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Baidu Inc. is investing 1 billion yuan ($140 million) to nurture Chinese startups that explore generative AI, leveraging its Ernie AI model to help drive innovation.

Baidu Inc., China’s internet search leader, is investing 1 billion yuan ($140 million) to incubate Chinese startups that focus on generative AI. As reported in Bloomberg, the move makes Baidu a part of the global investment wave centering on ChatGPT-like services.

Baidu’s $140 Million Venture into Generative AI Startups

According to a statement released by Baidu, the investment will be used to foster projects utilizing its Ernie AI model, with funding potentially as high as 10 million yuan each. Venture investors, including IDG Capital, will evaluate pitches from founders, who will then create demo products before a decision on seed funding.

Continue reading “Baidu invests 0 million to foster generative AI startups” | >

“We can foresee applications in a wide variety of scenarios, such as search and rescue.”

One difficult challenge in robotics is to make them move smoothly across rough surfaces. Researchers have been experimenting with various methods, including the ones inspired by nature, to make robot movement more flexible.

By taking cues from nature, engineers have created a new centipede-like robot that can easily switch from straight walking to curved motion.

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The new record was set when China’s three-person Shenzhou 16 mission took to the skies on May 29.

We have a new record for the highest number of people orbiting Earth at any one time. For a short time, the number of people in orbit totaled 17 off-world explorers from a total of five different countries.

The new record was set after the launch of China’s three-person Shenzhou 16 mission on Monday, May 29 at 9:31 p.m. EDT. The previous record was 14 people in orbit, set when the private Inspiration 4 mission took to the skies in September 2021.

NASA

Continue reading “For the first time ever, 17 people were in Earth orbit at the same time” | >

In a special report by Reuters, various industry experts were asked their opinions on the looming issue of AI deep fakes for the upcoming 2024 US elections.

As reported by Reuters, next year’s elections in the United States are likely mired with ever-sophisticated deepfake videos and audio. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) tools like Midjourney and FakeYou have made it nye-on child’s play to generate realistic-looking images, videos, and audio files that are very difficult at times to distinguish from reality.

According to Reuters, there has been a significant increase in the creation of “synthetic” media of late using new “generative AI” tools like Midjourney.

Continue reading “Experts worry about how AI deep fakes may impact 2024 US elections” | >

The Barkour benchmark is customizable and can be adapted to larger course areas with different configurations, similar to real dog agility competitions.

In the world of robotics, quadrupedal robots are becoming increasingly impressive with their abilities and tricks. However, comparing these robots and evaluating their capabilities is challenging due to the absence of standardized metrics.

To address this issue, a team of research scientists at Google has come up with an innovative solution: robot obstacle courses inspired by dog agility competitions. This new approach, known as Barkour, aims to establish a benchmark for assessing the agility and mobility of quadruped robots, a blog post said.

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They managed to achieve temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius. That is hotter than the sun’s core temperature!

Nuclear fusion reactions generate large amounts of energy. An example of nuclear fusion is the reactions happening in the sun’s core. Harnessing fusion energy has long been a goal of scientists and researchers as it produces no greenhouse gas emissions or long-lived radioactive waste.

However, there are several bottlenecks to producing fusion energy, such as the requirement of high temperatures and pressures, plasma instability, cost, scalability, and finding energy balance.

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A drug that was originally developed to treat diabetes and severe overweight might also help people with nicotine dependence, concludes new research from the University of Copenhagen.

Smoking is one of the to public health. According to new data from the Danish Health Authority, 15,920 Danes die every year because of their addiction to cigarettes.

And 75% of smokers want to quit.

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Neil Gershenfeld is the director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Continue reading “Neil Gershenfeld: Self-Replicating Robots and the Future of Fabrication | Lex Fridman Podcast #380” | >

Paraconsistent logic challenges this standard view. A logical consequence relation is said to be paraconsistent if it is not explosive. Thus, if a consequence relation is paraconsistent, then even in circumstances where the available information is inconsistent, the consequence relation does not explode into triviality. Thus, paraconsistent logic accommodates inconsistency in a controlled way that treats inconsistent information as potentially informative.

The prefix ‘para’ in English has two meanings: ‘quasi’ (or ‘similar to, modelled on’) or ‘beyond’. When the term ‘paraconsistent’ was coined by Miró Quesada at the Third Latin America Conference on Mathematical Logic in 1976, he seems to have had the first meaning in mind. Many paraconsistent logicians, however, have taken it to mean the second, which provided different reasons for the development of paraconsistent logic as we will see below.

Paraconsistent logic is defined negatively: any logic is paraconsistent as long as it is not explosive. This means there is no single set of open problems or programs in paraconsistent logic. As such, this entry is not a complete survey of paraconsistent logic. The aim is to describe some philosophically salient features of a diverse field.

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