Lifeboat Foundation

Since founding OpenAI in 2015, Sam Altman has spent many days thinking that the company’s generative artificial-intelligence products need a new kind of device to succeed. Since leaving Apple in 2019, Jony Ive, the designer behind the iPhone, iPod and MacBook Air, has been considering what the next great computing device could be.

Now, the two men and their companies are teaming up to develop a device that would succeed the smartphone and deliver the benefits of A.I. in a new form factor, unconstrained by the rectangular screen that has been the dominant computing tool of the past decade, according to two people familiar with the discussions…

“…Many tech executives believe the technology has the power to introduce a new paradigm in computing that they call “ambient computing.” Rather than typing on smartphones and taking photographs, they imagine a future device in the form of something as simple as a pendant or glasses that can process the world in real time, using a sophisticated virtual assistant capable of fielding questions and processing images.”

Continue reading “A Silicon Valley Supergroup Is Coming Together to Create an A.I. Device” »

The University of Alberta is 3rd in the world for AI research.

Researchers meet the challenge of developing a model that uses speech traits to detect cognitive decline, paving the way for a potential screening tool.

Researchers are striving to make earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer’s dementia possible with a machine learning (ML) model that could one day be turned into a simple screening tool anyone with a smartphone could use.

Continue reading “Machine learning model able to detect signs of Alzheimer’s across languages” »

Most of today’s EVs use lithium-ion batteries, the same kind you’ll find in your smartphone or laptop. These batteries all have two electrodes (one positive and one negative), and the negative one is usually made of graphite.

While the battery is being charged, the lithium ions flow from the side of the battery with the positive electrode to the side with the negative electrode. If the charging happens too fast, the flow can be disrupted, causing the battery to short circuit.

StoreDot’s EV battery replaces the graphite electrode with one made from nanoparticles based on the chemical element germanium — this allows the ions to flow more smoothly and quickly, enabling a faster charge.

WASHINGTON, Sept 27 (Reuters) — The founder of Branch Metrics, which developed a method of searching within smartphone apps, told a U.S. antitrust trial on Wednesday how his company struggled to integrate with devices because of steps Google took to block them.

The testimony came during the third week of a more than two-month trial in which the U.S. Justice Department is seeking to show that Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) abused its monopoly of search and some search advertising. Google has said that its business practices were legal.

Google is accused of paying $10 billion a year based on “revenue share agreements” to smartphone makers, wireless carriers and others who agree to make its software the default and maintain its monopoly in search.

A complete quantum computing system could be as large as a two-car garage when one factors in all the paraphernalia required for smooth operation. But the entire processing unit, made of qubits, would barely cover the tip of your finger.

Today’s smartphones, laptops and supercomputers contain billions of tiny electronic processing elements called transistors that are either switched on or off, signifying a 1 or 0, the binary language computers use to express and calculate all information. Qubits are essentially quantum transistors. They can exist in two well-defined states—say, up and down—which represent the 1 and 0. But they can also occupy both of those states at the same time, which adds to their computing prowess. And two—or more—qubits can be entangled, a strange quantum phenomenon where particles’ states correlate even if the particles lie across the universe from each other. This ability completely changes how computations can be carried out, and it is part of what makes quantum computers so powerful, says Nathalie de Leon, a quantum physicist at Princeton University. Furthermore, simply observing a qubit can change its behavior, a feature that de Leon says might create even more of a quantum benefit. “Qubits are pretty strange. But we can exploit that strangeness to develop new kinds of algorithms that do things classical computers can’t do,” she says.

Scientists are trying a variety of materials to make qubits. They range from nanosized crystals to defects in diamond to particles that are their own antiparticles. Each comes with pros and cons. “It’s too early to call which one is the best,” says Marina Radulaski of the University of California, Davis. De Leon agrees. Let’s take a look.

OpenAI is in advanced talks with former Apple designer Jony Ive and Japanese tech giant SoftBank to bankroll a $1 billion project to build the “iPhone of artificial intelligence,” the Financial Times.

Ive, who was first reported to be collaborating with Altman by The Information on Tuesday, founded LoveFrom in 2019 after two decades at Apple, where he played a key role… More.

The device is inspired by how the iPhone’s touchscreen transformed mobile internet and aims to give a “more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with AI,” the Financial Times reported.

Continue reading “OpenAI Reportedly Taps SoftBank For $1 Billion ‘iPhone Of Artificial Intelligence’ Venture” »

X employees have learnt not to send Elon Musk attachments or documents or spreadsheets in an email, per a Financial Times report.

When OpenAI first unveiled GPT-4, its flagship text-generating AI model, the company touted the model’s multimodality — in other words, its ability to understand the context of images as well as text. GPT-4 could caption — and even interpret — relatively complex images, OpenAI said, for example identifying a Lightning Cable adapter from a picture of a plugged-in iPhone.

But since GPT-4’s announcement in late March, OpenAI has held back the model’s image features, reportedly on fears about abuse and privacy issues. Until recently, the exact nature of those fears remained a mystery. But early this week, OpenAI published a technical paper detailing its work to mitigate the more problematic aspects of GPT-4’s image-analyzing tools.

To date, GPT-4 with vision, abbreviated “GPT-4V” by OpenAI internally, has only been used regularly by a few thousand users of Be My Eyes, an app to help low-vision and blind people navigate the environments around them. Over the past few months, however, OpenAI also began to engage with “red teamers” to probe the model for signs of unintended behavior, according to the paper.

PhonePe launched the Indus AppStore Developer Platform on Saturday, promising zero platform fee and no commission on in-app purchases as the Walmart-backed fintech races to win Android developers in Google’s largest market.

The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, which has amassed over 450 million registered users on its eponymous payments app, said developers can start registering and uploading their apps on the ‘made-in-India’ app store starting today. The app store, for which PhonePe has also partnered with phonemakers for distribution, features scores of locally relevant features including support for third-party payment providers, 12 Indian languages and a login system that revolves around phone numbers.

PhonePe will not charge developers any listing fee for the first year but move to a “nominal” cost thereafter, it said. The startup will additionally not levy a commission on in-app purchases, compared to Google’s 15–30% takerate. PhonePe, which leads the UPI-based payments market in India, said it has put in place an India-based team to offer support to developers, addressing the concerns of local developers who have been dissatisfied with Google’s delayed responses and U.S. timezone operating hours.