Lifeboat Foundation

The Biden administration announced on Friday a voluntary agreement with seven leading AI companies, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. The move, ostensibly aimed at managing the risks posed by AI and protecting Americans’ rights and safety, has provoked a range of questions, the foremost being: What does the new voluntary AI agreement mean?

At first glance, the voluntary nature of these commitments looks promising. Regulation in the technology sector is always contentious, with companies wary of stifling growth and governments eager to avoid making mistakes. By sidestepping the direct imposition of command and control regulation, the administration can avoid the pitfalls of imposing… More.

That said, it’s not an entirely hollow gesture. It does emphasize important principles of safety, security, and trust in AI, and it reinforces the notion that companies should take responsibility for the potential societal impact of their technologies. Moreover, the administration’s focus on a cooperative approach, involving a broad range of stakeholders, hints at a potentially promising direction for future AI governance. However, we should also not forget the risk of government growing too cozy with industry.

Continue reading “Biden Administration Secures Voluntary Commitments From AI Firms: A Step Forward Or Empty Rhetoric?” »

Apple is secretly developing its own generative AI tools to challenge OpenAI’s GPT and other language models like Google’s Bard, reports Mark Gurman of Bloomberg News. Internally dubbed “Apple GPT,” the company’s ChatGPT clone is already being used by some employees for work tasks.

Gurman reveals that a cross-functional collaboration is underway at Apple, with teams from AI, software engineering, and cloud infrastructure working together on this covert project. This initiative is driven by concerns within Apple that its devices may lose their essential status if the company lags behind its competitors in AI.

AI has been a component of Apple’s devices for years, primarily operating behind the scenes to enhance photo and video quality, and to power features such as crash detection. More recently, Apple has begun to introduce AI-powered enhancements to its iOS.

Generative AI has been front and centre of the news for the last nine months and attention is often on existential risks, copyright claims or suspicions around deepfakes. However, there are a growing number of more positive ways it can be integrated into businesses.

One of those areas is customer service. The Samsung Neon people were a good example of what could be achieved with embodied AI. Samsung created an impressive suite of customer service agents whose profiles could match those of customers in need of help.

I wanted an avatar that was a bit ‘uncanny’, so that it had some resemblance to my real physical self but looked quite artificial too.

Continue reading “I Used Generative AI To Create A Synthetic Self And You Can Too” »

It’s fair to say that the sun is one of the most-studied features in all of the cosmos, and because of that, you might expect that it’s easy to predict what it will do next. However, recent unexpected sun activity has surprised scientists and confirmed yet again how difficult it can be to predict what this cosmological phenomenon will do next.

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected the earliest-known carbon dust in a galaxy ever.

Using the powerful space telescope, a team of astronomers spotted signs of the element that forms the backbone of all life in ten different galaxies that existed as early as 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

The detection of carbon dust so soon after the Big Bang could shake up theories surrounding the chemical evolution of the universe. This is because the processes that create and disperse heavier elements like this should take longer to build up in galaxies than the age of these young galaxies at the time the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sees them.

What happens when humans begin combining biology with technology, harnessing the power to recode life itself.

What does the future of biotechnology look like? How will humans program biology to create organ farm technology and bio-robots. And what happens when companies begin investing in advanced bio-printing, artificial wombs, and cybernetic prosthetic limbs.

Continue reading “Timelapse of Future BIOTECHNOLOGY” »

According to scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a bifacial perovskite solar cell holds the potential to produce higher energy yields at lower overall costs.

The bifacial solar cell captures direct sunlight on the front and reflected sunlight on the back. As a result, this type of device can outperform its monofacial counterparts, according to the new study.

“This perovskite cell can operate very effectively from either side,” said Kai Zhu, a senior scientist in the Chemistry and Nanoscience Center at NREL and lead author of a new paper.

Jiang, Y., Wu, Y., Zhang, J. et al. Dilemma in optical identification of single-layer multiferroics. Nature 619, E40–E43 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06107-3

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Paving a potential industrial approach for effectively harvesting raindrop energy at a large scale.