Lifeboat Foundation

AUSTIN (Austin Business Journal) — Tesla Inc.’s growing footprint in the Austin area now includes a sizable facility in Hutto. But what it’s for remains unclear.

The Austin Business Journal visited the 36,000-square-foot site at 200 County Road 199 in the fast-growing industrial hub northeast of Austin in late December. The parking lot was full and a nondescript warehouse-style building was bustling with employees in construction vests and helmets, but there were no signs listing any companies and no clear indications of who was occupying it. The only traces it could be Tesla were a handful of the company’s electric vehicle charging stations out front.

But Elon Musk’s EV manufacturing and clean energy company is linked to the site in state filings, and it has been confirmed by Hutto officials. Tesla’s expansion to Hutto underscores the company’s wide-reaching plans for the region — as far south as San Antonio and, now, as far north as Hutto — as it continues buildout of its multibillion-dollar operation in eastern Travis County. The Hutto site is about 30 miles directly north of its gigafactory, which serves as the company’s headquarters, along State Highway 130.

Rocket Lab’s ($RKLB) space systems business got a major boost just before the year drew to a close.

As the cofounder of Google DeepMind, Shane Legg is driving one of the greatest transformations in history: the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). He envisions a system with human-like intelligence that would be exponentially smarter than today’s AI, with limitless possibilities and applications. In conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Legg explores the evolution of AGI, what the world might look like when it arrives — and how to ensure it’s built safely and ethically.

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Continue reading “The Transformative Potential of AGI — and When It Might Arrive | Shane Legg and Chris Anderson | TED” »

Square Enix is using AI to increase productivity.

“In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity and achieve greater sophistication in our marketing efforts,” Kiryu continuted. “In the longer term, we hope to leverage those technologies to create new forms of content for consumers, as we believe that technological innovation represents business opportunities.”

On the publishing front, Kiryu reveals the company wants to “enable greater global collaboration and to promote the shift to digital.” The team hopes this will allow them to not only gives them the chance to “maximize our sales of new titles, but also to deliver our rich back catalog to more customers and in turn to expand the fan base for our Group’s intellectual properties (IPs).”

Continue reading “Square Enix President States the Company Will Be ‘Aggressive in Applying AI’” »

Businesses must also ensure they are prepared for forthcoming regulations. President Biden signed an executive order to create AI safeguards, the U.K. hosted the world’s first AI Safety Summit, and the EU brought forward their own legislation. Governments across the globe are alive to the risks. C-suite leaders must be too — and that means their generative AI systems must adhere to current and future regulatory requirements.

So how do leaders balance the risks and rewards of generative AI?

Businesses that leverage three principles are poised to succeed: human-first decision-making, robust governance over large language model (LLM) content, and a universal connected AI approach. Making good choices now will allow leaders to future-proof their business and reap the benefits of AI while boosting the bottom line.

A common carbon compound is enabling remarkable performance enhancements when mixed in just the right proportion with copper to make electrical wires. It’s a phenomenon that defies conventional wisdom about how metals conduct electricity.

The findings, reported in the journal Materials & Design, could lead to more efficient electricity distribution to homes and businesses, as well as more efficient motors to power electric vehicles and industrial equipment. The team has applied for a patent for the work, which was supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office.

Materials scientist Keerti Kappagantula and her colleagues at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory discovered that graphene, single layers of the same graphite found in pencils, can enhance an important property of metals called the temperature coefficient of resistance.

Google has been dominating the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems for years. This has undoubtedly been helped by its 2014 acquisition of DeepMind, the London-based startup focused on AI research that developed AlphaGo, a program capable of defeating a grand champion of complex Asian board game Go, which opened debate on whether the AI would eventually surpass the human mind.

But Google’s unquestioned dominance was interrupted last year by another startup — OpenAI. The launch of ChatGPT, the most successful application in history, caught big technology companies off guard, and forced them to accelerate their AI programs. In April of this year, DeepMind — which until then had functioned as a relatively independent research laboratory— and Google Brain — the technology company’s other major research division — merged into a single organization: Google DeepMind, which has some of the best AI scientists in the world.

Colin Murdoch, 45, is the chief business officer of Google’s new AI super division, which has just presented its first toy: Gemini, a multimodal generative AI platform that can process and generate text, code, images, audio and video from different data sources. Those who have used it say that it far surpasses the latest version of ChatGPT, and that it puts Google back in the fight to dominate the market.

OpenAI recently topped $1.6 billion in annualized revenue on strong growth from its ChatGPT product, up from $1.3 billion as of mid-October, according to two people with knowledge of the figure.

The 20% growth over two months represented in that figure—a measure of the prior month’s revenue multiplied by 12—suggests that the company was able to hold onto its business momentum in selling artificial intelligence to enterprises despite a leadership crisis in November that provided an opening for rivals to go after its customers.

Earlier this year, GitHub rolled out Copilot Chat, a ChatGPT-like programming-centric chatbot for organizations subscribed to Copilot for Business. Copilot Chat more recently came to individual Copilot customers — those paying $10 per month — in beta. And now, GitHub’s launching Chat in general availability for all users.

As of today, Copilot Chat is available in the sidebar in Microsoft’s IDEs, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio — included as a part of GitHub Copilot paid tiers and free for verified teachers, students and maintainers of certain open source projects.

“As home to the world’s developers, we’ve brought to market what is now the most widely adopted AI developer tool in history,” Shuyin Zhao, VP of product management at GitHub, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “And code complete was just the beginning.”