Lifeboat Foundation

2016 was an indelible year for the telecom industry as it marked Mukesh Ambani led Jio’s foray into the sector which led to industry revenue getting caught in a downward spiral as old players’(Vodafone, Idea, Bharti Airtel) saw their profits and subscriber bases dwindling rapidly. The erstwhile flourished industry narrowed to a handful of players with 2019 opening up new challenging frontiers for the sector. It kept surfacing up in headlines owing to several significant developments, let’s dive into what kept India’s telecom sector abuzz throughout 2019.

Special thanks to Lieuwe Vinkhuyzen for checking that this very simplified view on building neural nets did not stray too far from reality.

The inhabitants of the Tesla fanboy echo chamber have heard regularly about the Tesla Dojo supercomputer, with almost nobody knowing what it was. It was first mentioned, that I know of, at Tesla Autonomy Day on April 22, 2019. More recently a few comments from Georg Holtz, Tesmanian, and Elon Musk himself have shed some light on this project.

Leave it to Elon Musk to think of putting life on other planets before we’ve even gone back to the moon.

Musk said the capability of SpaceX’s Starship rockets is “designed to make life multiplanetary,” before eventually building a city on Mars.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX would like to further expanded testing of its Starlink satellite internet by connecting the network to aircraft.

SpaceX would like to further expand testing of its Starlink satellite internet by connecting the network to aircraft, the company revealed in a recent request to the Federal Communications Commission.

Elon Musk’s space company on Nov. 6 asked the FCC if SpaceX could add Starlink user terminals “on a Gulfstream jet for a period of up to two years.”

Continue reading “SpaceX wants to test its Starlink satellite internet network inflight with a Gulfstream jet” »

Elon Musk wants to connect all corners of the planet via space, but his thousands of orbiting routers may pose a risk to satellites and to science.

There is some precedent for international treaties regarding the exploration of other worlds, most-notably the Outer Space Treaty of 1976 or the Artemis Accords. But these amount to little more than non-aggression pacts. The COSPAR convention came closer to what is needed by declaring the inherent hazards to science and terrestrial life that go with exploring other worlds. However, at present, such documents merely recommendations to governments and industry. There are no current means for enforcing the guidelines.

Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, talks with Commercial Crew astronauts and the current NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine. The merger between the public and private sectors of the aerospace industry is seen clearly with the partnership between NASA and SpaceX, as it was the first private company to bring American astronauts to the International Space Station.

Elon Musk founded The Company “to solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic.” He envisions a network of tunnels where Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEV) can transport passengers at high speeds through an underground transportation system called “Loop”. The Company’s AEVs are made up of modified Tesla Model 3 and Model X. These zero-emission vehicles will shuttle passengers through the tunnels at approximately 150-miles per hour. The first set of underground roads are under construction at Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). The tunneling project is almost finished. According to city officials it will be operational by January 2021. The Company plans to expand the LVCC Loop transportation system to other parts in Las Vegas. The Company submitted a proposal this year to the Las Vegas City Planning Commission to expand the tunnel to the downtown area.

On Tuesday, the Las Vegas City Planning Commission held a meeting in which the company received approval to connect the LVCC center set of tunnels to a future tunneling system that will lead downtown. The Commission gave the green light during a meeting, video below. The city council plans to review the proposal to cast a final vote in December. The downtown tunnel will begin at the LVCC, run through Las Vegas Boulevard, connect to Ogden, and lead back into Main Street. The City of Las Vegas shared via Twitter the map of where the tunnel will be built, pictured below.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company received its first official “approval” for the expansion of its Vegas Loop. The city’s Planning Commission openly showed support for the Boring Co.’s project, recommending an approval for the expansion of the Vegas Loop to the City Council. Before the recommendation, the Planning Commission suggested adding a stop to the loop in the Arts District as well.

The Las Vegas Arts District—known as 18b—is a cultural hub, filled with enticing creative opportunities and sights to titillate imaginative, adventurous minds. It offers a different sort of entertainment than the casinos and resorts in Sin City. The Planning Commission seemed eager to support a stop in the Arts District for the Vegas Loop.

“We’re very excited to see the (Boring Company’s) application come forward. It’s a special thing. It’s exciting that its coming through downtown. I can see on the map all the different stops associated with the casinos and hotels going up and down,” said one commissioner who had visited Boring Company’s tunnels before voting on the motion.

The year is coming to a close and it’s safe to say Elon Musk’s prediction that his company would field one million “robotaxis” by the end of 2020 isn’t going to come true. In fact, so far, Tesla’s managed to produce exactly zero self-driving vehicles. And we can probably call off the singularity too. GPT-3 has been impressive, but the closer machines get to aping human language the easier it is to see just how far away from us they really are.

So where does that leave us, ultimately, when it comes to the future of AI? That depends on your outlook. Media hype and big tech’s advertising machine has set us up for heartbreak when we compare the reality in 2020 to our 2016-era dreams of fully autonomous flying cars and hyper-personalized digital assistants capable of managing the workload of our lives.

Continue reading “Neural’s market outlook for artificial intelligence in 2021 and beyond” »