SpaceX Catches Returning Rocket in Mid-Air, Turning a Fanciful Idea Into Reality
Stephen Clark | Ars Technica
“This achievement is the primary of its kind, and it’s crucial for SpaceX’s vision of rapidly reusing the Starship rocket, enabling human expeditions to the moon and Mars, routine access to space for mind-bogglingly massive payloads, and novel capabilities that no other company—or country—seems near attaining.”
Meta’s AI Chief Says World Models Are Key to ‘Human-Level AI’—But It Might Be 10 Years Out
Maxwell Zeff | TechCrunch
“Are today’s AI models truly remembering, considering, planning, and reasoning, identical to a human brain would? Some AI labs would have you suspect they’re, but in keeping with Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, the reply is not any. He thinks we could get there in a decade or so, nevertheless, by pursuing a brand new method called a ‘world model.’”
This Lab Robot Mixes Chemicals
Kristel Tjandra | MIT Technology Review
“Lab scientists spend much of their time doing laborious and repetitive tasks, be it pipetting liquid samples or running the identical analyses over and yet again. But what if they may simply tell a robot to do the experiments, analyze the info, and generate a report? Enter Organa, a benchtop robotic system devised by researchers on the University of Toronto that may perform chemistry experiments.”
Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Team Up on Robots
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“The partnership goals to make Atlas right into a general-purpose humanoid …Boston Dynamics has an exceptionally capable humanoid platform able to advanced and sometimes painful-looking whole-body motion behaviors together with some relatively basic and brute force-y manipulation. Meanwhile, TRI has been working for quite some time on developing AI-based learning techniques to tackle quite a lot of complicated manipulation challenges.”
Watch: Jetson Founder Pushes the Limits of ‘Freestyle’ eVTOL Agility
Loz Blain | Latest Atlas
“It’s among the most dynamic flight we’ve seen from an eVTOL with a human on board, and among the closest we’ve seen to answering the query that probably launched the eVTOL sector: Hey, what wouldn’t it be prefer to ride around in a racing drone?”
Ultra-Deep Fracking for Limitless Geothermal Power Is Possible: EPFL
David Szondy | Latest Atlas
“The prospect of virtually unlimited clean geothermal power is now substantially brighter. EPFL’s Laboratory of Experimental Rock Mechanics (LEMR) has shown that the semi-plastic, gooey rock at supercritical depths can still be fractured to let water through. …Corporations like Fervo and Sage Geosystems are proving that a fracking approach to geothermal energy can extract far more power than traditional methods—this research proves that the concept could do the identical for ultra-deep supercritical geothermal projects as well.”
Apple Engineers Show How Flimsy AI ‘Reasoning’ Can Be
Kyle Orland | Wired
“For some time now, firms like OpenAI and Google have been touting advanced ‘reasoning’ capabilities as the following big step of their latest artificial intelligence models. Now, though, a brand new study from six Apple engineers shows that the mathematical ‘reasoning’ displayed by advanced large language models may be extremely brittle and unreliable within the face of seemingly trivial changes to common benchmark problems.”
GOVERNANCE
US Treasury Says AI Tools Prevented $1 Billion of Fraud in 2024
Todd Feathers | Gizmodo
“Through the most up-to-date fiscal yr, which resulted in September, the agency’s recent data-driven approach to rooting out bad actors contributed to the prevention and recovery of greater than $4 billion in fraudulent payments, in keeping with a press release. That’s a greater than sixfold increase over the $652.7 million in fraudulent payments detected or recovered in the course of the 2023 fiscal yr.”
INTERNET
SpaceX Tells FCC It Has a Plan to Make Starlink About 10 Times Faster
Jon Brodkin | Ars Technica
“In an application submitted to the Federal Communications Commission on October 11, SpaceX claims the requested ‘modification and its companion amendment will enable the Gen2 system to deliver gigabit-speed, truly low-latency broadband and ubiquitous mobile connectivity to all Americans and the billions of individuals globally who still lack access to adequate broadband.’”
