I Made an AI Clone of Myself
Chloe Xiang | Motherboard
“To create my AI clone, Synthesia told me that we would have to clone my voice and body, and it would take a total of a little over two hours to do so. Before the shoot, I was given a schedule of ‘Voice Clone,’ ‘Prep [Hair and Makeup],’ and ‘Video Performance.’ No details beyond that. Entering the studio the day of, I had no idea what to expect, other than that I was like an actress responding to a call sheet, ready to do my best improv.”
California Company Sets Launch Date for World’s First 3D-Printed Rocket
Passant Rabie | Gizmodo
“On Wednesday, Relativity Space announced that it had secured its launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration and is ready to blast its Terran 1 rocket into space. …Terran 1 is a two-stage, 110-foot-tall (33 meters) rocket that’s 85% 3D printed, making it the ‘largest 3D printed object to exist and to attempt orbital flight,’ according to the company. Relativity Space is working towards its goal of making the rocket 95% 3D printed.”
Google’s Improved Quantum Processor Good Enough for Error Correction
John Timmer | Ars Technica
“…getting quantum error correction isn’t really the news—they’d managed to get it to work a couple of years ago. Instead, the signs of progress are a bit more subtle. In earlier generations of processors, qubits were error-prone enough that adding more of them to an error-correction scheme caused problems that were larger than the gain in corrections. In this new iteration, adding more qubits and getting the error rate to go down is possible.”
ChatGPT-Style Search Represents a 10x Cost Increase for Google, Microsoft
Ron Amadeo | Ars Technica
“A ChatGPT-style search engine would involve firing up a huge neural network modeled on the human brain every time you run a search, generating a bunch of text and probably also querying that big search index for factual information. …All that extra processing is going to cost a lot more money. After speaking to Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy (Alphabet is Google’s parent company) and several analysts, Reuters writes that ‘an exchange with AI known as a large language model likely costs 10 times more than a standard keyword search’ and that it could represent ‘several billion dollars of extra costs.’i”
Ingenious Technique Could Make Moon Farming Possible
Kevin Hurler | Gizmodo
“The idea is that astronauts can extract nutrients in lunar regolith to create fertilizer for hydroponic farming. These nutrients could be pulled from soil using a processing plant and then dissolved into water, all on the Moon’s surface. The resulting nutrient-rich water can then be pumped into a greenhouse for hydroponic farming, a crucial part of maintaining a long-term human presence on the Moon.”
GOVERNANCE
The US Copyright Office Says You Can’t Copyright Midjourney AI-Generated Images
Richard Lawler | The Verge
“A copyright registration granted to the Zarya of the Dawn comic book has been partially canceled, because it included ‘non-human authorship’ that hadn’t been taken into account. …To justify the decision, the Copyright Office cites previous cases where people weren’t able to copyright words or songs that listed ‘non-human spiritual beings’ or the Holy Spirit as the author—as well as the infamous incident where a selfie was taken by a monkey.”
Alphabet Layoffs Hit Trash-Sorting Robots
Paresh Dave | Wired
“Just over a year after graduating from Alphabet’s X moonshot lab, the team that trained over a hundred wheeled, one-armed robots to squeegee cafeteria tables, separate trash and recycling, and yes, open doors, is shutting down as part of budget cuts spreading across the Google parent, a spokeswoman confirmed. …Everyday Robots emerged from the rubble of at least eight robotics acquisitions by Google a decade ago. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin expected machine learning would reshape robotics, and Page in particular wanted to develop a consumer-oriented robot, a former employee involved at the time says, speaking anonymously to discuss internal deliberations.”
Image Credit: Abhishek Tiwari / Unsplash
