Lifeboat Foundation

Retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration lead to photoreceptor death and loss of visual perception. Despite recent progress, restorative technologies for photoreceptor degeneration remain largely unavailable. Here, we describe a novel optogenetic visual prosthesis (FlexLED) based on a combination of a thin-film retinal display and optogenetic activation of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). The FlexLED implant is a 30 µm thin, flexible, wireless µLED display with 8,192 pixels, each with an emission area of 66 µm2. The display is affixed to the retinal surface, and the electronics package is mounted under the conjunctiva in the form factor of a conventional glaucoma drainage implant. In a rabbit model of photoreceptor degeneration, optical stimulation of the retina using the FlexLED elicits activity in visual cortex. This technology is readily scalable to hundreds of thousands of pixels, providing a route towards an implantable optogenetic visual prosthesis capable of generating vision by stimulating RGCs at near-cellular resolution.

### Competing Interest Statement.

All authors have a financial interest in Science Corporation.

Year 2016 face_with_colon_three

Stem cell breakthrough grows new cornea material that restores some sight to blind rabbits in an experiment.

🚨 TECH NEWS: The automaker will deploy Apptronik’s “Apollo” robot at a Mercedes factory in Hungary. Details:

German automaker Mercedes-Benz is deploying Apptronik’s Apollo robots at a manufacturing plant in Hungary.

Tesla has finally decided to release its Autopilot safety data report after taking a break of more than a year.

For years, Tesla used to release a “Vehicle safety report” that tracked miles between accidents in its vehicles based on the level of Autopilot used or not used and compared it to the industry average.

The automaker used the report to claim that its Autopilot technology resulted in a much safer driving experience and that its vehicles would crash much less often than the average car in the US even without Autopilot.

Nuclear physicists have long been working to reveal how the proton gets its spin. Now, a new method that combines experimental data with state-of-the-art calculations has revealed a more detailed picture of spin contributions from the very glue that holds protons together. It also paves the way toward imaging the proton’s 3D structure.

The rhetoric over “superhuman” AI implicitly erases what’s most important about being human.

Still, ChatGPT operates in a mostly siloed fashion. It can’t yet venture out “into the wild” to execute online tasks. For example, if you wanted to buy a milk frother on Amazon for under $100, ChatGPT might be able to recommend a product or two, and even provide links, but it can’t actually navigate Amazon and make the purchase.

Why? Besides obvious concerns, like letting a flawed AI model go on a shopping spree with your credit card, one challenge lies in training AI to successfully navigate graphical user interfaces (GUIs), like your laptop or smartphone screen.

But even the current version of GPT-4 seems to grasp the basic steps of online shopping. That’s the takeaway of a recent preprint paper in which AI researchers described how they successfully trained a GPT-4-based agent to “buy” products on Amazon. The agent, dubbed the MM-Navigator, did not actually purchase products, but it was able to analyze screenshots of an iOS smartphone screen and specify the appropriate action and where it should click, with impressive accuracy.

“The fear is that they can’t afford to let someone else get there first,” said Scott Jenson, a UX designer who left Google last month.

From MIT

Not all language model features are linear.

Recent work has proposed the linear representation hypothesis: that language models perform computation by manipulating one-dimensional representations of concepts (“features”) in activation space.

Continue reading “Not All Language Model Features Are Linear” »