Toggle light / dark theme

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to: http://to.pbs.org/DonateSPACE

Sign Up on Patreon to get access to the Space Time Discord!
/ pbsspacetime.

Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains. But sometimes physics comes to conclusions that are in direct conflict with concepts fundamental to our minds, such as the realness of space and time. How do we tell who’s correct? Are time and space objective realities or human-invented concepts?

Episode Companion Playlist.

In today’s AI news, CoreWeave has acquired AI developer platform Weights & Biases. According to The Information, CoreWeave spent $1.7 Billion on the transaction. Weights & Biases was valued at $1.25 Billion in 2023. The acquisition extends CoreWeave’s purpose-built cloud platform by enabling an end-to-end experience for customers, enhancing functionality for the world’s leading AI labs and enterprises to build, tune and deploy AI applications.

S Turing Award — often called the Nobel Prize of computer science — is going to Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, the pioneers of a key approach that underlies much of today Then, a team of researchers at Zoom has developed a breakthrough technique that could dramatically reduce the cost and computational resources needed for AI systems to tackle complex reasoning problems, Chain of draft (CoD), enables large language models (LLMs) to solve problems with minimal words — using as little as 7.6% of the text required by current methods while maintaining or even improving accuracy.

And soon, all businesses will be able to use Meta’s AI to power live, 24/7 customer service that can interact with customers on behalf of businesses on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Meta announced advancements in business AI—including the customer service AI agent that will make purchases and can respond to voice prompts from a user.

In videos, say goodbye to manual contract processing! IBM’s Brandon Swink explores how Generative AI, ECM, and Orchestration Hubs streamline document management and improve efficiency. Discover how these technologies transform your approach to complex documents.

And, in this episode of Top of Mind, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Daryl Plummer explores the emerging world of guardian agents — AI designed to monitor other AI. Learn how guardian agents will become critical for organizations deploying AI agents for quality control, system observation and security from rogue AI behavior.

Description: We are the targets for numerous information campaigns, as companies, politicians, cybercriminals, and nation states guzzle up the digital dust of our online selves. These information campaigns are designed to trigger our survival instincts in order to prevent us from thinking, and instead trigger an emotional reaction. Dr. Schwartz will discuss this rivalry for power, and how we must first learn how to calm our survival brain in order to defend our cognitive terrain against the onslaught of information warfare.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Tamara Schwartz, USAF (ret.), is an Associate Professor of Cybersecurity and Strategy at the York College of Pennsylvania, and an affiliate researcher with Cybersecurity at MIT-Sloan Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, an international cybersecurity think tank. While on active duty, Dr. Schwartz’s thought leadership informed the standup of Cyber Command and the design of various command centers supporting Joint Space, Cyber, and Global Strategic Operations, and her work at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan earned her the 2011 Information Operations Officer of the Year. More recently, Dr. Schwartz was a member of the 2020 “Dr. Evil task force,” with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, identifying future threats to inform DoD investments in emerging technology. She received her B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, her M.S. in Engineering Management from the University of Dayton, and her Doctorate of Business Administration from the Fox School of Business, Temple University. Her research expertise includes Artificial Intelligence, cybersecurity as a strategic competitive advantage, and information warfare.

Information Warfare, by Dr. Tamara Schwartz.
https://he.kendallhunt.com/product/in… College of Pennsylvania, Cybersecurity Management https://www.ycp.edu/academics/program… Weapons of Mass Disruption https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast

In today’s AI news, Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek wrapped up a week of revealing technical details about its development of a ChatGPT competitor, which was achieved at a fraction of the typical costs, in a move that is poised to accelerate global advances in the field. Over the past few days, DeepSeek published eight open-source projects on GitHub, the world’s largest open-source community.

In other advances, TikTok is preparing to sunset its creator marketplace in favor of a new, more expanded experience, the company has informed businesses and creators via email. The online platform, which connects brands with creators for collaborating on ads and other sponsorships, will stop allowing creator invitations or the creation of new campaigns as of Saturday the company says.

Ll need a Mac with an M1 chip or higher, which means Intel-based Macs are out of the loop. + And, Hume AI has unveiled Octave, an innovative text-to-speech (TTS) system that leverages large language model (LLM) technology to generate contextually aware and emotionally nuanced speech. The incredibly human-like voice tool competitively positions Octave as a leader in AI-driven voice synthesis. Traditional TTS systems often produce context-insensitive speech, which leads to monotonous output.

In videos, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, returns to the Hard Fork podcast for a candid, wide-ranging interview. We discuss Anthropic’s brand-new Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, the A.I. arms race against China, and his hopes and fears for this technology over the next two years. Then, we gather up recent tech stories, put them into a hat and close out the week with a round of HatGPT.

Organizations that rely solely on interactive sign-in monitoring are likely blind to these attacks and its risks, which include account takeovers, business disruption, lateral movement, multifactor authentication (MFA) invasion, and conditional access policies (CAP) bypass potential.

“For organizations heavily reliant on Microsoft 365, this attack is a wake-up call,” said Darren Guccione, CEO and co-founder at Keeper Security, in an emailed statement to Dark Reading. “Robust cybersecurity isn’t just about having MFA — it’s about securing every authentication pathway. A password manager enforces strong, unique credentials while minimizing exposure to credential-based attacks. For noninteractive authentication, privileged access management (PAM) is essential, ensuring least-privilege access, regular credential rotation, and real-time monitoring of service accounts.”

As for the threat actors, the researchers believe that it is likely a Chinese-affiliated group, though this theory remains unconfirmed.

Tech juggernaut Nvidia continued its winning streak on Wednesday, posting record quarterly revenue of $39.3 billion, up 12% from last quarter and 78% a year ago, compared to Wall Street’s projection of $38.3 billion. Sales for the year came in at $130.5 billion, up 114% from the previous year.

The company forecast revenue for next quarter to hit $43 billion, slightly above the Street’s projections. Gross margins dipped for a second consecutive quarter, however, coming in at 73.5%, matching the guidance CFO Colette Kress offered last quarter. She said margins are expected to temporarily drop into the low 70s amid the Blackwell rollout.

Another amazing quarter from the company, said Will Rhind, founder and CEO of GraniteShares, who manages leveraged ETFs that give investors double the exposure to long or short positions on the stock. The only slight thing that I guess you could probably nitpick on is margins.

Today, the company’s data center business accounts for most of its sales as customers, including nearly all of Big Tech, race to amass as much compute power as possible. The data center division’s $35.6 billion in revenue increased 93% from the same quarter last year and beat the Street’s expected number of $34.2 billion.

Major Chinese tech companies have been ramping up efforts to spur AI business growth.

Alibaba Group plans to invest more than $52 billion on AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years, in a bid to seize more opportunities in the artificial-intelligence era.

The spending of at least 380 billion yuan, equivalent to $52.41 billion, will surpass the company’s AI and cloud computing investment over the past decade, Alibaba said in a post Monday on its news site. Alibaba first mentioned the plan last week when the company reported its results but didn’t provide a specific figure.

The technology giant co-founded by Jack Ma delivered better-than-expected results for three months ended December, with revenue growth accelerating to its fastest pace since late 2023, supported by improvements in its e-commerce and cloud businesses.

In today’s AI news, Alibaba Group plans to invest more than $52 billion on AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years, in a bid to seize more opportunities in the artificial-intelligence era. The spending of at least 380 billion yuan, equivalent to $52.41 billion, will surpass the company’s AI and cloud computing investment over the past decade, Alibaba said in a post Monday on its news site.

And, at the Global Developer Conference, an AI community event hosted in Shanghai over the weekend, open-source developers from around China congregated in a show of exuberance over the possibilities of AI since DeepSeek’s resource-efficient models captured the world’s imagination. Use cases on display included everything from robotics to virtual reality glasses.

Then, John Werner poses the question, what if you could just run to the supply room, and Xerox an entire firm? What would that look like? Well, it might be expensive. But probably not as expensive as humans. John says, Dwarkesh Patel gives us an idea in a new collaborative essay Jan. 31 talking about the potential for all-AI companies. Suggesting that “everyone is sleeping on the collective advantages AI will have” …

And, agents capable of handling shopping-related tasks, optimizing supply chains, and creating personalized customer experiences are already here. Retail, in particular e-commerce, has been the poster child for agentic AI and is a sector where there is a lot of hype but also some very compelling use cases. So, let’s explore what’s happening in this space and what we can expect to see in the future.

In videos, during the 2025 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the chairman, founder and chief educational technology scientist of Squirrel AI Learning, Derek Haoyang Li, discusses with Forbes’ Randall Lane, the research, technology and success behind the Shanghai company’s innovative adaptive education models.

Meanwhile, as AI chatbots become more personal and proactive, the line between tool and companion is beginning to blur, with some users even professing love for their digital aides, says business consultant Amaryllis Liampoti. She presents three foundational principles for how brands can harness AI to build deeper emotional connections with consumers while prioritizing well-being, transparency and autonomy —

This approach is not only faster and more energy-efficient but also delivers precise control over the material’s optical properties.

Light-Powered Quantum Dot Tuning

Researchers at north carolina state university.

Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, North Carolina State University (also referred to as NCSU, NC State, or just State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. NC State offers a wide range of academic programs and disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, business, and education. It is known for its strong programs in engineering, science, and technology and is a leader in research and innovation. It forms one of the corners of the Research Triangle together with Duke University in Durham and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.