Lifeboat Foundation

Posthuman visions.

Posthuman art, AI art designed & curated by Steve Nichols.

Imagine using your cellphone to control the activity of your own cells to treat injuries and disease. It sounds like something from the imagination of an overly optimistic science fiction writer. But this may one day be a possibility through the emerging field of quantum biology.

Over the past few decades, scientists have made incredible progress in understanding and manipulating biological systems at increasingly small scales, from protein folding to genetic engineering. And yet, the extent to which quantum effects influence living systems remains barely understood.

Continue reading “Quantum physics proposes a new way to study biology—the results could revolutionize our understanding of how life works” »

This device is a pulse magneto-fusion power system whose successors could produce electricity from the first commercial fusion reactor as early as 2028.

Creating a continuously controlled fusion reaction and not a thermonuclear bomb requires a confined environment where high densities and high temperatures can turn hydrogen gas into plasma. The luxury the Sun enjoys as a big ball of hydrogen comes from its enormous size and immense gravitational forces which serve to confine the ongoing nuclear fusion within it. But here on Earth, we need powerful magnets to replace the gravity confinement that the Sun provides. And it was thought until recently that our confinement efforts to create dense plasma faced a speed limit barrier that caused the field to break. We now know that what was called the Greenwald Limit no longer exists after experiments done at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. So now the conditions to generate positive energy yields from controlled fusion means we are getting close to the first fusion reactors.

Enter Helion Energy and Pulse Fusion

Continue reading “The First-to-Fusion Power Wars Are On” »

ChatGPT is going mobile. Today, OpenAI announced the launch of an official iOS app that allows users to access its popular AI chatbot on the go, months after the App Store was filled with dubious, unofficial services. The new ChatGPT app will be free to use, free from ads, and will allow for voice input, the company says, but will initially be limited to U.S. users at launch.

Like its desktop counterpart, the ChatGPT app allows users to interact with an AI chatbot to ask questions without running a traditional web search, plus get advice, find inspiration, learn, research, and more. Given the issues with Apple’s own voice assistant, Siri, and Apple’s own lack of AI progress, the new release could push more users to try ChatGPT on their phones as their main mobile helper. The launch could also potentially impact Google, as the search engine today benefits from being the default search engine in Safari on Apple’s iPhone.

When using the mobile version of ChatGPT, the app will sync your history across devices — meaning it will know what you’ve previously searched for via its web interface, and make that accessible to you. The app is also integrated with Whisper, OpenAI’s open source speech recognition system, to allow for voice input.

Meta says it’s created a generative AI tool for coding similar to GitHub’s Copilot.

The company made the announcement at an event focused on its AI infrastructure efforts, including custom chips Meta’s building to accelerate the training of generative AI models. The coding tool, called CodeCompose, isn’t available publicly — at least not yet. But Meta says its teams use it internally to get code suggestions for Python and other languages as they type in IDEs like VS Code.

“The underlying model is built on top of public research from [Meta] that we have tuned for our internal use cases and codebases,” Michael Bolin, a software engineer at Meta, said in a prerecorded video. “On the product side, we’re able to integrate CodeCompose into any surface where our developers or data scientists work with code.”

Stability AI, the AI startup behind the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, this week announced the release of StableStudio, an open source version of DreamStudio, Stability AI’s commercial AI-powered design suite.

In a blog post, Stability AI writes that it hopes to “foster a project [that] can outpace anything developed by a single company,” alluding to recent investments in the generative AI space from tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

“We believe the best way to expand upon that impressive reach is through open, community-driven development rather than a private iteration of a closed-source product,” Stability AI said. “Our goal is to work with the broader community to create a world-class user interface for generative AI [that] users fully control.”

At a virtual event this morning, Meta lifted the curtains on its efforts to develop in-house infrastructure for AI workloads, including generative AI like the type that underpins its recently launched ad design and creation tools.

It was an attempt at a projection of strength from Meta, which historically has been slow to adopt AI-friendly hardware systems — hobbling its ability to keep pace with rivals such as Google and Microsoft.

“Building our own [hardware] capabilities gives us control at every layer of the stack, from datacenter design to training frameworks,” Alexis Bjorlin, VP of Infrastructure at Meta, told TechCrunch. “This level of vertical integration is needed to push the boundaries of AI research at scale.”

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At the 2023 Tesla Shareholder meeting in Austin, Texas, Tesla CEO Elon Musk shows off a new Optimus video, the company’s humanoid robot in development.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Reveals New Optimus Robot Video! (2023 Tesla Shareholder Meetinig)” »

Creating the nuke bomb scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. In this video essay, I discuss how Christopher Nolan will film the atomic bomb scene in Oppenheimer, a biopic film on the real-life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer movie will change the movie landscape through its source material and also its filmmaking potential.

Oppenheimer is an upcoming American biographical film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. It is based on American Prometheus, a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. The film is a co-production between Syncopy Inc. and Atlas Entertainment; Nolan produced the film alongside Emma Thomas and Charles Roven. Cillian Murphy leads an ensemble cast as Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who is among those credited with being the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in the Manhattan Project—the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. The film stars Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Dane DeHaan, Jack Quaid, Matthew Modine, Dylan Arnold, David Krumholtz, Alden Ehrenreich, David Dastmalchian, Olli Haaskivi, Jason Clarke, James D’Arcy, Michael Angarano, Guy Burnet, Danny Deferrari, Matthias Schweighöfer, Gary Oldman, Harrison Gilbertson, Emma Dumont, Devon Bostick, Trond Fausa, Christopher Denham, Josh Zuckerman, Josh Peck and Olivia Thirlby.

Continue reading “OPPENHEIMER — Creating The Nuke Scene” »