The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
Existing computer systems have separate data processing and storage devices, making them inefficient for processing complex data like AI. A KAIST research team has developed a memristor-based integrated system similar to the way our brain processes information. It is now ready for application in various devices, including smart security cameras, allowing them to recognize suspicious activity immediately without having to rely on remote cloud servers, and medical devices with which it can help analyze health data in real time.
The joint research team of Professor Shinhyun Choi and Professor Young-Gyu Yoon of the School of Electrical Engineering has developed the next-generation neuromorphic semiconductor-based ultra-small computing chip that can learn and correct errors on its own. The research is published in the journal Nature Electronics.
What is special about this computing chip is that it can learn and correct errors that occur due to non-ideal characteristics that were difficult to solve in existing neuromorphic devices. For example, when processing a video stream, the chip learns to automatically separate a moving object from the background, and it becomes better at this task over time.
A weakness in Google’s OAuth “Sign in with Google” feature could enable attackers that register domains of defunct startups to access sensitive data of former employee accounts linked to various software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms.
The security gap was discovered by Trufflesecurity researchers and reported to Google last year on September 30.
Google initially disregarded the finding as a “fraud and abuse” issue and not an Oauth or login issue. However, after Dylan Ayrey, CEO and co-founder of Trufflesecurity, presented the issue at Shmoocon last December, the tech giant awarded a $1337 bounty to the researchers and re-opened the ticket.
In today’s AI news, this year coding might go from one of the most sought-after skills on the job market to one that can be fully automated. Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta and some of the biggest companies in the tech industry are already working toward this on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on Friday.
In other advancements, NovaSky, a team of researchers based out of UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, released Sky-T1-32B-Preview, a reasoning model that’s competitive with an earlier version of OpenAI’s o1. “Remarkably, Sky-T1-32B-Preview was trained for less than $450,” the team wrote in a blog post, “demonstrating that it is possible to replicate high-level reasoning capabilities affordably and efficiently.”
And, no company has capitalized on the AI revolution more dramatically than Nvidia. The world’s leading high-performance GPU maker has used its ballooning fortunes to significantly increase investments in all sorts of startups but particularly in AI startups.
Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer has green-lit a plan to use the immigration system to recruit a new wave of AI experts and loosen up data mining regulations to help Britain lead the world in the new technology. The recruitment of thousands of new AI experts by the government and private sector is part of a 50-point plan to transform Britain with the new technology.
In videos, newly deployed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, El Capitan — the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) first exascale supercomputer, is setting new benchmarks in computing power. At 2.79 exaFLOPs of peak performance El Capitan’s unprecedented capabilities are already impacting scientific computing and making the previously unimaginable a reality.
Then, François Chollet discusses the outcomes of the ARC-AGI (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) Prize competition in 2024, where accuracy rose from 33% to 55.5% on a private evaluation set. They explore two core solution paradigms—program synthesis (induction) and direct prediction (“transduction”)—and how successful solutions combine both.
And, in this entertaining and important talk, AI ethicist Nadia Lee shares the perils, pitfalls and opportunities that swirl around our emerging AI reality. Nadia Lee is an ethical AI advocate and the founder of ThatsMyFace, an AI company which detects key assets and people in malicious content for businesses.
Exploring the most important questions we face as we age.
Dr. Debra Whitman, Ph.D. is Executive Vice President and Chief Public Policy Officer, at AARP (https://www.aarp.org/) where she leads policy development, analysis and research, as well as global thought leadership supporting and advancing the interests of individuals age 50-plus and their families. She oversees AARP’s Public Policy Institute, AARP Research, Office of Policy Development and Integration, Thought Leadership, and AARP International.
Dr. Whitman is an authority on aging issues with extensive experience in national policy making, domestic and international research, and the political process. An economist, she is a strategic thinker whose career has been dedicated to solving problems affecting economic and health security, and other issues related to population aging.
As staff director for the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, Dr. Whitman worked across the aisle to increase retirement security, lower the cost of health care, protect vulnerable seniors, safeguard consumers, make the pharmaceutical industry more transparent, and improve our nation’s long term care system.
Before that, Dr. Whitman worked for the Congressional Research Service as a specialist in the economics of aging. She provided members of Congress and their staff with research and advice, and authored analytical reports on the economic impacts of current policies affecting older Americans, as well as the distributional and intergenerational effects of legislative proposals.
Improving Global Resilience Against Emerging Infectious Threats — Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, MD — Founding Director, Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases (CEID), Boston University.
Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, MD, MALD is a board-certified infectious diseases physician who is the Founding Director of BU Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases (https://www.bu.edu/ceid/about-the-cen…) as well an Associate Professor at the BU School of Medicine. She served the Senior Policy Advisor for Global COVID-19 Response for the White House COVID-19 Response Team in 2022–2023, where she coordinated the interagency programs for global COVID-19 vaccine donations from the United States and was the policy lead for Project NextGen, $5B HHS program aimed at developing next generation vaccines and treatments for pandemic prone coronaviruses. She also served as the interim Testing Coordinator for the White House MPOX Response Team. She is the Director and co-founder of Biothreats Emergence, Analysis and Communications Network (BEACON), an open source outbreak surveillance program.
Between 2011–2021, Dr. Bhadelia helped develop and then served as the medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit (SPU) at Boston Medical Center, a medical unit designed to care for patients with highly communicable diseases, and a state designated Ebola Treatment Center. She was previously an associate director for BU’s maximum containment research program, the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories. She has provided direct patient care and been part of outbreak response and medical countermeasures research during multiple Ebola virus disease outbreaks in West and East Africa between 2014–2019. She was the clinical lead for a DoD-funded viral hemorrhagic fever clinical research unit in Uganda, entitled Joint Mobile Emerging Disease Intervention Clinical Capability (JMEDICC) program between 2017 and 2022. Currently, she is a co-director of Fogarty funded, BU-University of Liberia Emerging and Epidemic Viruses Research training program. She was a member of the World Health Organization(WHO)’s Technical Advisory Group on Universal Health and Preparedness Review (UHPR). She currently serves as a member of the National Academies Forum on Microbial Threats and previously served as the chair of the National Academies Workshop Committee for Potential Research Priorities to Inform Readiness and Response to Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A (H5N1) and member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Current State of Research, Development, and Stockpiling of Smallpox Medical Countermeasures.
Dr. Bhadelia’s research focuses on operational global health security and pandemic preparedness, including medical countermeasure evaluation and clinical care for emerging infections, diagnostics evaluation and positioning, infection control policy development, and healthcare worker training. She has health system response experience with pathogens such as H1N1, Zika, Lassa fever, Marburg virus disease, and COVID-19 at the state, national, and global levels.
Dr. Bhadelia has served on state, national, and interagency groups focused on biodefense priority setting, development of clinical care guidelines, and medical countermeasures research. She has served as a subject matter expert to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Defense (DoD), White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and World Bank. She is an adjunct professor at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University since 2016, where she teaches on global health security and emerging pathogens.