Listen to the podcast episode here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/222312/131…
Category: robotics/AI
Gödel, Escher, Bach author Doug Hofstadter on why today’s AI terrifies him
Wonderful book.
Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, voices his concerns about how the current wave of rapid advancements in AI may endanger humanity.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Introduction.
0:34 When I started out, computers were rigid.
1:29 I thought Artificial Intelligence would take hundreds of years.
1:59 I never imagined computers would rival humans so soon.
2:53 It feels like humans are about to be eclipsed.
4:01 I feel diminished, inferior.
5:01 AI pioneer Geoff Hinton may regret part of his life’s work.
6:07 Conclusion: what do you think?
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW
• Gödel, Escher, Bach author Doug Hofstadter…
READ \
New technique cools high-performance chips from the inside out
Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have developed a technique to carve microscopic liquid-cooling channels directly inside silicon semiconductor chips.
Interestingly, the computer architecture slashed the energy required for cooling by pumping ordinary, room-temperature water straight through the chip’s internal structure.
“As the performance of AI semiconductors and advanced electronic packaging becomes increasingly limited by heat, we expect this technology to serve as a foundational cooling solution for future high-performance computing systems,” said Professor Sung Jin Kim.
The Path to Robust deAGI | Ben Goertzel SCaLE 23x
The Path to Robust deAGI asks what it would take to build artificial general intelligence that is both powerful and structurally aligned with human flourishing—not just steered by after‑the‑fact safety patches. Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET and a founding member of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, will outline how a decentralized, token‑coordinated ecosystem—combining ASI: Chain, Hyperon AGI, and community‑owned GPU clouds—can prevent AGI from being captured by any single corporation or state.
Goertzel will contrast centralized AGI roadmaps with a deAGI approach that bakes openness, diversity of values, and economic inclusion into the architecture itself, drawing on ideas like pluralistic training data, interoperable agent networks, and on‑chain governance of key system upgrades. He will also discuss technical milestones toward “robust” deAGI—modular cognitive architectures, decentralized marketplaces for AI services, and verification mechanisms that let communities audit and constrain AGI behavior—framing them as concrete steps toward an AGI that advances joy, growth, and choice for all rather than amplifying existing power imbalances.
Overview of Kwaai.
Kwaai is a registered 501©3 non-profit organization and open source AI research and development lab. Its mission is to democratize artificial intelligence by building open source Personal AI systems that prioritize user privacy, data ownership, and transparency. Kwaai operates as a volunteer-based initiative and invites technologists, researchers, policy experts, and community members to join its efforts.
What is Personal AI?
Kwaai’s vision of Personal AI is an assistant that users own and control. This AI:
Is trained on the user’s own data and experiences.
Runs locally on personal devices or on a peer to peer fabric, without requiring a SaaS subscription.
ChartNet trains AI to read charts, boosting smaller models past commercial rivals
To accelerate and refine decision-making in a fast-paced, global marketplace, enterprises may deploy generative artificial intelligence models to help summarize and interpret the charts that often fill market summaries and financial reports.
But even the latest vision-language models sometimes struggle with this task, since it requires a model to integrate visual, numerical, and linguistic understanding. A company that invests in a state-of-the-art model might still receive inaccurate or incomplete information.
To fill this performance gap, researchers from MIT and the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab developed a multifaceted resource for AI users that is specifically designed to teach vision-language models (VLMs) how to effectively interpret charts.
How do flocking birds and schools of fish move? New research offers crystal-clear answer
Flocking birds and schools of fish are a familiar sight. While previous research has uncovered the broad dynamics driving these movements, their underlying intricacies remain a mystery. Now a study by a team of New York University mathematicians offers new insights into these phenomena. It reveals that flocks and schools behave in ways similar to a soft crystalline material, with individual birds and fish serving as “atoms” that are evenly spaced in a lattice-like formation.
The findings, reported in the journal Physical Review Fluids, offer detailed insights into the hydrodynamic and aerodynamic interactions crucial in aerospace and automotive engineering, robotics and energy harvesting.
“Our findings offer a new way to understand how animal collectives coordinate movement and respond to their environment,” says Christiana Mavroyiakoumou, a researcher at NYU’s Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science at the time of the study and now a fellow at Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute. “More specifically, lines of birds or fish behave like an elastic material with regularly spaced individuals held together by flexible, or spring-like, bonds—akin to soft crystalline substances in which atoms are arranged in an orderly, repeating pattern.”
Europe warns of potential US AI cutoff as tech sovereignty push intensifies
Europe fears US AI control as OpenAI, Anthropic rules tighten at G7 talks
Geoffrey Hinton: “AI Is Already Conscious” | Big Technology Podcast
The “Godfather of AI” and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton just said the quiet part out loud: he believes today’s AI is already conscious — and that our entire model of the mind is “as wrong as the belief that people were designed by God.” In this clip from the Big Technology Podcast, Hinton dismantles the “stochastic parrot” argument (“I think that’s complete nonsense”), explains why understanding a question is impossible without real comprehension, and walks through the Copernicus → Darwin → AI arc that he says will end humanity’s belief that it is special. Then he turns to the company at the center of the AI safety debate: Anthropic. Hinton argues that a publicly traded AI lab has “a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders — as opposed to legally required to not wipe out human beings,” and warns that Anthropic is “caught in a bind” trying to stay safe while raising the money it needs to compete. He closes with the line every founder and regulator should hear: progress is the accelerator, regulation is the steering wheel — and the big labs are asking us to let them build a very fast car without one. Chapters: 0:00 “I believe they’re already conscious” 0:05 Why “stochastic parrot” is nonsense 1:40 We’re about to become the cat 3:40 Anthropic is caught in a bind 5:00 Regulation is the steering wheel, not the brake Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics and is often called the Godfather of AI for his foundational work on deep learning and backpropagation. He left Google in 2023 to speak freely about AI risk. 🎙️ Full episode (Big Technology Podcast): • AI Pioneer Geoffrey Hinton: AI Is Consciou… 📺 Frontier Cut curates the sharpest clips from the world’s top AI and business podcasts. New episodes weekly. 🔔 Subscribe: @frontiercut #GeoffreyHinton #AI #Anthropic #AISafety #Superintelligence #AGI #BigTechnologyPodcast
Kill the bench
Drawing from historical examples, Carmen Kivisild puts forth a bold vision for why wet lab automation is the future of biology. I’ve had similar hopes/thoughts for how biology will progress and I greatly enjoyed how this essay put words to these concepts.
Like Grace Hopper killed the punch card. The story of how “scientist” gets redefined.