a Robot Body
Hans Peter Brondmo | Quote
“As the top of Alphabet’s AI-powered robotics moonshot, I got here to consider many issues. For one, robots can’t come quickly sufficient. For an additional, they shouldn’t seem like us. …I’m extra satisfied than ever that the robots want to return. But I’ve considerations that Silicon Valley, with its give attention to ‘minimal viable merchandise’ and VCs’ common aversion to investing in {hardware}, will probably be affected person sufficient to win the worldwide race to present AI a robotic physique. And far of the cash that’s being invested is specializing in the unsuitable issues. Right here is why.”
The AI Spending Spree, in Charts
Nate Rattner and Tom Dotan | The Wall Avenue Journal
“Generative synthetic intelligence has sparked one of many largest spending booms in trendy American historical past, as firms and buyers wager a whole lot of billions of {dollars} that the know-how will revolutionize the worldwide economic system and sooner or later result in large income. The query is when, and even whether or not, all these investments will repay.”
Picture Credit score: Laura Skinner / Unsplash
