I-XRAY, Nobel Prizes, War Drones, & More

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TLDR;

🎖️ The Nobel Prize Embraces AI

🔫 Anduril Wins $250 Million US Defense Contract

🧐 An AI Melts Down When It Discovers It Isn’t Human

🤨 OpenAI Disenchanted with Microsoft?

🌥️ AI is Good for the Climate?

🔮 Writer’s Impressive Palmyra X 004 Model

😣 AI & The Loneliness Epidemic

🤔 Cursor Founders Go on Lex Fridman

[TREND OF THE WEEK] Meta’s AI Glasses Can Be Used as SpyWare

OTHER PREMIUM CONTENT

Other New Premium Content

🔥 Meta’s RLEF Turns Any Model into a SOTA Coder

🤩 Entropy, Finally a Real Cure to Hallucinations?

😳 Media Proclaims A Rival to o1 Models. It’s Embarrassingly Not

NOBEL PRIZES

The Nobel Prize Embraces AI

This week, the traditional scientific community acknowledged AI's already-crucial impact on the world.

First, Hopfield and Hinton, two of the precursors of neural nets, the data-compressing algorithm that underpins developments like ChatGPT, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics and, yesterday, three other computer scientists/neuroscientists/chemists, two of which work at Google Deepmind (the CEO, Demis, and John, director), were awarded the Nobel Chemistry Prize, for their contributions to protein folding prediction.

TheWhiteBox’s take:

As for the Physics prize, the consensus is that both Hopfield and Hinton have been instrumental to the success of Deep Learning, the AI field that comprises neural networks and explains much of the progress of the field over the last two decades.

However, their election has been met with mixed feelings, especially from the very own AI field. Especially harsh was Jurgen Schmidhuber, one of the most prominent AI researchers, who directly accused the Academy of ‘rewarding plagiarism’ as, according to him, both rewardees failed to cite crucial developments by other researchers like Shun-Ichi Amari in their respective research.

The reception for the Chemistry prize has been much more widely accepted, as it’s hard to deny that the emergence of ‘protein folding predictor’ AIs like AlphaFold has massively contributed to the field.

AlphaFold takes sequences of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) and predicts the protein’s 3D structure. Proteins are the quintessential component of all living organisms, and understanding their structure gives us insight into their function.

Predicting this shape is complex and slow, but AlphaFold has significantly accelerated the process, revolutionizing protein structure prediction and providing crucial insights into key fields like drug discovery, biotechnology, and fundamental biology.

Are we, as humans, handing in the torch of scientific discovery to AI? I don’t know, but it certainly feels that way.

WARFARE

Anduril Wins $250 Million Contract

Anduril has won a $250 million US Defense contract to deploy drone-intercepting AI technology known as the RoadRunner, which you can see in action here.

TheWhiteBox’s take:

As you may imagine, this technology is extremely AI-heavy. But Roadrunner's key feature, similar to Space X’s rockets, is reusability.

With the US forces burning millions of dollars every second through the use of expensive artillery, having smart hardware that can return to base if it doesn’t intercept a drone is exceptionally cost-effective. This…

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