Lifeboat Foundation

The firm worked with UK weather forecasters to create a model that was better at making short term predictions than existing systems.

First protein folding, now weather forecasting: London-based AI firm DeepMind is continuing its run applying deep learning to hard science problems. Working with the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, DeepMind has developed a deep-learning tool called DGMR that can accurately predict the likelihood of rain in the next 90 minutes—one of weather forecasting’s toughest challenges.

In a blind comparison with existing tools, several dozen experts judged DGMR’s forecasts to be the best across a range of factors—including its predictions of the location, extent, movement, and intensity of the rain—89% of the time. The results were published in a Nature paper today.

Continue reading “DeepMind’s AI predicts almost exactly when and where it’s going to rain” »

Getting a quick and accurate reading of an X-ray or some other medical images can be vital to a patient’s health and might even save a life. Obtaining such an assessment depends on the availability of a skilled radiologist and, consequently, a rapid response is not always possible. For that reason, says Ruizhi “Ray” Liao, a postdoc and a recent Ph.D. graduate at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), “we want to train machines that are capable of reproducing what radiologists do every day.” Liao is the first author of a new paper, written with other researchers at MIT and Boston-area hospitals, that is being presented this fall at MICCAI 2,021 an international conference on medical image computing.

Amazon released a huge number of smart home products today, including two robots for home security, a Nest competitor, more Echo devices, and a perfect device for Covid-times connection with friends and family. Plus there’s an updated fitness tracker, a partnership with TikTok, entertainment from Sling, and more.

And yes, that includes ways to chat with Han Solo or Chewbacca from Star Wars or Woody from Toy Story on your Amazon Echo devices.

Topological quantum computing is probably one of the most promising fields of the future which would greatly boost machine learning that already employs combined elements of cognitive, evolutionary and neuromorphic engineering. Post-singularity artificial superintelligence could have complete access to their own source code — a level of self-awareness presently beyond human capability. That would allow the post-singularity syntelligence to create myriad virtual worlds right out of its own superimagination. We can’t completely rule out a possibility that we’re part of that simulated reality right now. At the same time, we ourselves are moving towards the point of Theogenesis where we can rightly call ourselves cybergods.

#THEOGENESIS #CyberneticTheoryofMind #QuantumCosmology #ComputationalPhysics #posthumanism #cybernetics #theosophy #futurism

Continue reading “Where Do We Fit in the Cosmic Scheme and Where Are We Headed?” »

Tesla has been making participants in the “Full Self-Driving” beta test sign non-disclosure agreements, but CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday “we probably don’t need” them.

The reason? “There’s a lot of videos” being shared of the beta software in action, Musk said on Tuesday during the 2021 Code Conference. “People don’t seem to listen to me” and are “just ignoring it anyway.”

“I don’t know why there’s an NDA,” he said.

For years now, artificial intelligence has been hailed as both a savior and a destroyer. The technology really can make our lives easier, letting us summon our phones with a “Hey, Siri” and (more importantly) assisting doctors on the operating table. But as any science-fiction reader knows, AI is not an unmitigated good: It can be prone to the same racial biases as humans are, and, as is the case with self-driving cars, it can be forced to make murky split-second decisions that determine who lives and who dies. Like it or not, AI is only going to become an even more omnipresent force: We’re in a “watershed moment” for the technology, says Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO.

A conversation with the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Continue reading “Misinformation Is About to Get So Much Worse” »

Firms including OpenAI have developed safety tools to constrain AI decision-making. But there’s a limit to what these tools can accomplish.

A new group is seeking to warn European policymakers about AI’s ‘existential’ threat to humanity.

Having conquered Go and protein folding, the company turns to a really hard problem.