Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX is developing stronger steel superalloys. SpaceX is making improved versions of Inconel alloys.

SpaceX metallurgy team developed SX500 superalloy for 12000 psi, hot oxygen-rich gas. It was hard. Almost any metal turns into a flare in those conditions.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2018

Continue reading “SpaceX Casting Raptor Engine Parts from Supersteel Alloys” »

The Elon Musk funded OpenAI non-profit has created a breakthrough system for writing high-quality text. It can write text, performs basic reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization and all without task-specific training.

The system is able to take a few sentences of sample writing and then produce a multi-paragraph article in the style and context of the sample. This capability would let AI’s to impersonate the writing style of any person from previous writing samples.

GPT-2, is a 1.5 billion parameter Transformer that achieves state of the art results on 7 out of 8 tested language modeling datasets in a zero-shot setting, yet still simplifies (or in AI term underfits) their database called WebText. Samples from the model reflect these improvements and contain coherent paragraphs of text. These findings suggest a promising path towards building language processing systems which learn to perform tasks from their naturally occurring demonstrations.

Continue reading “A Tsunami of Fake News is On Its Way and Here is How” »

Researchers this week announced they had developed an automatic text generator using artificial intelligence which is very good—so good, it is keeping details private for now.

That software developed by OpenAI could be used to generate news stories, product reviews and other kinds of writing which may be more realistic than anything developed before by computer.

OpenAI, a research center backed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon and Microsoft, said the new software “achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks,” including summarization and translating.

SpaceX is building a steel launch system called Starship for the moon and Mars, but some aerospace experts say Elon Musk’s new design won’t be easy.

All hopes are on Mars to be the next big adventure for mankind, with groups like NASA working hard to make a manned mission to the Red Planet a reality and companies like SpaceX betting big on Earth-to-Mars travel.

SpaceX boss Elon Musk has long promised that living on Mars will be a reality within our lifetimes, even suggesting that he himself might move there at some point in the not-too-distant future. But once all the kinks are ironed out, how much is it going to cost to leave Earth behind and become a full-fledged Martian? Musk thinks he has the answer.

“Very dependent on volume, but I’m confident moving to Mars (return ticket is free) will one day cost less than $500k & maybe even below $100k,” he wrote. “Low enough that most people in advanced economies could sell their home on Earth & move to Mars if they want.”

The extraordinary ambition of Musk’s prediction wasn’t lost on some Twitter users. “Fyre Festival Part Deux,” one replied.

Maybe that skepticism is why, in a follow –up reply, Musk seemed to hedge his bets.

Continue reading “Elon Musk: A Round-Trip Ticket to Mars Will Cost Just $100,000” »

If I were to make a prediction, I’d think there’s a good chance that it is not batteries. But capacitors.”

Today he may be making good on his prediction. The electric vehicle manufacturer confirmed that it has acquired a small San Diego lab that owns ultracapacitor patents and technology.

Maxwell Technologies provides dry electrode manufacturing technology that can be used to make to make batteries that power electric vehicles and renewable energy systems. The company announced that in an all-stock transaction it will merge and become a wholly owned by a subsidiary of Tesla.

Continue reading “Is Tesla’s Elon Musk Making Good On Prediction That Capacitors ‘Supersede’ Batteries?” »

The Raptor engine is designed to power Starship to our lunar neighbor and beyond.

by

• Amanda Kooser

Telesat picked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin New Glenn rocket to launch its satellites into space.