Lifeboat Foundation

The study’s authors compared the influence of two components of the brain’s physical structure: the outer folds of the cerebral cortex — the area where most higher-level brain activity occurs — and the connectome, the web of nerves that links distinct regions of the cerebral cortex. The team found that the shape of the outer surface was a better predictor of brainwave data than was the connectome, contrary to the paradigm that the connectome has the dominant role in driving brain activity. “We use concepts from physics and engineering to study how anatomy determines function,” says study co-author James Pang, a physicist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

A model of the brain’s geometry better explains neuronal activity than a model based on the ‘connectome’.

Large language models are trained on all kinds of data, most of which it seems was collected without anyone’s knowledge or consent. Now you have a choice whether to allow your web content to be used by Google as material to feed its Bard AI and any future models it decides to make.

It’s as simple as disallowing “User-Agent: Google-Extended” in your site’s robots.txt, the document that tells automated web crawlers what content they’re able to access.

Though Google claims to develop its AI in an ethical, inclusive way, the use case of AI training is meaningfully different than indexing the web.

Robert Way/iStock.

ChatGPT was not connected to the internet and was equipped to answer questions related to data it was trained on until September 2021. If you asked ChatGPT who won the FIFA World Cup in 2022, it wouldn’t have been able to answer.

OpenAI promises up-to-date information with direct links to sources for subscribers only, but others will get the feature.

OpenAI posted today that ChatGPT can once more trawl the web for current information, offering answers taken directly from “current and authoritative” sources, which it cites in its responses. The feature, called Browse with Bing, is only open to those with Plus and Enterprise subscriptions for now, but the company says it will roll it out “to all users soon.”

Microsoft’s Bing Chat on Windows, in the Edge browser, and in third-party browser plugins could already return live information from the web, and so can Google’s Bard in Chrome and other browsers. Both also offer… More.

Continue reading “ChatGPT can now search the web in real time” »

With office spaces being emptier, companies are using WiFi access points and AI sensors to learn about employees’ behavior in the workplace.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has received its first contract from the US Space Force to provide customized satellite communications for the military under the company’s new Starshield program, extending the provocative billionaire’s role as a defense contractor.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is competing with 15 companies, including Viasat Inc., for $900 million in work orders through 2028 under the Space Force’s new “Proliferated Low Earth Orbit” contracts program, which is tapping into communications services of satellites orbiting from 100 miles to 1,000 miles (160 kilometers to 1,600 kilometers) above Earth.

The Starshield service will be provided over SpaceX’s existing constellation of Starlink communications satellites.

How many times have you shown up to a video meeting with people at work only to find you have terrible internet that day? Maybe the others on the call are cutting in and out, or maybe your own signal is being corrupted on their screen. Regardless, many remote workers have found a simple solution—turn down the video quality and focus on audio.

In a very general sense, this is the same technique that researchers leverage when using quantum squeezing to improve the performance of their sensors. Mark Kasevich, a professor of physics and applied physics at Stanford University and a member of Q-NEXT, uses quantum squeezing in his work developing quantum sensors.

Q-NEXT is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Quantum Information Science Research Center led by DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory. Center researchers use quantum squeezing to make better measurements of quantum systems.

And it will pay legal fees if its customers end up in any lawsuits about it.

Getty Images is so confident its new generative AI model is free of copyrighted content that it will cover any potential intellectual-property disputes for its customers.

The generative AI system, announced today, was built by Nvidia and is trained solely on images in Getty’s image library. It does not include logos or images that have been scraped off the internet without consent.

AlexLXM/iStock.

However, there may be a solution on the way. Machine learning is being used by a group of academics from the National Research Council (NRC) and the University of Waterloo to address this age-old problem.