OpenAI Upgrades Its Smartest AI Model With Improved Reasoning Skills
Will Knight | Wired
“The o3 model scores much higher on several measures than its predecessor, OpenAI says, including ones that measure complex coding-related skills and advanced math and science competency. It is three times better than o1 at answering questions posed by ARC-AGI, a benchmark designed to test an AI models’ ability to reason over extremely difficult mathematical and logic problems they’re encountering for the first time.”

ROBOTICS

New Physics Sim Trains Robots 430,000 Times Faster Than Reality
Benj Edwards | Ars Technica
“On Thursday, a large group of university and private industry researchers unveiled Genesis, a new open source computer simulation system that lets robots practice tasks in simulated reality 430,000 times faster than in the real world. …’One hour of compute time gives a robot 10 years of training experience. That’s how Neo was able to learn martial arts in a blink of an eye in the Matrix Dojo,’ wrote Genesis paper co-author Jim Fan on X, who says he played a ‘minor part’ in the research.”

AUTOMATION

Waymo Still Doing Better Than Humans at Preventing Injuries and Property Damage
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“They found that the performance of Waymo’s vehicles was safer than that of humans, with an 88 percent reduction in property damage claims and a 92 percent reduction in bodily injury claims. Across 25.3 million miles, Waymo was involved in nine property damage claims and two bodily injury claims. The average human driving a similar distance would be expected to have 78 property damage and 26 bodily injury claims, the company says.”

BIOTECH

A Third Person Has Received a Transplant of a Genetically Engineered Pig Kidney
Emily Mullin | Wired
“Towana Looney, 53, is off of kidney dialysis after undergoing the procedure at NYU Langone Health on November 25. She was discharged from the hospital on December 6, and her doctors say she is in good health. Her surgery is the latest in a series of similar procedures known as xenotransplantation, the practice of transplanting organs from one species to another.”

SPACE

We’re About to Fly a Spacecraft Into the Sun for the First Time
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach yet to the Sun. It will come within just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) of the solar surface, flying into the solar atmosphere for the first time. Yeah, it’s going to get pretty hot. Scientists estimate that the probe’s heat shield will endure temperatures in excess of 2,500° Fahrenheit (1,371° C) on Christmas Eve, which is pretty much the polar opposite of the North Pole.”

TECH

Smart Glasses Won Me Over, and This Is the Pair That Did It
Joanna Stern | The Wall Street Journal
“Meta’s Ray-Bans and its prototype Orion hint at the future of smart glasses—sleek, stylish and truly wearable. This was the year smart glasses won me over. These lighter-weight face computers are the next step in how we interact with each other and our surroundings. This isn’t virtual-reality or a detour to the metaverse—you see the real world, just with digital stuff in it. And you look at your phone a lot less.”

ROBOTICS

‘Deep Research’ Shows How Google Can Win the AI Race
Mark Sullivan | Fast Company
“After I agreed to the plan, the agent got busy. …I watched as it raced over the internet and began compiling a list of sources. About three minutes later it had compiled a 60-item list of  source articles and publications, including research papers, journal articles, Medium posts, and Reddit discussions. From all these sources, the agent synthesized a 2,100-word, citation-filled essay that answered my question. Impressive.”

FUTURE

How to Disappear Completely
s.e. smith | The Verge
“We are watching the internet slip away as websites and apps rise and fall, swallowed by private equity, shuttered by burnout, or simply frozen in time—taking with it our memories, our cultural phenomena, our memes. …How comfortable are we with the disappearance of entire swaths of careers and artistic pursuits? And who is making these decisions—private equity or journalists, AI or archivists, billionaires or workers? The answers to these questions, and the way we define ourselves today, will shape our culture of the future.”

Image Credit: Resource Database on Unsplash

Google’s New Project Astra Could Be Generative AI’s Killer App
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
“Last week I was taken through an unmarked door on an upper floor of a building in London’s King’s Cross district into a room with strong secret-project vibes. The word ‘ASTRA’ was emblazoned in giant letters across one wall. …’The pitch to my mum is that we’re building an AI that has eyes, ears, and a voice. It can be anywhere with you, and it can help you with anything you’re doing,’ says Greg Wayne, co-lead of the Astra team. ‘It’s not there yet, but that’s the kind of vision.'”

COMPUTING

Graphene Interconnects Aim to Give Moore’s Law New Life 
Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“Destination 2D, a startup based in Milpitas, Calif., claims to have solved [two challenges associated with using graphene in chips]. Destination 2D’s team has demonstrated a technique to deposit graphene interconnects onto chips at 300 °C, which is still cool enough to be done by traditional CMOS techniques. They have also developed a method of doping graphene sheets that offers current densities 100 times as dense as copper, according to Kaustav Banerjee, co-founder and CTO of Destination 2D.”

AUTOMATION

Wayve’s AI Self-Driving System Is Here to Drive Like a Human and Take On Waymo and Tesla
Ben Oliver | Wired
“[In contrast to Waymo’s hybrid system] Wayve’s AI operates without high-definition maps or coded interventions, and learns unsupervised from vast quantities of unlabeled real-life or simulated driving videos. ‘I think the gap between that geofenced robotaxi model and what an embodied AI solution can do is stark and game-changing,’ Wayve founder Alex Kendall says. ‘The market’s now somewhat swinging in our direction, but there’s no prizes for having the right idea eight years ago. Now it’s all down to execution.'”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Harvard Makes 1 Million Books Available to Train AI Models
Kate Knibbs | Wired
“Harvard University announced Thursday it’s releasing a high-quality dataset of nearly 1 million public-domain books that could be used by anyone to train large language models and other AI tools. …In addition to the trove of books, the Institutional Data Initiative is also working with the Boston Public Library to scan millions of articles from different newspapers now in the public domain, and it says it’s open to forming similar collaborations down the line.”

TRANSPORTATION

Electric Cars Could Last Much Longer Than You Think
James Morris | Wired
“Rather than having a shorter lifespan than internal combustion engines, EV batteries are lasting way longer than expected, surprising even the automakers themselves. …A 10-year-old EV could be almost as good as new, and a 20-year-old one still very usable. That could be yet another disruption to an automotive industry that relies on cars mostly heading to the junkyard after 15 years.”

ENVIRONMENT

AI’s Emissions Are About to Skyrocket Even Further
James O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review
“AI models are rapidly moving from fairly simple text generators like ChatGPT toward highly complex image, video, and music generators. Until now, many of these ‘multimodal’ models have been stuck in the research phase, but that’s changing. ‘As we scale up to images and video, the data sizes increase exponentially,’ says Gianluca Guidi, a PhD student in artificial intelligence at University of Pisa and IMT Lucca, who is the paper’s lead author. Combine that with wider adoption, he says, and emissions will soon jump.”

SPACE

NASA’s Boss-to-Be Proclaims We’re About to Enter an ‘Age of Experimentation’
Stephen Clark | Ars Technica
“‘If the launch doesn’t cost a half-billion dollars, we don’t need to spend many, many years and lots of billions to get it right with some super exquisite asset, when you can get into a rhythm of using all of these providers to get things up very quickly to see what works and what doesn’t, and then evolve into something else,’ Jared Isaacman said. ‘What happens when industry starts cranking out spaceships out of multiple factories? …You’re going to have lots and lots of people in space at one time, and that’s why I call it a light switch-like moment, where a lot of things are going to change.'”

AUTOMATION

The End of Cruise Is the Beginning of a Risky New Phase for Autonomous Vehicles
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“Eight years and $10 billion later, GM has decided to pull the plug on its grand robotaxi experiment. The automaker’s CEO, Mary Barra, made the surprise announcement late on Tuesday, arguing that a shared autonomous mobility service was never really in its ‘core business.’ It was too expensive and had too many regulatory hurdles to overcome to make it a viable revenue stream. Instead, GM would pivot to ‘privately owned’ driverless cars—because, after all, that’s what the people really wanted.”

FUTURE

Galactic Civilizations May Be Impossible. Here’s Why.
Adam Frank | Big Think
“For galactic-scale civilizations to exist in our Universe, they would have to overcome two major hurdles related to physics and biology. One is the sheer distance between each society. The other is biological life span. …Do the laws of physics and the dynamics of social arrangements (even alien ones) allow for galactic societies? As much as I love them (how else could I become a Space Pirate?), I fear the answer may be ‘no.'”

Image Credit: Thomas Chan on Unsplash

The GPT Era Is Already Ending
Matteo Wong | The Atlantic
“[OpenAI] has been unusually direct that the o1 series is the future: Chen, who has since been promoted to senior vice president of research, told me that OpenAI is now focused on this ‘new paradigm,’ and Altman later wrote that the company is prioritizing’ o1 and its successors. The company believes, or wants its users and investors to believe, that it has found some fresh magic. The GPT era is giving way to the reasoning era.”

SPACE

Falcon 9 Reaches a Flight Rate 30 Times Higher Than Shuttle at 1/100th the Cost
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“Space enthusiast Ryan Caton also crunched the numbers on the number of SpaceX launches this year compared to some of its competitors. So far this year, SpaceX has launched as many rockets as Roscosmos has since 2013, United Launch Alliance since 2010, and Arianespace since 2009. This year alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more times than the Ariane 4, Ariane 5, or Atlas V rockets each did during their entire careers.”

NEUROSCIENCE

These Temporary Tattoos Can Read Your Brainwaves
Ed Cara | Gizmodo
“The future of diagnostic medicine is gearing up to look a bit more cyberpunk. Scientists have just unveiled technology that should allow people to one day have their brains and bodies monitored via customized, temporary electronic tattoos. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and others developed the tech, which aims to avoid the limitations of conventional electroencephalography, or EEG, testing.”

CRYPTOCURRENCY

Another Crypto Revolution Is Here—and It’s Unlike Any From the Past
Yueqi Yang | The Information
“The new period of crypto that’s beginning to unfold is shaping up to be starkly different from previous ones. A few years ago, cryptonians wanted to talk about topics like Web3, DeFi and the metaverse, and they gambled heavily on speculative assets: most notably NFTs and crypto coins that traded on meme stock–like hype. For now, they appear far more temperate and are placing an enormous priority on stablecoins, theoretically a less risky form of crypto since they’re backed by dollar reserves.”

ROBOTICS

Waymo’s Next Robotaxi City Will Be Miami
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“Waymo is making the moves on Magic City. Alphabet’s robotaxi service said it would launch in Miami in 2026. The company has been testing its autonomous vehicles in the Florida city on-and-off since 2019, and more recently has begun to lay the groundwork in earnest. Waymo plans to start ‘reacquainting’ its autonomous Jaguar I-Pace vehicles to Miami’s streets in 2025. And in 2026, it expects to start making its vehicles available to riders through its Waymo One ridehail app.”

TECH

The Inside Story of Apple Intelligence
Steven Levy | Wired
“Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, all had well-developed strategies for generative AI by the time Apple finally announced its own push this June. Conventional wisdom suggested this entrance was unfashionably late. Apple disagrees. Its leaders say the company is arriving just in time—and that it’s been stealthily preparing for this moment for years.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

ChatGPT Now Has Over 300 Million Weekly Users
Emma Roth | The Verge
“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed the milestone during The New York Times’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday, which comes just months after ChatGPT hit 200 million weekly users in August. ‘Our product has scaled … now we have more than 300 million weekly active users,’ Altman said. ‘We have users sending more than 1 billion messages per day to ChatGPT.'”

FUTURE

Would You Eat Dried Microbes? This Company Hopes So.
Casey Crownhart | MIT Technology Review
“LanzaTech, a rising star in the fuel and chemical industries, is joining a growing group of businesses producing microbe-based food as an alternative to plant and animal products. Using microbes to make food is hardly new—beer, yogurt, cheese, and tempeh all rely on microbes to transform raw ingredients into beloved dishes. But some companies are hoping to create a new category of food, one that relies on microbes themselves as a primary ingredient in our meals.”

SECURITY

OpenAI Is Working With Anduril to Supply the US Military With AI
Will Knight | Wired
“OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and one of the most prominent artificial intelligence companies in the world, said today that it has entered a partnership with Anduril, a defense startup that makes missiles, drones, and software for the United States military. It marks the latest in a series of similar announcements made recently by major tech companies in Silicon Valley, which has warmed to forming closer ties with the defense industry.”

Image Credit: Declan Sun on Unsplash

AI Can Now Create a Replica of Your Personality
James O’Donnell | MIT Technology Review
“Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy. That’s now possible, according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind, which has been published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.”

ROBOTICS

This AI Taught Itself to Do Surgery by Watching Videos—and It’s Ready to Operate on Humans
Jesus Diaz | Fast Company
“For the first time in history, Kim and his colleagues managed to teach an artificial intelligence to use a robotic surgery machine to perform precise surgical tasks by making it watch thousands of hours of actual procedures happening in real surgical theaters. …According to their recently published paper, the researchers say the AI managed to achieve a performance level comparable to human surgeons without prior explicit programming.”

COMPUTING

New Fastest Supercomputer Will Simulate Nuke Testing
Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“El Capitan was announced yesterday at the SC Conference for supercomputing in Atlanta, Georgia, and it debuted at #1 in the newest Top500 list, a twice-yearly ranking of the world’s highest performing supercomputers. …[The supercomputer], housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., can perform over 2700 quadrillion operations per second at its peak. The previous record holder, Frontier, could do just over 2000 quadrillion peak operations per second.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A Chinese Lab Has Released a ‘Reasoning’ AI Model to Rival OpenAI’s o1
Kyle Wiggers | TechCrunch
“On Wednesday, DeepSeek, an AI research company funded by quantitative traders, released a preview of DeepSeek-R1, which the firm claims is a reasoning model competitive with o1. …Similar to o1, DeepSeek-R1 reasons through tasks, planning ahead, and performing a series of actions that help the model arrive at an answer. This can take a while. Like o1, depending on the complexity of the question, DeepSeek-R1 might ‘think’ for tens of seconds before answering.”

FUTURE

AI Could Cause ‘Social Ruptures’ Between People Who Disagree on Its Sentience
Robert Booth | The Guardian
“Significant ‘social ruptures’ between people who think artificial intelligence systems are conscious and those who insist the technology feels nothing are looming, a leading philosopher has said. …Last week, a transatlantic group of academics predicted that the dawn of consciousness in AI systems is likely by 2035 and one has now said this could result in ‘subcultures that view each other as making huge mistakes’ about whether computer programs are owed similar welfare rights as humans or animals.”

AUTOMATION

Get in, Loser—We’re Chasing a Waymo Into the Future
Wired Staff | Wired
“To provide the most useful dispatch from the future…we realized we needed a way to make self-driving cars feel strange again. A way to scare up the less superficial lessons of our city’s years with Waymo. …Our idea: We’ll pile a few of us into an old-fashioned, human-piloted hired car, then follow a single Waymo robotaxi wherever it goes for a whole workday. We’ll study its movements, its relationship to life on the streets, its whole self-driving gestalt. We’ll interview as many of its passengers as will speak to us, and observe it through the eyes of the kind of human driver it’s designed to replace.”

COMPUTING

Microsoft and Atom Computing Combine for Quantum Error Correction Demo
John Timmer | Ars Technica
“The two companies [released] a draft manuscript describing their work on error correction [this week]. The paper serves as both a good summary of where things currently stand in the world of error correction, as well as a good look at some of the distinct features of computation using neutral atoms.”

TECH

OpenAI Considers Taking on Google With Browser
Erin Woo, Sahil Patel, and Amir Efrati | The Information
“OpenAI is preparing to launch a frontal assault on Google. The ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser that it would combine with its chatbot, and it has separately discussed or struck deals to power search features for travel, food, real estate and retail websites, according to people who have seen prototypes or designs of the products.”

INTERNET

Bluesky Says It Won’t Screw Things Up
Steven Levy | Wired
“In little more than a week, its numbers soared from 14 million to 20 million and were growing at a pace of a million a day. …When I spoke this week to Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, she was gratified by the new users. ‘It’s been a wild week,’ she says. But she noted that this spike was one of several over the past few months. Bluesky, she says, is in it for the long haul. The idea is not to recreate classic Twitter, she says, but to reshape social media on the principle of openness and user control.”

SCIENCE

All Life on Earth Today Descended From a Single Cell. Meet LUCA.
Jonathan Lambert | Quanta
“The [new analysis] sketched a surprisingly complex picture(opens a new tab) of the cell. LUCA lived off hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, boasted a genome as large as that of some modern bacteria, and already had a rudimentary immune system, according to the study. Its genomic complexity, the authors argue, suggests that LUCA was one of many lineages — the rest now extinct—living about 4.2 billion years ago, a turbulent time relatively early in Earth’s history and long thought too harsh for life to flourish.”

Image Credit: bharath kumar on Unsplash

IBM Boosts the Amount of Computation You Can Get Done on Quantum Hardware
John Timmer | Ars Technica
“There’s a general consensus that we won’t be able to consistently perform sophisticated quantum calculations without the development of error-corrected quantum computing, which is unlikely to arrive until the end of the decade. It’s still an open question, however, whether we could perform limited but useful calculations at an earlier point. IBM is one of the companies that’s betting the answer is yes, and on Wednesday, it announced a series of developments aimed at making that possible.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

OpenAI Shifts Strategy as Rate of ‘GPT’ AI Improvements Slows
Stephanie Palazzolo, Erin Woo, and Emir Efrati | The Information
“”The Orion situation could test a core assumption of the AI field, known as scaling laws: that LLMs would continue to improve at the same pace as long as they had more data to learn from and additional computing power to facilitate that training process. In response to the recent challenge to training-based scaling laws posed by slowing GPT improvements, the industry appears to be shifting its effort to improving models after their initial training, potentially yielding a different type of scaling law.”

BIOTECH

The First CRISPR Treatment Is Making Its Way to Patients
Emily Mullen | Wired
“Vertex, the pharmaceutical company that markets Casgevy, announced in a November 5 earnings call that the first person to receive Casgevy outside of a clinical trial was dosed in the third quarter of this year. …When Wired followed up with Vertex via email, spokesperson Eleanor Celeste declined to provide the exact number of patients that have received Casgevy. However, the company says 40 patients have undergone cell collections in anticipation of receiving the treatment, up from 20 patients last quarter.”

AUTOMATION

AI Is Now Designing Chips for AI
Kristen Houser | Big Think
“It’s 2028, and your tech startup has an idea that could revolutionize the industry—but you need a custom designed microchip to bring the product to market. Five years ago, designing that chip would’ve cost more than your whole company is worth, but your team is now able to do it at a fraction of price and in a fraction of the time—all thanks to AI, fittingly being run on chips like these.”

ROBOTICS

Now Anyone in LA Can Hail a Waymo Robotaxi
Kirsten Korosec | TechCrunch
“Waymo has opened its robotaxi service to everyone in Los Angeles, sunsetting a waitlist that had grown to 300,000 people. The Alphabet-backed company said starting Tuesday anyone can download the Waymo One app to hail a ride in its service area, which is now about 80 square miles in Los Angeles County.”

ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE

The First Entirely AI-Generated Video Game Is Insanely Weird and Fun
Will Knight | Wired
“Minecraft remains remarkably popular a decade or so after it was first released, thanks to a unique mix of quirky gameplay and open world building possibilities. A knock-off called Oasis, released last month, captures much of the original game’s flavor with a remarkable and weird twist. The entire game is generated not by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an AI model that dreams up each frame.”

ENERGY

Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star.
Brad Plumer | The New York Times
“At last year’s climate conference in the United Arab Emirates, 22 countries pledged, for the first time, to triple the world’s use of nuclear power by midcentury to help curb global warming. At this year’s summit in Azerbaijan, six more countries signed the pledge. ‘It’s a whole different dynamic today,’ said Dr. Bilbao y Leon, who now leads the World Nuclear Association, an industry trade group. ‘A lot more people are open to talking about nuclear power as a solution.'”

HEALTH

The Next Omics? Tracking a Lifetime of Exposures to Better Understand Disease
Lindzi Wessel | Knowable Magazine
“Of the millions of substances people encounter daily, health researchers have focused on only a few hundred. Those in the emerging field of exposomics want to change that. …In homes, on buildings, from satellites and even in apps on the phone in your pocket, tools to monitor the environment are on the rise. At the intersection of public health and toxicology, these tools are fueling a new movement in exposure science. It’s called the exposome and it represents the sum of all environmental exposures over a lifetime.”

SPACE

Buckle Up: SpaceX Aims for Rapid-Fire Starship Launches in 2025
Passant Rabie | Gizmodo
“SpaceX has big plans for its Starship rocket. After a groundbreaking test flight, in which the landing tower caught the booster, the company’s founder and CEO Elon Musk wants to see the megarocket fly up to 25 times next year, working its way up to a launch rate of 100 flights per year, and eventually a Starship launching on a daily basis.”

TECH

Are AI Clones the Future of Dating? I Tried Them for Myself.
Eli Tan | The New York Times
“As chatbots like ChatGPT improve, their use in our personal and even romantic lives is becoming more common. So much so, some executives in the dating app industry have begun pitching a future in which people can create AI clones of themselves that date other clones and relay the results back to their human counterparts.”

GENETICS

Genetic Discrimination Is Coming for Us All
Kristen V. Brown | The Atlantic
“For decades, researchers have feared that people might be targeted over their DNA, but they weren’t sure how often it was happening. Now at least a handful of Americans are experiencing what they argue is a form of discrimination. And as more people get their genomes sequenced—and researchers learn to glean even more information from the results—a growing number of people may find themselves similarly targeted.”

Image Credit: Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash

Why AI Could Eat Quantum Computing’s Lunch
Edd Gent | MIT Technology Review
“The scale and complexity of quantum systems that can be simulated using AI is advancing rapidly, says Giuseppe Carleo, a professor of computational physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). …Given the pace of recent advances, a growing number of researchers are now asking whether AI could solve a substantial chunk of the most interesting problems in chemistry and materials science before large-scale quantum computers become a reality.”

ROBOTICS

MIT Debuts a Large Language Model-Inspired Method for Teaching Robots New Skills
Brian Heater | TechCrunch
“The team introduced a new architecture called heterogeneous pretrained transformers (HPT), which pulls together information from different sensors and different environments. …’Our dream is to have a universal robot brain that you could download and use for your robot without any training at all,’ CMU associate professor David Held said of the research. ‘While we are just in the early stages, we are going to keep pushing hard and hope scaling leads to a breakthrough in robotic policies, like it did with large language models.'”

FUTURE

Why Futurist Amy Webb Sees a ‘Technology Supercycle’ Headed Our Way
Tim Brinkhof | Big Think
“[Webb] predicts that we are on the cusp of a ‘technology supercycle,’ in which advances in three complementary and increasingly interconnected fields of research—AI, biotech, and smart sensors—will transform our economy and society to a similar extent as the wheel and the steam engine.”

BIOTECH

A ‘Crazy’ Idea for Treating Autoimmune Diseases Might Actually Work
Sarah Zhang | The Atlantic
“Lupus cannot be cured. No autoimmune disease can be cured. Two years ago, however, a study came out of Germany that rocked all of these assumptions. Five patients with uncontrolled lupus went into complete remission after undergoing a repurposed cancer treatment called CAR-T-cell therapy, which largely wiped out their rogue immune cells. The first treated patient has had no symptoms for almost four years now.”

GENE EDITING

How a Breakthrough Gene-Editing Tool Will Help the World Cope With Climate Change
James Temple | MIT Technology Review
“Jennifer Doudna, one of the inventors of the breakthrough gene-editing tool CRISPR, says the technology will help the world grapple with the growing risks of climate change by delivering crops and animals better suited to hotter, drier, wetter, or weirder conditions. ‘The potential is huge,’ says Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her role in the discovery. ‘There is a coming revolution right now with CRISPR.'”

TECH

The Death of Search
Matteo Wong | The Atlantic
“A little, or even a lot, of inefficiency in search has long been the norm; AI will snuff it out. Our lives will be more convenient and streamlined, but perhaps a bit less wonderful and wonder-filled, a bit less illuminated. A process once geared toward exploration will shift to extraction. Less meandering, more hunting. No more unknown unknowns. If these companies really have their way, no more hyperlinks—and thus, no actual web.”

ENERGY

One Way That Could Improve Space-Based Power: Relays
Michelle Hampson | IEEE Spectrum
“Intermediate transmitters could more effectively beam power to the ground. …In their study, the researchers designed and tested several low-cost, light-weight proof of concept transmit arrays to refocus the beam, finding the tactic could transfer nearly 2.5 times as much power as a system that would beam power straight to Earth.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Debate May Help AI Models Converge on Truth
Stephen Ornes | Quanta
“Letting AI systems argue with each other may help expose when a large language model has made mistakes. …The approach was first proposed six years ago, but two sets of findings released earlier this year—one in February from the AI startup Anthropic and the second in July from Google DeepMind—offer the first empirical evidence that debate between two LLMs helps a judge (human or machine) recognize the truth.”

SPACE

Life-Seeking, Ice-Melting Robots Could Punch Through Europa’s Icy Shell
Robin George Andrews | MIT Technology Review
“Can robots actually get through that ice shell and survive the journey? A simple way to start is with a cryobot—a melt probe that can gradually thaw its way through the shell, pulled down by gravity. …Once it gets through the ice, the cryobot could unfurl a suite of scientific investigation tools, or perhaps deploy an independent submersible that could work in tandem with the cryobot—all while making sure none of that radioactive matter contaminates the ocean.”

Image Credit: Harry Borrett on Unsplash

Google CEO Says Over 25% of New Google Code Is Generated by AI
Benj Edwards | Ars Technica
“We’ve always used tools to build new tools, and developers are using AI to continue that tradition. On Tuesday, Google’s CEO revealed that AI systems now generate more than a quarter of new code for its products, with human programmers overseeing the computer-generated contributions. The statement, made during Google’s Q3 2024 earnings call, shows how AI tools are already having a sizable impact on software development.”

AUTOMATION

Waymo Raises $5.6 Billion From Outside Investors
Eli Tan | The New York Times
“Amid its push to grow its fleet of autonomous robot taxis and expand into new cities, Waymo has raised $5.6 billion from outside investors, its largest funding round to date. …The fresh money comes behind Waymo’s first taste of commercial success. Its robot taxis are now completing over 100,000 rides each week in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles, double its number in May, and will be operating in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta by 2025 through a partnership with Uber.”

ROBOTICS

This Is a Glimpse of the Future of AI Robots
Will Knight | Wired
“Physical Intelligence, also known as PI or π, was founded earlier this year by several prominent robotics researchers to pursue the new robotics approach inspired by breakthroughs in AI’s language abilities. ‘The amount of data we’re training on is larger than any robotics model ever made, by a very significant margin, to our knowledge,’ says Sergey Levine, a cofounder of Physical Intelligence and an associate professor at UC Berkeley.”

ENERGY

Nuclear Fusion’s New Idea: An Off-the-Shelf Stellarator
Tom Clynes | IEEE Spectrum
“The PPPL team invented this nuclear-fusion reactor, completed last year, using mainly off-the-shelf components. Its core is a glass vacuum chamber surrounded by a 3D-printed nylon shell that anchors 9,920 meticulously placed permanent rare-earth magnets. Sixteen copper-coil electromagnets resembling giant slices of pineapple wrap around the shell crosswise.”

TECH

Wall Street Giants to Make $50 Billion Bet on AI and Power Projects
Katherine Blunt | The Wall Street Journal
“The investment is a bet on AI’s huge energy needs and the mounting stress it is putting on the US power grid. …The companies said they are now working together with large tech companies to accelerate their access to electricity, which has become constrained in parts of the US as data-center developers compete for power sources and access to the grid. ‘The capital needs are huge, and one of the big bottlenecks—maybe the bottleneck—is electricity availability,’ ECP founder and senior partner Doug Kimmelman said.

ENVIRONMENT

The AI Boom Rests on Billions of Tons of Concrete
Ted C. Fishman | IEEE Spectrum
“To the casual observer, the data industry can seem incorporeal, its products conjured out of weightless bits. But as I stand beside the busy construction site for DataBank’s ATL4, what impresses me most is the gargantuan amount of material—mostly concrete—that gives shape to the goliath that will house, secure, power, and cool the hardware of AI. Big data is big concrete. And that poses a big problem.”

AUTOMATION

Waymo Explores Using Google’s Gemini to Train Its Robotaxis
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“Waymo has long touted its ties to Google’s DeepMind and its decades of AI research as a strategic advantage over its rivals in the autonomous driving space. Now, the Alphabet-owned company is taking it a step further by developing a new training model for its robotaxis built on Google’s multimodal large language model (MLLM) Gemini.”

SPACE

SpaceX Has Caught a Massive Rocket. So What’s Next?
Eric Berger | Ars Technica
“Here’s our best attempt to piece together the milestones and major goals of the Starship program over the next several years before it unlocks the capability to land humans on the Moon for NASA’s Artemis Program and begins flying demonstration missions to Mars. For fun, we’ve also included some estimated dates for each of these milestones. These represent our best guesses, and they’re almost certainly wrong.”

SCIENCE

Meet the First Star System to ‘Solve’ the 3-Body Problem
Ethan Siegel | Big Think
“It’s easy to have planets that orbit around a single star, and in a double star system, you can either orbit close to one star or far from both members. These configurations are stable, but adding a third star into the mix was thought to render the formation of planets unstable, as mutual gravitational interactions would eventually force their ejection. That wisdom got thrown out the window with the discovery of GW Orionis, which boasts multiple massive dust rings and possibly even more planets, all orbiting three stars at once.”

Image Credit: David Clode on Unsplash

Anthropic Wants Its AI Agent to Control Your Computer
Will Knight | Wired
“It took a while for people to adjust to the idea of chatbots that seem to have minds of their own. The next leap into the unknown may involve trusting artificial intelligence to take over our computers, too. Anthropic, a high-flying competitor to OpenAI, announced [this week] that it has taught its AI model Claude to do a range of things on a computer, including search the web, open applications, and input text using the mouse and keyboard.”

BIOTECH

A Neuralink Rival Says Its Eye Implant Restored Vision in Blind People
Emily Mullin | Wired
“For years, they had been losing their central vision—what allows people to see letters, faces, and details clearly. The light-receiving cells in their eyes had been deteriorating, gradually blurring their sight. But after receiving an experimental eye implant as part of a clinical trial, some study participants can now see well enough to read from a book, play cards, and fill in a crossword puzzle despite being legally blind.”

COMPUTING

DNA Has Been Modified to Make It Store Data 350 Times Faster
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | New Scientist
“DNA has been used for years to store data, but encoding information into the molecule is painstaking work. Now, researchers have drastically sped it up by mimicking a natural biological process that drives gene expression. This could lead to durable, do-it-yourself DNA data storage technologies.”

TRANSPORTATION

Air Taxis and Other Electric-Powered Aircraft Cleared for Takeoff With Final FAA Rules
Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge
“The FAA says these ‘powered-lift’ vehicles will be the first completely new category of aircraft since helicopters were introduced in 1940. These aircraft will be used for a variety of services, including air taxis, cargo delivery, and rescue and retrieval operations. The final rules published today contain guidelines for pilot training as well as operational requirements regarding minimum safe altitudes and visibility.”

ENERGY

Cheap Solar Panels Are Changing the World
Zoë Schlanger | The Atlantic
“‘In a single year, in a single technology, we’re providing as much new electricity as the entirety of global growth the year before,’ Kingsmill Bond, a senior energy strategist at RMI, a clean-energy nonprofit, told me. A decade or two ago, analysts ‘did not imagine in their wildest dreams that solar by the middle of the 2020s would already be supplying all of the growth of global electricity demand,’ he said. Yet here we are.”

ENVIRONMENT

GMOs Could Reboot Chestnut Trees
Anya Kamenetz | MIT Technology Review
“The sprouts, no higher than our knees, are samples of likely the first genetically modified trees to be considered for federal regulatory approval as a tool for ecological restoration. American Castanea’s founders, and all the others here today, hope that the American chestnut (Castanea dentata) will be the first tree species ever brought back from functional extinction—but, ideally, not the last.”

FUTURE

Here’s What the Regenerative Cities of Tomorrow Could Look Like
Kotaro Okada | Wired
“Wired Japan collaborated with the urban design studio For Cities to highlight some of the world’s best sustainable urban developments, which are harbingers of what is to come. From using local materials and construction methods to restoring ecosystems, these projects go beyond merely making green spaces and provide hints of how cities of the future will function as well as how they will be built. Here are some places where the future is now.”

AUTOMATION

How Wayve’s Driverless Cars Will Meet One of Their Biggest Challenges Yet
Will Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology Review
“The move to the US will be a test of Wayve’s technology, which the company claims is more general-purpose than what many of its rivals are offering. Wayve’s approach has attracted massive investment—including a $1 billion funding round that broke UK records this May—and partnerships with Uber and online grocery firms such as Asda and Ocado. But it will now go head to head with the heavyweights of the growing autonomous-car industry, including Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla.”

PRIVACY

Two Students Created Face Recognition Glasses. It Wasn’t Hard.
Kashmir Hill | The New York Times
“Mr. Nguyen and a fellow Harvard student, Caine Ardayfio, had built glasses used for identifying strangers in real time, and had demonstrated them on two ‘real people’ at the subway station, including Mr. Hoda, whose name was incorrectly transcribed in the video captions as ‘Vishit.’ Mr. Nguyen and Mr. Ardayfio, who are both 21 and studying engineering, said in an interview that their system relied on widely available technologies.”

ETHICS

Google Is Now Watermarking Its AI-Generated Text
Eliza Strickland | IEEE Spectrum
“The system, called SynthID-Text, doesn’t compromise ‘the quality, accuracy, creativity, or speed of the text generation,’ says Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind and a coauthor of the paper. But the researchers acknowledge that their system is far from foolproof, and isn’t yet available to everyone—it’s more of a demonstration than a scalable solution.”

Image Credit: Sylwia Bartyzel on Unsplash

SpaceX Catches Returning Rocket in Mid-Air, Turning a Fanciful Idea Into Reality
Stephen Clark | Ars Technica
“This achievement is the first of its kind, and it’s crucial for SpaceX’s vision of rapidly reusing the Starship rocket, enabling human expeditions to the moon and Mars, routine access to space for mind-bogglingly massive payloads, and novel capabilities that no other company—or country—seems close to attaining.”

FUTURE

Meta’s AI Chief Says World Models Are Key to ‘Human-Level AI’—But It Might Be 10 Years Out
Maxwell Zeff | TechCrunch
“Are today’s AI models truly remembering, thinking, planning, and reasoning, just like a human brain would? Some AI labs would have you believe they are, but according to Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, the answer is no. He thinks we could get there in a decade or so, however, by pursuing a new method called a ‘world model.'”

AUTOMATION

This Lab Robot Mixes Chemicals
Kristel Tjandra | MIT Technology Review
“Lab scientists spend much of their time doing laborious and repetitive tasks, be it pipetting liquid samples or running the same analyses over and over again. But what if they could simply tell a robot to do the experiments, analyze the data, and generate a report? Enter Organa, a benchtop robotic system devised by researchers at the University of Toronto that can perform chemistry experiments.”

ROBOTICS

Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Team Up on Robots
Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum
“The partnership aims to make Atlas into a general-purpose humanoid …Boston Dynamics has an exceptionally capable humanoid platform capable of advanced and occasionally painful-looking whole-body motion behaviors along with some relatively basic and brute force-y manipulation. Meanwhile, TRI has been working for quite a while on developing AI-based learning techniques to tackle a variety of complicated manipulation challenges.”

TRANSPORTATION

Watch: Jetson Founder Pushes the Limits of ‘Freestyle’ eVTOL Agility
Loz Blain | New Atlas
“It’s some of the most dynamic flight we’ve seen from an eVTOL with a human on board, and some of the closest we’ve seen to answering the question that probably launched the eVTOL sector: Hey, what would it be like to ride around in a racing drone?”

ENERGY

Ultra-Deep Fracking for Limitless Geothermal Power Is Possible: EPFL
David Szondy | New Atlas
“The prospect of virtually unlimited clean geothermal power is now substantially brighter. EPFL’s Laboratory of Experimental Rock Mechanics (LEMR) has shown that the semi-plastic, gooey rock at supercritical depths can still be fractured to let water through. …Companies like Fervo and Sage Geosystems are proving that a fracking approach to geothermal energy can extract much more power than traditional methods—this research proves that the concept could do the same for ultra-deep supercritical geothermal projects as well.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Apple Engineers Show How Flimsy AI ‘Reasoning’ Can Be
Kyle Orland | Wired
“For a while now, companies like OpenAI and Google have been touting advanced ‘reasoning’ capabilities as the next big step in their latest artificial intelligence models. Now, though, a new study from six Apple engineers shows that the mathematical ‘reasoning’ displayed by advanced large language models can be extremely brittle and unreliable in the face of seemingly trivial changes to common benchmark problems.”

GOVERNANCE

US Treasury Says AI Tools Prevented $1 Billion of Fraud in 2024
Todd Feathers | Gizmodo
“During the most recent fiscal year, which ended in September, the agency’s new data-driven approach to rooting out bad actors contributed to the prevention and recovery of more than $4 billion in fraudulent payments, according to a press release. That’s a more than sixfold increase over the $652.7 million in fraudulent payments detected or recovered during the 2023 fiscal year.”

INTERNET

SpaceX Tells FCC It Has a Plan to Make Starlink About 10 Times Faster
Jon Brodkin | Ars Technica
“In an application submitted to the Federal Communications Commission on October 11, SpaceX claims the requested ‘modification and its companion amendment will enable the Gen2 system to deliver gigabit-speed, truly low-latency broadband and ubiquitous mobile connectivity to all Americans and the billions of people globally who still lack access to adequate broadband.'”

Image Credit: SpaceX

AI’s Penicillin and X-Ray Moment
Matteo Wong | The Atlantic
“When the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, he designated funds to reward those who ‘have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.’ The resulting Nobel Prizes have since been awarded to the discoverers of penicillin, X-rays, and the structure of DNA—and, as of today, to two scientists who, decades ago, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.”

AUTOMATION

‘I Applied to 2,843 Roles’: The Rise of AI-Powered Job Application Bots
Jason Koebler | 404 Media
“Before I put my laptop aside at the restaurant I’m working at, I open a terminal window, enter a single command, and hit enter. The server gives me my breakfast and I push my laptop away as the bot springs to life, opening a Chrome window and navigating to LinkedIn. It starts scrolling through job listings, and opens a few of them.”

BIOTECH

They Were Made Without Eggs or Sperm. Are They Human?
Kristen V. Brown | The Atlantic
“In recent years, Hanna and other scientists have made remarkable progress in cultivating pluripotent stem cells to mimic the structure and function of a real, growing embryo. But as researchers solve technical problems, they are still left with moral ones. When is a copy so good that it’s equivalent to the real thing? And more to the point, when should the lab experiment be treated—legally and ethically—as human?”

TRANSPORTATION

Ian Brooke Wants to Revolutionize Flight as We Know It
Ross Pomeroy | Big Think
“The 34-year-old Brooke is CEO of Astro Mechanica, a Y Combinator-backed startup that has invented a new kind of jet engine. It’s radically more efficient and versatile than anything that has come before. …Astro Mechanica claims the Turboelectric Adaptive Engine will unlock massive efficiency gains across a whole range of speeds, but especially at supersonic speeds between Mach 1.8 to Mach 3.4.”

SPACE

The World’s First Commercial Space Station Looks Like a Luxury Hotel Inside
Carlton Reid | Wired
“Aluminum for spacecraft interiors is passé; what space-farers apparently want is wood. That’s the bet from Vast, the makers of Haven-1, the world’s first commercial space station set to be placed in low-Earth orbit by the SpaceX Falcon rocket next year. First paying customers will be getting on board in 2026, and judging by the final designs just released of the station’s cozy interior, they’ll feel right at home.”

FUTURE

The Kevin Kelly Interview: The Power of ‘Radical Optimism’
Eric Markowitz | Big Think
“Kelly—author, philosopher, and co-founder of Wired magazine—insists that to truly play the long game and rebuild society for the better, we must embrace one simple yet profound mindset: optimism. ‘Optimism,’ he has written, ‘enables us to reach good and great things beyond the capability of a single generation.’ He also believes that in business, embracing optimism—and a long-term perspective—can lead to compounding advantages.”

SCIENCE

The ‘Beautiful Confusion’ of the First Billion Years Comes Into View
Rebecca Boyle | Quanta
“The galaxies were never supposed to be so bright. They were never supposed to be so big. And yet there they are—oddly large, luminous objects that keep appearing in images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Kevin Hainline(opens a new tab) is part of a team that uses the JWST to find these galaxies, whose brightness, apparent mass, and sheer existence a virtual eyeblink after the Big Bang are among the biggest surprises from the three-year-old mission.”

TECH

The O.G. of Tech Startups Says AI Changes Everything
Julianne Pepitone | IEEE Spectrum
“Now [Steve] Blank, who teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University, is thinking about how artificial intelligence tools are poised to transform his lean startup method—by supercharging the process of testing hypotheses, developing novel products, and creating businesses with a speed that humans could never match.”

Image Credit: Marcel Strauß / Unsplash