Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic Launches the World’s First ‘Hybrid Reasoning’ AI ModelWill Knight | Wired
“Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company founded by exiles from OpenAI, has introduced the first AI model that can produce either conventional output or a controllable amount of ‘reasoning’ needed to solve more grueling problems. Anthropic says the new hybrid model, called Claude 3.7, will make it easier for users and developers to tackle problems that require a mix of instinctive output and step-by-step cogitation.”
Robotics
Figure Will Start ‘Alpha Testing’ Its Humanoid Robot in the Home in 2025Brian Heater | TechCrunch
“Figure is planning to bring its humanoids into the home sooner than expected. CEO Brett Adcock confirmed on Thursday that the Bay Area robotics startup will begin ‘alpha testing’ its Figure 02 robot in the home setting later in 2025. The executive says the accelerated timeline is a product of the company’s ‘generalist’ Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, called Helix.”
Artificial Intelligence
New AI Text Diffusion Models Break Speed Barriers by Pulling Words From NoiseBenj Edwards | Ars Technica
“Mercury Coder Mini scores 88.0 percent on HumanEval and 77.1 percent on MBPP—comparable to GPT-4o Mini—while reportedly operating at 1,109 tokens per second compared to GPT-4o Mini’s 59 tokens per second. This represents roughly a 19x speed advantage over GPT-4o Mini while maintaining similar performance on coding benchmarks.”
Computing
Amazon Uses Quantum ‘Cat States’ With Error CorrectionJohn Timmer | Ars Technica
“The system mixes two different types of qubit hardware to improve the stability of the quantum information they hold. The idea is that one type of qubit is resistant to errors, while the second can be used for implementing an error-correction code that catches the problems that do happen.”
Artificial Intelligence
It’s a Lemon’—OpenAI’s Largest AI Model Ever Arrives to Mixed ReviewsBenj Edwards | Ars Technica
“The verdict is in: OpenAI’s newest and most capable traditional AI model, GPT-4.5, is big, expensive, and slow, providing marginally better performance than GPT-4o at 30x the cost for input and 15x the cost for output. The new model seems to prove that longstanding rumors of diminishing returns in training unsupervised-learning LLMs were correct and that the so-called ‘scaling laws’ cited by many for years have possibly met their natural end.”
Computing
Google’s Taara Hopes to Usher in a New Era of Internet Powered by LightSteven Levy | Wired
“Instead of beaming from space, Taara’s ‘light bridges’—which are about the size of a traffic light—are earthbound. As X’s ‘captain of moonshots’ Astro Teller puts it, ‘As long as these two boxes can see each other, you get 20 gigabits per second, the equivalent of a fiber-optic cable, without having to trench the fiber-optic cable.'”
Energy
Next-Gen Nuclear Startup Plans 30 Reactors to Fuel Texas Data CentersAlex Pasternack | Fast Company
“Last Energy, a nuclear upstart backed by an Elon Musk-linked venture capital fund, says it plans to construct 30 microreactors on a site in Texas to supply electricity to data centers across the state. The initiative, which it says could provide about 600 megawatts of electricity, would be the company’s largest project to date and help it develop a commercial pipeline in the US.”
Science
The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AIJohn Pavlus | Quanta Magazine
“Single-purpose systems like AlphaFold can generate scientific predictions with revolutionary accuracy, but researchers still lack ‘foundation models’ designed for general scientific discovery. These models would work more like a scientifically accurate version of ChatGPT, flexibly generating simulations and predictions across multiple research areas.”
Tech
Vinod Khosla: Most AI Investments Will Lose Money as Market Enters ‘Greed’ CycleSri Muppidi | The Information
“Early OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla warned that most investments in artificial intelligence will lose money, particularly as more investors jump into the market, funding more startups. But he said some companies would grow to be worth hundreds of billions—and eventually trillions—of dollars and make up for the failures.”
Biotechnology
A Protein Borrowed From Tardigrades Could Give Us Radiation Body ArmorEd Cara | Gizmodo
“The strangely adorable and resilient tardigrade, or water bear, just might hold the key to making cancer treatment a lot more (water-) bearable. That’s because a team of researchers just found evidence that a protein produced by these microscopic creatures could protect our healthy cells from the ravages of radiation therapy.”
Tech
The World’s Smallest Lego Brick Is Here. It’s Literally MicroscopicGrace Snelling | Fast Company
“The brick in question is a microscopic sculpture created by UK-based artist David A Lindon. It’s made from a standard red square Lego, and it looks like one, too, aside from the fact that it measures just 0.02517 millimeter by 0.02184 millimeter (about the size of a white blood cell).”
Artificial Intelligence
Anthropic’s Latest Flagship AI Might Not Have Been Incredibly Costly to TrainKyle Wiggers | TechCrunch
“Assuming Claude 3.7 Sonnet indeed cost just ‘a few tens of millions of dollars’ to train, not factoring in related expenses, it’s a sign of how relatively cheap it’s becoming to release state-of-the-art models. Claude 3.5 Sonnet’s predecessor, released in fall 2024, similarly cost a few tens of millions of dollars to train, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed in a recent essay.”
Computing
How North Korea Pulled Off a $1.5 Billion Crypto Heist—the Biggest in HistoryDan Goodin | Ars Technica
“‘The Bybit hack has shattered long-held assumptions about crypto security,’ Dikla Barda, Roman Ziakin, and Oded Vanunu, researchers at security firm Check Point, wrote Sunday. ‘No matter how strong your smart contract logic or multisig protections are, the human element remains the weakest link.’”
Computing
Is It Lunacy to Put a Data Center on the Moon?Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“The idea of putting a data center on the moon raises a natural question: Why? Lonestar’s CEO Christopher Stott says it is to protect sensitive data from Earthly hazards. ‘Data centers, right? They’re like modern cathedrals. We’re building these things, they run our entire civilization. It’s superb, and yet you realize that the networks connecting them are increasingly fragile.’”
The post This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through March 1) appeared first on SingularityHub.
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