A company in the US is trying to bring back the dodo in a Jurassic Park-style revival. CC-licensed photo by allispossible.org.uk on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. They won’t fly away, though. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
OpenAI agreed to buy $51m of AI chips from a startup backed by CEO Sam Altman • WIRED
Paresh Dave:
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Sam Altman was reinstated soon after being fired as OpenAI CEO last month, but still stood to gain had the company continued to develop ChatGPT without him. During Altman’s tenure as CEO, OpenAI signed a letter of intent to spend $51m on AI chips from a startup called Rain AI into which he has also invested personally.
Rain is based less than a mile from OpenAI’s headquarters in San Francisco and is working on a chip it calls a neuromorphic processing unit, or NPU, designed to replicate features of the human brain. OpenAI in 2019 signed a nonbinding agreement to spend $51m on the chips when they became available, according to a copy of the deal and Rain disclosures to investors this year seen by WIRED. Rain told investors Altman had personally invested more than $1m into the company. The letter of intent has not been previously reported.
The investor documents said that Rain could get its first hardware to customers as early as October next year. OpenAI and Rain declined to comment.
OpenAI’s letter of intent with Rain shows how Altman’s web of personal investments can entangle with his duties as OpenAI CEO. His prior position leading startup incubator Y Combinator helped Altman become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent dealmakers, investing in dozens of startups and acting as a broker between entrepreneurs and the world’s biggest companies. But the distraction and intermingling of his myriad pursuits played some role in his recent firing by OpenAI’s board for uncandid communications, according to people involved in the situation but not authorized to discuss it.
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Welllll. There’s a lot more detail in this story (Saudi Arabia forced to sell stake in company by US government! Attempt to corner market for AI chips!). But maybe this is the smoking gun that explains what the previous OpenAI board meant when it said, you’ll recall, that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”
The story doesn’t say that. But there’s an undercurrent in this that the board didn’t like it.
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Not so dead as a dodo: “de-extinction” plan to reintroduce bird to Mauritius • CNN
Tom Page:
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US-based biotechnology and genetic engineering company Colossal Biosciences, which is pursuing the “de-extinction” of multiple species, including the woolly mammoth, has entered a partnership with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation to find a suitable location for the large flightless birds.
The dodo has been extinct since 1681; a combination of predation by humans and animals introduced by humans led to its downfall, turning it into a textbook case for extinction. But according to the partners, its return to Mauritius could benefit the dodo’s immediate environment and other species.
Colossal first announced its intention to resurrect the dodo in January 2023. Exactly when it will be able to do so remains unclear, but fresh details regarding how it plans to recreate the species have been revealed.
The full genome of the dodo has been sequenced by Beth Shapiro, lead paleogeneticist at Colossal. In addition, the company says it has now sequenced the genome of the solitaire, an extinct relative of the dodo from Rodrigues Island, close to Mauritius, and the Nicobar pigeon, the dodo’s closest living relative, which resides on islands in Southeast Asia spanning the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Geneticists at Colossal have found cells that act as a precursor for ovaries or testes in the Nicobar pigeon can grow successfully in a chicken embryo. They are now researching to see if these cells (called primordial germ cells, or PGCs) can turn into sperm and eggs.
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They start with dodos, then pretty soon they’re saying “maybe just a small dinosaur? Ooh, how about this one for Mauritius too?” Also, we’ll need a new aphorism. Dead as a..?
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Cop28 president says there is ‘no science’ behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels • The Guardian
Damian Carrington and Ben Stockton:
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The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal.
Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”.
The comments were “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial”, scientists said, and they were at odds with the position of the UN secretary general, António Guterres.
Al Jaber made the comments in ill-tempered responses to questions from Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN special envoy for climate change, during a live online event on 21 November. As well as running Cop28 in Dubai, Al Jaber is also the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company, Adnoc, which many observers see as a serious conflict of interest.
More than 100 countries already support a phase-out of fossil fuels and whether the final Cop28 agreement calls for this or uses weaker language such as “phase-down” is one of the most fiercely fought issues at the summit and may be the key determinant of its success. Deep and rapid cuts are needed to bring fossil fuel emissions to zero and limit fast-worsening climate impacts.
Al Jaber spoke with Robinson at a She Changes Climate event. Robinson said: “We’re in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone … and it’s because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel. That is the one decision that Cop28 can take and in many ways, because you’re head of Adnoc, you could actually take it with more credibility.”
Al Jaber said: “I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation. I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5ºC.”
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Perhaps he’s been reading the wrong scenarios, because I’ve certainly seen one which suggests how to stay within 1.5ºC of warming. But it essentially requires stopping use of fossil fuels almost immediately. Again, as Upton Sinclair said: can’t get someone to understand something when their salary depends on their not understanding it. And once again Cop is revealed as a fossil fuel talking shop.
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1960s chatbot ELIZA beat OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in a recent Turing test study • Ars Technica
Benj Edwards:
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In the recent study, listed on arXiv at the end of October, UC San Diego researchers Cameron Jones (a PhD student in Cognitive Science) and Benjamin Bergen (a professor in the university’s Department of Cognitive Science) set up a website called turingtest.live, where they hosted a two-player implementation of the Turing test over the Internet with the goal of seeing how well GPT-4, when prompted different ways, could convince people it was human.
Through the site, human interrogators interacted with various “AI witnesses” representing either other humans or AI models that included the aforementioned GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA, a rules-based conversational program from the 1960s. “The two participants in human matches were randomly assigned to the interrogator and witness roles,” write the researchers. “Witnesses were instructed to convince the interrogator that they were human. Players matched with AI models were always interrogators.”
The experiment involved 652 participants who completed a total of 1,810 sessions, of which 1,405 games were analyzed after excluding certain scenarios like repeated AI games (leading to the expectation of AI model interactions when other humans weren’t online) or personal acquaintance between participants and witnesses, who were sometimes sitting in the same room.
Surprisingly, ELIZA, developed in the mid-1960s by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, scored relatively well during the study, achieving a success rate of 27%. GPT-3.5, depending on the prompt, scored a 14% success rate, below ELIZA. GPT-4 achieved a success rate of 41%, second only to actual humans.
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Good old Eliza, still going strong all these years on.
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It’s official: Evernote will restrict free users to 50 notes • TechCrunch
Ivan Mehta:
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Days after Evernote started testing with limited users a free plan with access to only one notebook and 50 notes, the company has now made this its new default free plan. The notetaking app said that this change will be applicable for all new and existing free users starting December 4.
In a post on its blog, Evernote specified that users can delete content from their notebooks to add other content within the limit.
“From December 4, the Evernote Free experience has changed. Going forward, new and existing Free users will have a maximum of fifty notes and one notebook per account. These limits refer to the number of notes and notebooks a user can have in their account at one time: you can always delete unwanted content to remain below the threshold,” the company, owned by Milan-based Bending Spoons, said.
Users with more than 50 notes in their existing free accounts will be able to export additional notes and notebooks. Evernote mentioned on its blog that these restrictions will reflect on its compare plans page on December 4, but didn’t specify if limits or pricing of other plans are also changing.
Earlier this week, Evernote confirmed to TechCrunch on its website that the new limited-free plan was part of a test with “less than 1% of its free users.” The test was trying to get people to pay the higher limit plans, which are priced at $14.99 and $17.99 per month.
The company said that most free users fall below the newly set limit. However, Evernote acknowledged that this change might push customers towards “reconsidering” their “relationship with Evernote.”
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Bought a year ago, laid off 129 people in February, “unprofitable for years”. Started in February 2008 but doubtful it ever made money. Another ZIRP casualty. Bending Spoons also canned the entire staff of filmmaking app Filmic on Friday.
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Thames Water told by auditors it could run out of money by April • The Guardian
Miles Brignall:
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The parent company of Thames Water has been warned by its auditors that it could run out of money by April if shareholders do not inject more cash into the debt-laden firm.
In accounts signed off in July and published on the Companies House website last week, PricewaterhouseCoopers said there was “material uncertainty” about whether the main company behind the water supplier can continue as a going concern.
The disclosure was made in the 2022-23 accounts of Kemble Water Holdings, the company at the top of Thames Water’s byzantine ownership structure.
PwC made its assertion after noting that there were no firm arrangements in place to refinance a £190m loan at one of its subsidiary companies.
Thames Water is expected to face further scrutiny over its debt levels when it issues its results on Tuesday, and a possible investigation into whether it misled MPs earlier this year.
In June, it emerged that contingency plans for the collapse of Thames Water were being drawn up by the UK government amid fears that Britain’s biggest water company would not survive because of its huge debt pile.
Sir Robert Goodwill, chair of the environment, food and rural affairs select committee, said it was considering a fresh investigation after the Financial Times reported that Thames Water had originally presented a loan from its shareholders to its parent as new equity funding.
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This would be quite an event. Water companies in the UK were privatised in 1989, and none has collapsed into bankruptcy or similar problems. Until now. Its debts in June were about 80% of its value (about £17.5bn). The current government won’t like having to take that onto its books, so the question is: who will be left with the hot (wet) potato?
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Switzerland put vertical solar panels on a roadside retaining wall • Electrek
Michelle Lewis:
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The canton of Appenzell Ausserhoden in northeastern Switzerland is aiming to generate at least 40% of its electricity from renewables by 2035. So, it exercised a little creativity and covered a roadside retaining wall with 756 glass-glass solar panels.
The panels have an output of 325 kW and an energy yield of around 230,000 kWh annually. This is equivalent to the consumption of about 52 Swiss households. The energy will be fed into the grid of energy supplier St. Gallisch-Appenzellische Kraftwerke, and the canton will get a feed-in tariff in return.
…K2 Systems says that “especially in the winter months (when consumption and dependence on foreign electricity imports are at their highest), the vertically aligned modules will achieve a very good electricity yield.”
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The calculation (230,000 kWh/yr / 245.7 kW / 365 day/yr) works out to 2h33m average per day; ironically, more during the winter because the sun will be lower.
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Amazon deal for iRobot may restrict competition, European Commission says • WSJ
Ben Glickman:
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The EC said that the deal may restrict competition in the making of robot vacuum cleaners and could allow Amazon to fortify its position as an online marketplace services provider.
The commission said Amazon may have the “ability and the incentive” to foreclose iRobot’s rivals by preventing them from selling on Amazon’s platform.
“We continue to work through the process with the European Commission and are focused on addressing its questions and any identified concerns at this stage,” an Amazon spokesperson said in response to the release.
The spokesperson said iRobot [which makes the Roomba] faces “intense competition” in the market for vacuum cleaner products and that the company believes it can invest in iRobot while lowering prices for consumers.
The acquisition by Amazon, announced in August 2022, was cleared by U.K. regulators in June, but faces an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
The EC has until February 14 to make a final decision on the deal.
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Amazon signed the deal back in August 2022 for $1.7bn, all cash. And it’s still bumping back and forth into regulatory barriers.
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iPhone glitch photo explained. It is NOT photoshop. • Threads
So there was a big kerfuffle over the weekend about a photo of a British comedian/actress in a wedding dress which showed her with her arms in three different poses.. in the same photo. It became this year’s blue/silver dress meme. And here a guy called Faruk explains it in a short video. You need the video really.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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