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Metas Open Source Llama 3 Is Already Nipping at OpenAIs Heels Will Knight | Wired OpenAI changed the world with ChatGPT, setting off a wave of AI investment and drawing more than 2 million developers to its cloud APIs. But if open source models prove competitive, developers and entrepreneurs may decide to stop paying to access the latest model from OpenAI or Google and use Llama 3 or one of the other increasingly powerful open source models that are popping up.

Real Hope for Cancer Cure as Personal mRNA Vaccine for Melanoma Trialed Andrew Gregory | The Guardian Experts are testing new jabs that are custom-built for each patient and tell their body to hunt down cancer cells to prevent the disease ever coming back. A phase 2 trial found the vaccines dramatically reduced the risk of the cancer returning in melanoma patients. Now a final, phase 3, trial has been launched and is being led by University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH). Dr Heather Shaw, the national coordinating investigator for the trial, said the jabs had the potential to cure people with melanoma and are being tested in other cancers, including lung, bladder and kidney.

An AI Startup Made a Hyperrealistic Deepfake of Me Thats So Good Its Scary Melissa Heikkil | MIT Technology Review Until now, all AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make them pretty easy to differentiate from reality. Because theyre so close to the real thing butnot quiteit, these videos can make people feel annoyed or uneasy or ickya phenomenon commonly known as the uncanny valley. Synthesia claims its new technology will finally lead us out of the valley.

Nuclear Fusion Experiment Overcomes Two Key Operating Hurdles Matthew Sparkes | New Scientist A nuclear fusion reaction has overcome two key barriers to operating in a sweet spot needed for optimal power production: boosting the plasma density and keeping that denser plasma contained. The milestone is yet another stepping stone towards fusion power, although a commercial reactor is still probably years away.

Daniel Dennett: Why Civilization Is More Fragile Than We Realized Tom Chatfield | BBC [Dennetts]warning was not of a takeover by some superintelligence, but of a threat he believed that nonetheless could be existential for civilization, rooted in the vulnerabilities of human nature. If we turn this wonderful technology we have for knowledge into a weapon for disinformation, he told me, we are in deep trouble. Why? Because we wont know what we know, and we wont know who to trust, and we wont know whether were informed or misinformed. We may become either paranoid and hyper-skeptical, or just apathetic and unmoved. Both of those are very dangerous avenues. And theyre upon us.'

California Just Went 9.25 Hours Using Only Renewable Energy Adele Peters | Fast Company Last Saturday, as 39 million Californians went about their daily livestaking showers, doing laundry, or charging their electric carsthe whole state ran on 100% clean electricity for more than nine hours. The same thing happened on Sunday, as the state was powered without fossil fuels for more than eight hours. It was the ninth straight day that solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, and battery storage fully powered the electric grid for at least some portion of the time. Over the last six and a half weeks, thats happened nearly every day. In some cases, its just for 15 minutes. But often its for hours at a time.

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AI Hype Is Deflating. Can AI Companies Find a Way to Turn a Profit? Gerrit De Vynck | The Washington Post Some once-promising start-ups have cratered, and the suite of flashy products launched by the biggest players in the AI raceOpenAI, Microsoft, Google and Metahave yet to upend the way people work and communicate with one another. While money keeps pouring into AI, very few companies are turning a profit on the tech, which remains hugely expensive to build and run. The road to widespread adoption and business success is still looking long, twisty and full of roadblocks, say tech executives, technologists and financial analysts.

Apple Releases Eight Small AI Language Models Aimed at On-Device Use Benj Edwards | Ars Technica In the world of AI, what might be called small language models have been growing in popularity recently because they can be run on a local device instead of requiring data center-grade computers in the cloud. On Wednesday, Appleintroduced a set of tiny source-available AI language models called OpenELM that are small enough to run directly on a smartphone. Theyre mostly proof-of-concept research models for now, but they could form the basis of future on-device AI offerings from Apple.

If Starship Is Real, Were Going to Need Big Cargo Movers on the Moon and Mars Eric Berger | Ars Technica Unloading tons of cargo on the Moon may seem like a preposterous notion. During Apollo, mass restrictions were so draconian that the Lunar Module could carry two astronauts, their spacesuits, some food, and just 300 pounds (136 kg) of scientific payload down to the lunar surface. By contrast, Starship is designed to carry 100 tons, or more, to the lunar surface in a single mission. This is an insane amount of cargo relative to anything in spaceflight history, but thats the future that [Jaret] Matthews is aiming toward.

Image Credit:CARTIST / Unsplash

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through April 27) - Singularity Hub

Blood transfusions save lives. In the US alone, people receive around 10 million units each year. But blood banks are always short in supplyespecially when it comes to the universal donor type O.

Surprisingly, the gut microbiome may hold a solution for boosting universal blood supplies by chemically converting other blood types into the universal O.

Infusing the wrong blood typesay, type A to type Btriggers deadly immune reactions. Type O blood, however, is compatible with nearly everyone. Its in especially high demand following hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other crises because doctors have to rapidly treat as many people as possible.

Sometimes, blood banks have an imbalance of different blood typesfor example, too much type A, not enough universal O. This week, a team from Denmark and Sweden discovered a cocktail of enzymes that readily converts type A and type B blood into the universal donor. Found in gut bacteria, the enzymes chew up an immune-stimulating sugar molecule dotted on the surfaces of type A and B blood cells, removing their tendency to spark an immune response.

Compared to previous attempts, the blend of enzymes converted A and B blood types to type O blood with remarkably high efficiencies, the authors wrote.

Blood types can be characterized in multiple ways, but roughly speaking, the types come in four main forms: A, B, AB, and O.

These types are distinguished by what kinds of sugar moleculescalled antigenscover the surfaces of red blood cells. Antigens can trigger immune rejection if mismatched. Type A blood has A antigens; type B has B antigens; type AB has both. Type O has neither.

This is why type O blood can be used for most people. It doesnt normally trigger an immune response and is highly coveted during emergencies when its difficult to determine a persons blood type. One obvious way to boost type O stock is to recruit more donors, but thats not always possible. As a workaround, scientists have tried to artificially produce type O blood using stem cell technology. While successful in the lab, its expensive and hard to scale up for real-world demands.

An alternative is removing the A and B antigens from donated blood. First proposed in the 1980s, this approach uses enzymes to break down the immune-stimulating sugar molecules. Like licking an ice cream cone, as the antigens gradually melt away, the blood cells are stripped of their A or B identity, eventually transforming into the universal O blood type.

The technology sounds high-tech, but breaking down sugars is something our bodies naturally do every day, thanks to microbes in the gut that happily digest our food. This got scientists wondering: Can we hunt down enzymes in the digestive track to convert blood types?

Over a half decade ago, a team from the University of British Columbia made headlines by using bacterial enzymes found in the gut microbiome to transform type A blood to type O. Some gut bugs eat away at mucusa slimy substance made of sugary molecules covering the gut. These mucus linings are molecularly similar to the antigens on red blood cells.

So, digestive enzymes from gut microbes could potentially chomp away A and B antigens.

In one test, the team took samples of human poop (yup), which carry enzymes from the gut microbiome and looked for DNA that could break down red blood cell sugar chains.

They eventually discovered two enzymes from a single bacterial strain. Tested in human blood, the duo readily stripped away type A antigens, converting it into universal type O.

The study was a proof of concept for transforming one blood type into another, with potentially real-world implications. Type A bloodcommon in Europe and the USmakes up roughly one-third of the supply of donations. A technology that converts it to universal O could boost blood transplant resources in this part of the world.

This is a first, and if these data can be replicated, it is certainly a major advance, Dr. Harvey Klein at the National Institutes of Healths Clinical Center, who was not involved in the work, told Science at the time.

Theres one problem though. Converted blood doesnt always work.

When tested in clinical trials, converted blood has raised safety concerns. Even when removing A or B antigens completely from donated blood, small hints from earlier studies found an immune mismatch between the transformed donor blood and the recipient. In other words, the engineered O blood sometimes still triggered an immune response.

Why?

Theres more to blood types than classic ABO. Type A is composed of two different subtypesone with higher A antigen levels than the other. Type B, common in people of Asian and African descent, also comes in extended forms. These recently discovered sugar chains are longer and harder to break down than in the classic versions. Called extended antigens, they could be why some converted blood still stimulates the immune system after transfusion.

The new study tackled these extended forms by again peeking into gut bacteria DNA. One bacterial strain, A. muciniphila, stood out. These bugs contain enzymes that work like a previously discovered version that chops up type A and B antigens, but surprisingly, they also strip away extended versions of both antigens.

These enzymes werent previously known to science, with just 30 percent similarity when compared to a previous benchmark enzyme that cuts up B and extended B antigens.

Using cells from different donors, the scientists engineered an enzyme soup that rapidly wiped out blood antigens. The strategy is unprecedented, wrote the team.

Although the screen found multiple enzymes capable of blood type conversion, each individually had limited effects. But when mixed and matched, the recipe transformed donated B type cells into type O, with limited immune responses when mixed with other blood types.

A similar strategy yielded three different enzymes to cut out the problematic A antigen and, in turn, transform the blood to type O. Some people secrete the antigen into other bodily fluidsfor example, saliva, sweat, or tears. Others, dubbed non-secreters, have less of these antigens floating around their bodies. Using blood donated from both secreters and non-secreters, the team treated red blood cells to remove the A antigen and its extended versions.

When mixed with other blood types, the enzyme cocktail lowered their immune response, although with lower efficacy than cells transformed from type B to O.

By mapping the structures of these enzymes, the team found some parts increased their ability to chop up sugar chains. Focusing on these hot-spot structures, scientists are set to hunt down other naturally-derived enzymesor use AI to engineer ones with better efficacy and precision.

The system still needs to be tested in humans. And the team didnt address other blood antigens, such as the Rh system, which is what makes blood types positive or negative. Still, bacterial enzymes appear to be an unexpected but promising way to engineer universal blood.

Image Credit: Zeiss Microscopy / Flickr

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Scientists Find a Surprising Way to Transform A and B Blood Types Into Universal Blood - Singularity Hub

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Cognition Emerges From Stealth to Launch AI Software Engineer Devin Shubham Sharma | VentureBeat The human user simply types a natural language prompt into Devins chatbot style interface, and the AI software engineer takes it from there, developing a detailed, step-by-step plan to tackle the problem. It then begins the project using its developer tools, just like how a human would use them, writing its own code, fixing issues, testing and reporting on its progress in real-time, allowing the user to keep an eye on everything as it works.

Covariant Announces a Universal AI Platform for Robots Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum [On Monday, Covariant announced] RFM-1, which the company describes as a robotics foundation model that gives robots the human-like ability to reason. Thats from the press release, and while I wouldnt necessarily read too much into human-like or reason, what Covariant has going on here is pretty cool. Our existing system is already good enough to do very fast, very variable pick and place, says Covariant co-founder Pieter Abbeel. But were now taking it quite a bit further. Any task, any embodimentthats the long-term vision. Robotics foundation models powering billions of robots across the world.'

Cerebras Unveils Its Next Waferscale AI Chip Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum Cerebras says its next generation of waferscale AI chips can do double the performance of the previous generation while consuming the same amount of power. The Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) contains 4 trillion transistors, a more than 50 percent increase over the previous generation thanks to the use of newer chipmaking technology. The company says it will use the WSE-3 in a new generation of AI computers, which are now being installed in a datacenter in Dallas to form a supercomputer capable of 8 exaflops (8 billion billion floating point operations per second).

SpaceX Celebrates Major Progress on the Third Flight of Starship Stephen Clarke | Ars Technica SpaceXs new-generation Starship rocket, the most powerful and largest launcher ever built, flew halfway around the world following liftoff from South Texas on Thursday, accomplishing a key demonstration of its ability to carry heavyweight payloads into low-Earth orbit. The successful launch builds on two Starship test flights last year that achieved some, but not all, of their objectives and appears to put the privately funded rocket program on course to begin launching satellites, allowing SpaceX to ramp up the already-blistering pace of Starlink deployments.

This Self-Driving Startup Is Using Generative AI to Predict Traffic James ODonnell | MIT Technology Review The new system, called Copilot4D, was trained on troves of data from lidar sensors, which use light to sense how far away objects are. If you prompt the model with a situation, like a driver recklessly merging onto a highway at high speed, it predicts how the surrounding vehicles will move, then generates a lidar representation of 5 to 10 seconds into the future (showing a pileup, perhaps).

Electric Cars Are Still Not Good Enough Andrew Moseman | The Atlantic The next phase, when electric cars leap from early adoption to mass adoption, depends on the people [David] Rapson calls the pragmatists: Americans who will buy whichever car they deem best and who are waiting for their worries about price, range, and charging to be allayed before they go electric. The current slate of EVs isnt winning them over.

Mining Helium-3 on the Moon Has Been Talked About ForeverNow a Company Will Try Eric Berger | Ars Technica Two of Blue Origins earliest employees, former President Rob Meyerson and Chief Architect Gary Lai, have started a company that seeks to extract helium-3 from the lunar surface, return it to Earth, and sell it for applications here. The present lunar rush is rather like a California gold rush without the gold. By harvesting helium-3, which is rare and limited in supply on Earth, Interlune could help change that calculus by deriving value from resources on the moon. But many questions about the approach remain.

What Happens When ChatGPT Tries to Solve 50,000 Trolley Problems? Fintan Burke | Ars Technica Autonomous driving startups are now experimenting with AI chatbot assistants, including one self-driving system that will use one toexplain its driving decisions. Beyond announcing red lights and turn signals, the large language models (LLMs) powering these chatbots may ultimately need to make moral decisions, like prioritizing passengers or pedestrians safety. But is the tech ready? Kazuhiro Takemoto, a researcher at the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan, wanted to check if chatbots could make the same moral decisions when driving as humans.

States Are Lining Up to Outlaw Lab-Grown Meat Matt Reynolds | Wired As well as the Florida bill, there is also proposed legislation to ban cultivated meat in Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, and Tennessee. If all of those bills passan admittedly unlikely prospectthen some 46 million Americans will be cut off from accessing a form of meat that many hope will be significantly kinder to the planet and animals.

Physicists Finally Find a Problem Only Quantum Computers Can Do Lakshmi Chandrasekaran | Quanta Quantum computers are poised to become computational superpowers, but researchers have long sought a viable problem that confers a quantum advantagesomething only a quantum computer can solve. Only then, they argue, will the technology finally be seen as essential. Theyve been looking for decades. Now, a team of physicists including [John] Preskill may have found the best candidate yet for quantum advantage.

Image Credit: SpaceX

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 16) - Singularity Hub

In sci-fi and horror movies, the "mad scientist" rarely begins as a villain. From Dr. Frankenstein to Spider-Man's Doc Ock, they are often the victims of a combination of good intentions, unstoppable curiosity and more than a little hubris. Their plight is as familiar in real life as on screen, most recently with artificial intelligence.

According to the authors of "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," who heavily borrowed from fantasy-genre language to predict a high-tech future, "We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone we are literally making sand think. ... We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder."

Ray Kurzweil is a scientist and futurist who for years now has predicted potential advancements in higher tech, as not just a helpful set of tools for humans to use but also as essential to post-human evolution. By hitching our humanity to artificial intelligence, what he calls "the Singularity," Kurzweil prophesies a new age:

"And this Singularity isn't far off," he says. "I set the date for the Singularity representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today."

Kurzweil sees the Singularity as more than a possibility. He thinks it is a near-absolute inevitability that human intelligence will be equaled, surpassed and eventually merged with our computerized tools.

Though many predictions about AI are still more science fiction than fact, it is advancing faster than many expected. Even Kurzweil, when he was writing in the early 2000s, failed to see the omnipresence of smartphones and social media. Today, it is nearly impossible to identify things produced by programs such as ChatGPT.

For years, Oxford mathematician and devout Christian John Lennox has warned of some of AI's more negative implications. In his book "2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity," Lennox challenged more utopian predictions about AI and highlighted its limits. "A neural network," wrote Lennox, "can pick out a cat on a YouTube video, but it has no concept of what a cat is." Here, Lennox is pointing to a profound limitation of materialism. In fact, only those wedded to the idea that the human mind is merely an organic machine can think that a smart computer is, in any real sense, "alive."

Though AI may never be the golden ticket it's hyped to be, suggested Lennox, its threats to humanity remain. The title intentionally points to George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984." The current situation in China should be enough to reveal that it will not take a fully realized Singularity to enslave millions. It will only take fallen humans with bad ideas and enough power to control some very powerful technologies.

And yet, the promises of AI are amazing. An algorithm can pick out our music, movies and groceries with incredible accuracy, even if it is a bit creepy. The labor- and time-saving potential of AI will save humanity hours of mindless tasks. And we've not even begun to imagine the potential for technical and medical advances.

However, potentials are not actuals, and history is full of the unintended applications and consequences of human technologies. The only way forward in these possible futures is with a clear-eyed perspective on human exceptionalism and human fallenness. We must know the implications of both being created in the image of God and being an heir of Adam's sin.

Adapted from Breakpoint, Feb. 23, 2024; reprinted by permission of the Colson Center, breakpoint.org.

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Breakpoint: The promises and perils of artificial intelligence - Chattanooga Times Free Press

Singularity 6's cosy MMO Palia has reached over 3 million players in six months ahead of its launch on Steam on March 25.

The studio's debut title a fantasy mix of life simulation and MMORPG launched last August with a PC open beta via its own website and launcher, followed by a release on the Epic Games Store in October. The game then launched on Nintendo Switch in December.

As for how Palia achieved this feat, Singularity 6 director of business strategy Yu Sian Tan tells GamesIndustry.biz it was a combination of captivating players and the game's release on Nintendo Switch.

"We believe that we struck a chord with players when we wanted to expand the community sim experience by making it more social, creating an environment that encourages players to be kind to one another and having an overarching narrative that players can dive into," she says, adding that Nintendo's involvement and supporting in development and marketing aided an increase in player numbers.

"[Their support] is invaluable to us as a new game studio," Tan adds. "After our launch on the Nintendo Switch, our partnership with Nintendo has only grown stronger."

Tan says Palia's launch on Nintendo provided a "big boost" to the title compared to the PC open beta due to the "flexibility" of the portable console.

"It also meant we were launching on a new platform and now supported cross-platform play so things definitely got a lot more interesting for the team," she says.

Despite this boost in player numbers, Tan notes that maintaining player engagement is one of the biggest challenges of overseeing the success of a free-to-play MMO.

"The free-to-play approach can be challenging because it involves a bit of a balancing act between offering engaging gameplay for free, but also introducing effective monetisation strategies that do not alienate players or cause unnecessary pressure that would run antithetical to the cosy community sim gameplay we are trying to encourage in Palia," she explains.

Tan highlights that the main obstacle with free-to-play is the ability to engage players over a long period of time when they haven't paid an upfront cost for the game, as well as keeping the game fresh as a live service product.

"I'd love to be able to say it's easy to predict what our players love to play and how they would engage with our content, but every time we release something new to our players, we constantly learn and evolve our understanding of our playerbase," she says.

"Every time we release something new to our players, we constantly learn and evolve our understanding of our playerbase"

"It's a mix of offering up content with our own unique spin on it that appeals to the player archetypes we expect to be attracted to Palia, but also throwing in new experiences to help players discover something that they might not have expected to like."

In terms of the live service aspect of the game, Tan describes adapting the title to this model as a "learning curve" for the studio, and that its live operations team has been instrumental in understanding concerns raised by its development team and ensuring their needs are met.

"We have definitely been working on improving our platform testing over time to understand what we need to test and where to test it to ensure we minimise our risk and maximise confidence," she notes.

"We have also been working on unifying the gameplay experience between platforms where it makes sense, without sacrificing the player experience. This has been a conscious effort for us as there are trade-offs we have to make, but this is key to ensure we can sustainably release content on multiple platforms in the future."

Among the lessons learned during development, Tan highlights that the game starting as an open beta on PC enabled the studio to comfortably launch the game on Switch, and helped lay the groundwork to bring the game to a bigger audience.

"There have been so many lessons we have learned along the way from building our own launcher/patcher on PC from scratch [to creating] robust monitoring systems and a scalable infrastructure that could handle the ebbs and flows in our playerbase," she says.

As for advice she has for developers working on similar free-to-play and live service products, Tan says it all comes down to the strength of the development team itself.

"The most important factor is to have a strong development team who trusts each other to band together and support each other throughout the ups and downs," she highlights. "Accept that you cannot plan for everything, so it's important to have established processes for how you deal with issues when they come up and how you take the lessons and apply them going forward."

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Palia reaches over 3m players in six months thanks to "invaluable" Switch partnership - GamesIndustry.biz