Good morning! This is your daily ☕️ Techpresso.
On this day, 26 years ago, Compaq Computer acquired Digital Equipment Corporation, a foundational computing company once dominant in the 1960s-1980s, for $9.6 billion, setting the stage for Compaq's eventual merger with HP.
In today's Techpresso:
🚀 SpaceX signs deal to launch private space station
🤖 Mistral CEO confirms ‘leak’ of new open source AI model nearing GPT-4 performance
🧪 OpenAI says GPT-4 poses little risk of helping create bioweapons
💸 Microsoft, OpenAI to invest $500 million in AI robotics startup
🔮 An AI headband to control your dreams
🎮 Playing Doom using gut bacteria
🎁 + 7 other news you might like
🔮 + 7 handpicked research papers and tools
🚀 SpaceX signs deal to launch private space stationLINK
Starlab Space has chosen SpaceX’s Starship megarocket to launch its large and heavy space station, Starlab, into orbit, aiming for a launch in a single flight.
Starlab, a venture between Voyager Space and Airbus, is designed to be fully operational from a single launch without the need for space assembly, targeting a 2028 operational date.
The space station will serve various users including space agencies, researchers, and companies, with SpaceX's Starship being the only current launch vehicle capable of handling its size and weight.
🤖 Mistral CEO confirms ‘leak’ of new open source AI model nearing GPT-4 performanceLINK
Mistral's CEO Arthur Mensch confirmed that an 'over-enthusiastic employee' from an early access customer leaked a quantized and watermarked version of an old model, hinting at Mistral's ongoing development of a new AI model nearing GPT-4's performance. The leaked model, labeled 'miqu-1-70b,' was shared on HuggingFace and 4chan, attracting attention for its high performance on common language model benchmarks, leading to speculation it might be a new Mistral model. Despite the leak, Mensch hinted at further advancements with Mistral's AI models, suggesting the company is close to matching or even exceeding GPT-4's performance with upcoming versions.
🧪 OpenAI says GPT-4 poses little risk of helping create bioweaponsLINK
OpenAI released a study indicating that GPT-4 poses at most slight risk in assisting in the creation of a bioweapon, according to their conducted research involving biology experts and students.
The study, motivated by concerns highlighted in President Biden’s AI Executive Order, aimed to reassure that while GPT-4 may slightly facilitate the creation of bioweapons, the impact is not statistically significant.
In experiments with 100 participants, GPT-4 marginally improved the ability to plan a bioweapon, with biology experts showing an 8.8% increase in plan accuracy, underscoring the need for further research on AI's potential risks.
💸 Microsoft, OpenAI to invest $500 million in AI robotics startupLINK
Microsoft and OpenAI are leading a funding round to invest $500 million in Figure AI, a robotics startup competing with Tesla's Optimus.
Figure AI, known for its commercial autonomous humanoid robot, could reach a valuation of $1.9 billion with this investment.
The startup, which partnered with BMW for deploying its robots, aims to address labor shortages and increase productivity through automation.
🔮 An AI headband to control your dreamsLINK
Tech startup Prophetic introduced Halo, an AI-powered headband designed to induce lucid dreams, allowing wearers to control their dream experiences.
Prophetic is seeking beta users, particularly from previous lucid dream studies, to help create a large EEG dataset to refine Halo's effectiveness in inducing lucid dreams.
Interested individuals can reserve the Halo headband with a $100 deposit, leading towards an estimated price of $2,000, with shipments expected in winter 2025.
🎮 Playing Doom using gut bacteriaLINK
The latest, weirdest way to play Doom involves using genetically modified E. coli bacteria, as explored in a paper by MIT's Media Lab PhD student Lauren "Ren" Ramlan.
Ramlan's method doesn't turn E. coli into a computer but uses the bacteria's ability to fluoresce as pixels on an organic screen to display Doom screenshots.
Although innovative, the process is impractical for gameplay, with the organic display managing only 2.5 frames in 24 hours, amounting to a game speed of 0.00003 FPS.
Other news you might like
FTX abandons efforts to restart its crypto exchange.LINK
Engineers develop hack to make automotive radar 'hallucinate'.LINK
Mark Zuckerberg apologizes to families over social media harms in contentious Senate hearing.LINK
Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Doesn’t Want to Be the Face of Crypto.LINK
Hackers used Ars Technica and Vimeo to deliver malware using obfuscated binary instructions in a URL.LINK
Amazon left Roomba with a huge mess to clean up.LINK
Neuralink rival Synchron takes stake in medical component maker Acquandas.LINK
Latest research and tools
Kando: a cross-platform tool that provides a pie menu interface for enhanced user interaction.LINK
Lockbox: a forward proxy tool for securely making third-party API calls.LINK
Gnuplotlib: a tool that makes plotting graphs less troublesome for NumPy users.LINK
Matryoshka Representation Learning: this method improves how artificial intelligence understands complex data by breaking it down into simpler, layered components.LINK
Rust Has Provenance: a system enhancement for ensuring data origin and history tracking in the Rust programming language ecosystem.LINK
Vision Mamba: efficient visual representation learning is achieved through the use of Bidirectional SSM.LINK
ArXiv update: arXiv's RSS feed has been completely rewritten to run in the cloud, now offering a more accurate daily article list, author lists for each paper, and compliance with the RSS 2.0 specification, while discontinuing support for older RSS versions.LINK
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