Personalized AI Agents Are Here. Is the World Ready for Them?
Kevin Roose | The New York Times
“Very soon, tech companies tell us, AI ‘agents’ will be able to send emails and schedule meetings for us, book restaurant reservations and plane tickets, and handle complex tasks like ‘negotiate a raise with my boss’ or ‘buy Christmas presents for all my family members.’ That phase, though still remote, came a little closer on Monday when OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced that users could now create their own, personalized chatbots.”
ChatGPT Continues to Be One of the Fastest-Growing Services Ever
Jon Porter | The Verge
“One hundred million people are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced at its first-ever developer conference on Monday. Since releasing its ChatGPT and Whisper models via API in March, the company also now boasts over two million developers, including over 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies.”
The Humane AI Pin Gets Its Big Reveal But We Still Have a Lot of Questions
Lucas Ropek | Gizmodo
“Humane, a startup founded by two former Apple employees, has launched its hotly anticipated AI pin, a small, cookie-sized device that you stick to the front of your shirt and that, according to its creators, is designed to revolutionize our relationship to computing. While Thursday finally saw the startup unveil some details about its long anticipated product, the jury’s still out on whether it’s actually going to compel you to throw your smartphone in the trash—or if it’ll even prove a functional product you’ll want to buy.”
NVIDIA’s Eos Supercomputer Just Broke Its Own AI Training Benchmark Record
Andrew Tarantola | Engadget
“On Wednesday, NVIDIA unveiled the newest iteration of its Eos supercomputer, one powered by more than 10,000 H100 Tensor Core GPUs and capable of training a 175 billion-parameter GPT-3 model on 1 billion tokens in under four minutes. That’s three times faster than the previous benchmark on the MLPerf AI industry standard, which NVIDIA set just six months ago.”
I Tried Lab-Grown Chicken at a Michelin-Starred Restaurant
Casey Crownhart | MIT Technology Review
“A swanky restaurant in San Francisco isn’t my usual haunt for reporting on climate and energy. But I recently paid a visit to Bar Crenn, a Michelin-starred spot and one of two restaurants in the US currently serving up lab-grown meat. The two morsels on the plate in front of me were what I’d come for: a one-ounce sampling of cultivated chicken, made in the lab by startup Upside Foods.”
The World’s Largest Aircraft Breaks Cover in Silicon Valley
Mark Harris | TechCrunch
“As dawn breaks over Silicon Valley, the world is getting its first look at Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship that its maker LTA Research hopes will kickstart a new era in climate-friendly air travel, and accelerate the humanitarian work of its funder, Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The airship—its snow-white steampunk profile visible from the busy 101 highway—has taken drone technology such as fly-by-wire controls, electric motors and lidar sensing, and supersized them to something longer than three Boeing 737s, potentially able to carry tons of cargo over many hundreds of miles.”
In California’s Central Valley, a Massive Carbon Removal Factory Is Pulling CO2 From the Air
Adele Peters | Fast Company
“Across the street from a farm in California’s Central Valley, a gleaming new three-story structure is now quietly pulling CO2 from the air. Run by a Bay Area-based startup called Heirloom, it’s the first commercial ‘direct air capture’ facility in the U.S. Each year, it will capture as much as 1,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, one early step in the company’s plans to scale up to millions of tons a year.”
The First Small-Scale Nuclear Plant in the US Died Before It Could Live
Gregory Barber | Wired
“A six-reactor, 462-megawatt plant was slated to begin construction by 2026 and produce power by the end of the decade. On Wednesday, NuScale and its backers pulled the plug on the multibillion-dollar Idaho Falls plant. They said they no longer believed the first-of-its-kind plant, known as the Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) would be able to recruit enough additional customers to buy its power.”
Image Credit: Simone Hutsch / Unsplash
