Lifeboat Foundation

This week now has four flights scheduled, starting with Crew-8, which is sending a new crew to the International Space Station for a six-month tour of duty after successfully launching from Florida. Starlink 6–41 from Cape Canaveral and Transporter 10 from Vandenberg Space Force Base are also on the docket along with the debut of a new small satellite launcher from Japan.

Crew-8 launched three NASA astronauts and one Roscosmos cosmonaut to the Station on March 3, while the Starlink 6–41 flight and Transporter 10 are now due to fly on March 4. The new KAIROS small satellite launcher developed by the Japanese commercial sector is scheduled to fly on March 8.

AI systems, such as GPT-4, can now learn and use human language, but they learn from astronomical amounts of language input—much more than children receive when learning how to understand and speak a language. The best AI systems train on text with a word count in the trillions, whereas children receive just millions per year.

Due to this enormous data gap, researchers have been skeptical that recent AI advances can tell us much about human learning and development. An ideal test for demonstrating a connection would involve training an AI model, not on massive data from the web, but on only the input that a single child receives. What would the model be able to learn then?

Continue reading “New research shows how child-like language learning is possible using AI tools” »

Researchers from China used different spectra of light to maximize data transmission in various modes and setting up interoperability between them.

A new light-based communication network developed through a research collaboration between Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications and Suzhou Lighting Chip Monolithic Optoelectronics Technology company in China makes seamless connectivity on land, in the sea, and in the air a reality.

While urban landscapes may enjoy the advantages of wireless 5G internet, many pockets worldwide still need broadband. Even as Elon Musk wants to make space-based ultra-fast internet connections the norm, the services cannot be delivered for undersea activities where research and exploration demand them.

It turns out an old dog can learn new tricks. After over 300 flights and 13 years in service, Falcon 9 continues to improve as SpaceX tweaks the design for higher performance.

SpaceX hit a new record on Sunday, flying 24 Starlink v.2 minis aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, surpassing its previous high water mark of 23 satellites. “This mission is carrying one additional Starlink satellite from previous east coast missions thanks in part to performance increases on Falcon 9,” SpaceX wrote on X.

The company did not detail how it was able to squeeze more performance out of Falcon 9. The Starlink v.2 mini debuted at the start of last year, boasting around 4x more capacity than its predecessors. The company has previously been launching 21–23 Starlink satellites per flight.

Discover Genie, the magical AI wizard from Google DeepMind, trained on internet videos to create endless action-packed virtual worlds.

On a normal day in February, Tim Rocktäschel from Google DeepMind’s Open-Endedness Team unveiled an exciting development in the field of artificial intelligence.

China ruled on a case of infringement of copyright by an AI-generated service, the first effective ruling of its kind globally, which provided a judicial answer to the dilemma of whether the content generated by AI service providers infringes on copyright, media reported on Monday.

According to the 21st Century Business Herald, the Guangzhou Internet Court ruled that the an AI company had infringed the plaintiff’s copyright and adaptation rights to the Ultraman works in the process of providing generative AI services, and should bear relevant civil liability.

The protagonist of this case was the super IP Ultraman. In this case, the copyright owner of the “Ultraman” works exclusively authorized the copyright of the series images to the plaintiff, while the defendant company operated a website, providing services with AI conversation and AI-generated painting functions.

We introduce Genie, a foundation world model trained from Internet videos that can generate an endless variety of playable (action-controllable) worlds from synthetic images, photographs, and even sketches.

What can we expect from next-gen Wi-Fi 7?

Chayka argues that cultivating our own personal taste is important, not because one form of culture is demonstrably better than another, but because that slow and deliberate process is part of how we develop our own identity and sense of self. Take that away, and you really do become the person the algorithm thinks you are.

As Chayka points out in Filterworld, algorithms “can feel like a force that only began to exist … in the era of social networks” when in fact they have “a history and legacy that has slowly formed over centuries, long before the Internet existed.” So how exactly did we arrive at this moment of algorithmic omnipresence? How did these recommendation machines come to dominate and shape nearly every aspect of our online and (increasingly) our offline lives? Even more important, how did we ourselves become the data that fuels them?

These are some of the questions Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones set out to answer in How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms. Wiggins is a professor of applied mathematics and systems biology at Columbia University. He’s also the New York Times’ chief data scientist. Jones is now a professor of history at Princeton. Until recently, they both taught an undergrad course at Columbia, which served as the basis for the book.