This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 4)
GOVERNANCE
The White House Is Preparing for an AI-Dominated Future
Karen Hao and Matteo Wong | The Atlantic
“A year ago, few people could have imagined how chatbots and image generators would change the basic way we think about the internet’s effects on elections, education, labor, or work; only months ago, the deployment of AI in search engines seemed like a fever dream. All of that, and much more in the nascent AI revolution, has begun in earnest. The executive order’s internal conflict over, and openness to, different values and approaches to AI may have been inevitable, then—the result of an attempt to chart a path for a technology when nobody has a reliable map of where it’s going.”
TECH
Everything We Know About Humane’s Bewildering New AI Pin
Lucas Ropek | Gizmodo
“The company, which has received a healthy dose of financial help from prominent companies like OpenAI and Microsoft, has been hyping its new device for months now, promising that it will revolutionize our relationship with computing forever. The device is finally scheduled to drop next week on November 9th. But what is it?”
BIOTECH
Panel Says That Innovative Sickle Cell Cure Is Safe Enough for Patients
Gina Kolata | The New York Times
“The panel’s conclusion on Tuesday about exa-cel’s safety sends it to the FDA for a decision on greenlighting it for broad patient use. Exa-cel frees patients from the debilitating and painful effects of this chronic, deadly disease. If approved, the Vertex product would be the first medicine to treat a genetic disease with the CRISPR gene-editing technique.”
ETHICS
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Wild Rise and Abrupt Crash
David Streitfeld | The New York Times
“Six years ago, Sam Bankman-Fried knew little about alternative currencies. But he correctly bet there were huge opportunities in grabbing a tiny piece of millions of crypto trades. In the blink of an eye, he was lauded as being worth $23 billion. Only Mark Zuckerberg had accumulated so much wealth so young. The Facebook co-founder has his critics, but he looks like Thomas Edison next to Mr. Bankman-Fried. After a speedy trial in Manhattan federal court, the onetime crypto king, now 31, was convicted on Thursday of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy involving his companies FTX and Alameda Research.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Forget ChatGPT, Why Llama and Open Source AI Win 2023
Sharon Goldman | VentureBeat
“According to Meta, the open source AI community has fine-tuned and released over 7,000 Llama derivatives on the Hugging Face platform since the model’s release, including a veritable animal farm of popular offspring including Koala, Vicuna, Alpaca, Dolly and RedPajama. …You could consider ChatGPT the equivalent of Barbie, 2023’s biggest blockbuster movie. But Llama and its open source AI cohort are more like the Marvel Universe, with its endless spinoffs and offshoots that have the cumulative power to offer the biggest long-term impact on the AI landscape.”
IMPACT
What Are the Hardest Problems in Tech We Should Be More Focused on as a Society?
Editorial Staff | MIT Technology Review
“Technology is all about solving big thorny problems. Yet one of the hardest things about solving hard problems is knowing where to focus our efforts. There are so many urgent issues facing the world. Where should we even begin? So we asked dozens of people to identify what problem at the intersection of technology and society that they think we should focus more of our energy on. We queried scientists, journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs, activists, and CEOs.”
TECH
Almost-Unbeatable AI Is Now a Permanent Feature of Gran Turismo 7
Jonathan M. Gitlin | Ars Technica
“The entertainment company experimented with [the AI] earlier this year for a few weeks in a limited test, but when the GT7 Spec II update rolls out to consoles tomorrow morning, Sophy will be able to race 340 of the game’s cars on nine of its tracks. Ideally, you want the AI in a racing game to be good enough that the race is a challenge, but perhaps not quite so unbeatable that it’s a fool’s errand to try to win.”
ENVIRONMENT
The Ultra-Efficient Farm of the Future Is in the Sky
Matt Simon | Wired
“This is no ordinary green roof, but a sprawling, sensor-laden outdoor laboratory overseen by horticulturalist Jennifer Bousselot. The idea behind rooftop agrivoltaics is to emulate a forest on top of a building. Just as the shade of towering trees protects the undergrowth from sun-stress, so too can solar panels encourage the growth of plants—the overall goal being to grow more food for ballooning urban populations, all while saving water, generating clean energy, and making buildings more energy efficient.”
SPACE
Remains of Planet That Formed the Moon May Be Hiding Near Earth’s Core
John Timmer | Ars Technica
“Deep in the Earth’s mantle there are two regions where seismic waves slow down, termed large low-velocity provinces. …Now, a team of scientists has tied the two regions’ existence back to a catastrophic event that happened early in our Solar System’s history: a giant collision with a Mars-sized planet that ultimately created our Moon.”
Image Credit: Pawel Czerwinski / Unsplash