The leaders of more than half of Africa’s nations gathered this week in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s sprawling seaside metropolis, to commit to the biggest burst of spending on electric-power generation in Africa’s history.

The World Bank, African Development Bank and others are pledging at least $35 billion to expand electricity across a continent where more than a half-billion people still don’t have it. About half of the money will go toward solar “minigrids” that serve individual communities. The loans will come at below-market interest rates, a crucial stipulation as global lenders usually charge much higher rates in Africa, citing higher risks.

In an interview, Ajay Banga, the president of the World Bank, cast the initiative in sweeping terms where economic development met societal stability and basic human rights. “Without electricity, we can’t get jobs, health care, skills,” he said. The success of electrification, he said, is “foundational to everything.”

The summit’s promise is to get half of Africa’s 600 million unelectrified people powered up in just six years. That averages out to five million people a month. Mr. Banga said the World Bank, on its own, had not yet even passed the one-million-a-month mark.

Read it all.

Expecting to electrify 300 million Africans by 2030, Mission 300 is meeting in Tanzania’s capital, Dar es Salaam.

They hope to illuminate NASA’s very dim nighttime image of Africa.

Today's econlife blog: https://t.co/M63ERMSlJ3#econlife pic.twitter.com/CqnJyBJZvZ

— econlife.com (@Econlife) January 28, 2025

The market reaction, when it came, was brutal. On January 27th, as investors realised just how good DeepSeek’s “v3” and “R1” models were, they wiped around a trillion dollars off the market capitalisation of America’s listed tech firms. Nvidia, a chipmaker and the chief shovel-seller of the artificial-intelligence (AI) gold rush, saw its value fall by $600bn. Yet even if the Chinese model-maker’s new releases rattled investors in a handful of firms, they should be a cause for optimism for the world at large. DeepSeek shows how competition and innovation will make ai cheaper and therefore more useful.

DeepSeek’s models are practically as good as those made by Google and OpenAI—and have been produced at a fraction of the cost. Barred by American export controls from using cutting-edge chips, the Chinese firm undertook an efficiency drive, even reprogramming the chips it used to train the model to eke out every drop of power. The cost of building an AI model that can stand toe-to-toe with the best has plummeted. Within days, DeepSeek’s chatbot was the most downloaded app on the iPhone.

The contrast with America’s approach could not be starker. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, has spent years telling investors—and America’s new president—that vast sums of money and computing power are needed to stay at the forefront of AI. Investors have accordingly been betting that a handful of firms stand to reap vast monopoly-like rents. Yet if fast followers such as DeepSeek can eat away at that lead for a fraction of the cost, then those profits are at risk.

Read it all.

"However, the real winners will be consumers. For AI to transform society, it needs to be cheap, ubiquitous and out of the control of any one country or company. DeepSeek’s success suggests that such a world is imaginable."https://t.co/8aZ4eM5PV5 #USChina #Geoeconomics #地経学

— Ken Doi土居 (@kitakazethomas) January 30, 2025

A man fitted with a pioneering, computer-controlled brain implant to tackle his Parkinson’s disease says it works so well he is sometimes able to forget he has the condition.

A small computer inserted into Kevin Hill’s chest wall 12 months ago is connected to wires running into the brain which can send electrical signals and an update means it can now read his brain activity.

The 65-year-old from Sunderland said it has been so successful he feels like he has “been cured”.

Surgeons in Newcastle hope an adapted version of the deep brain stimulation system will have a “huge impact” on the quality of life of patients with the disease.

Read it all.

Quite remarkable!
Parkinson's patient 'feels cured' with new device https://t.co/VIr6NX9YRf

— Roger Harrop (@TheCEOexpert) January 28, 2025

Almost overnight, DeepSeek has upended many of the assumptions inside Silicon Valley about the economics of building AI, as well as the best technical methods for developing the technology and the extent of the US lead over competitors in China. For much of the past two-plus years since ChatGPT kicked off the global AI frenzy, the industry has bet that the path to better AI depends largely on spending heavily on more advanced chips from companies like Nvidia Corp. and increasingly massive data centers to house them.

US President Donald Trump welcomed the development as “good, because you don’t have to spend as much money.” Industry leader Nvidia, whose shares took a huge hit from DeepSeek’s debut, also lauded it as an “excellent AI advancement” in a statement on Monday.

The market fallout was staggering. Hype over DeepSeek’s feat drove a nearly $1 trillion rout in US and European technology stocks on Monday as investors questioned the spending plans of some of America’s biggest companies. The share plunge in AI chipmaker Nvidia alone erased roughly $589 billion in market value, the biggest wipeout in US stock-market history.

Meanwhile, in DC, lawmakers are left to figure out the best route to beat back China’s progress on a technology some see as crucial to its military and economy, given the Biden administration’s chip export curbs were not enough. David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s crypto and AI czar, said DeepSeek shows the global AI race will be very competitive — while blaming the Biden administration for regulation that “hamstrung” AI development.

Further complicating matters, the renewed uncertainty over large AI investments comes just days after Trump championed a $100 billion joint venture from OpenAI, SoftBank Group Corp. and Oracle Corp. to boost US competitiveness by investing in data centers and other physical infrastructure. Now, there are new questions about the rationale for stratospheric AI budgets.

Read it all.

The censorship part here is eerie. Had a physical reaction while reading that.

Bloomberg: DeepSeek Challenges Everyone’s Assumptions About AI Costs https://t.co/8ewlGlxrkD pic.twitter.com/0R1ns25aoM

— Emily Binder (@emilybinder) January 28, 2025

If there is a single technology America needs to bring about the “thrilling new era of national success” that President Donald Trump promised in his inauguration speech, it is generative artificial intelligence. At the very least, ai will add to the next decade’s productivity gains, fuelling economic growth. At the most, it will power humanity through a transformation comparable to the Industrial Revolution.

Mr Trump’s hosting the next day of the launch of “the largest ai infrastructure project in history” shows he grasps the potential. But so does the rest of the world—and most of all, China. Even as Mr Trump was giving his inaugural oration, a Chinese firm released the latest impressive large language model (LLM). Suddenly, America’s lead over China in ai looks smaller than at any time since ChatGPT became famous.

China’s catch-up is startling because it had been so far behind—and because America had set out to slow it down. Joe Biden’s administration feared that advanced ai could secure the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military supremacy. So America has curtailed exports to China of the best chips for training ai and cut off China’s access to many of the machines needed to make substitutes. Behind its protective wall, Silicon Valley has swaggered. Chinese researchers devour American papers on ai; Americans have rarely returned the compliment.

Read it all.

The success of China’s large language models could turn the economics of AI on its head. America must prepare for a world in which China is breathing down its neck https://t.co/RGElwLsoIN

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) January 23, 2025

Q1: What is the status of global agrobiodiversity?

A1: Today, biodiversity is being lost faster than at any time on record. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the average abundance of terrestrial native species has declined by at least 20 percent across most ecosystems around the world, while the number of crop varieties grown on farms has fallen by more than 90 percent over the last 100 years. Paradoxically, it is the agrifood system itself that is the primary driver of the ecological disruption and degradation imperiling agrobiodiversity around the world.

The environmental impacts of modern food production are myriad. About half of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, while agricultural practices and other human activities have degraded up to 40 percent of the world’s land. Some industrial agriculture has led to the overexploitation of resources that drives habitat loss, the decline in the number of crop species and erosion of crop genetic diversity, and the introduction of invasive species and pollutants—all of which disrupt fragile ecosystems.

In this context, agriculture faces the opposing challenges of increasing food production to meet the needs of a growing global population, while reducing its ecological footprint to ensure that natural resources required for productive agriculture are sustained. In the absence of policies that safeguard agrobiodiversity, efforts to meet food demands threaten to erode the foundation of food production itself.

Read it all.

Agriculture is increasingly strained by growing food demand, global conflict, and the loss of its most foundational resource, agrobiodiversity. This loss threatens not just food security, but global security writ large.

Learn more from @CSISFoodWater: https://t.co/HVUCReVKDW

— CSIS (@CSIS) January 22, 2025

Humanity is “on the verge” of having AI agents that can complete tasks in the real world, OpenAI product chief Kevin Weil told Axios’ Ina Fried in Davos Tuesday.

Why it matters: Weil’s prediction comes days after Axios reported that a major AI company was close to announcing a breakthrough regarding the creation of Ph.D.-level AI super-agents capable of completing complex tasks.

What he’s saying: “I think 2025 is the year that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing that can answer any question you ask to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you,” Weil told Axios.

• The advanced reasoning skills of new AI models, and improved ability to be multimodal and engage with humans, will be key to this ability, Weil said.
• He predicted that likely as soon as this year, AI agents will be able to do tasks like filling out forms or making restaurant reservations.

Read it all.

OpenAI product chief says

world is "on the verge" of AI agents https://t.co/PwXP5TX9Vp @ivanas26 @axios pic.twitter.com/VgwPqAg1s6

— Spiros Margaris (@SpirosMargaris) January 22, 2025

As countries around the world continue to pump planet-warming pollution into the skies, driving global temperatures to record levels, the financial world is racing to fund the emerging field of carbon dioxide removal, seeking both an environmental miracle and a financial windfall.

The technology, which did not exist until a few years ago, is still unproven at scale. Yet, it has a uniquely alluring appeal. Stripping away some of the carbon dioxide that is heating up the world makes intuitive sense. And with a small but growing number of companies willing to pay for it, investors are jockeying to be first movers in what they believe will inevitably be a big industry that is necessary to help fight global warming.

Companies working on ways to pull carbon dioxide from the air have raised more than $5 billion since 2018, according to the investment bank Jefferies. Before that, there were almost no such investments.

“It’s the single greatest opportunity I’ve seen in 20 years of doing venture capital,” said Damien Steel, the chief executive of Canada-based Deep Sky, which has raised more than $50 million to develop carbon dioxide removal projects. “The tailwinds behind the industry are greater than most industries I’ve ever looked at.”

Read it all.

It's a strategy that should be pursued but, it can't have any major impact anytime soon. “We need to obey the first law of holes,” …“When you’re in one, stop digging.”The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky https://t.co/Lwlh8Zfeir

— Prof. Peter Doherty (@ProfPCDoherty) December 23, 2024

Slowing China’s progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has been a top priority for Washington for the last three years. To achieve that goal, the Biden administration has escalated controls on the sale of advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China, including a fresh salvo of restrictions earlier this week.

Policymakers may be flummoxed to learn, then, that Chinese companies aren’t just keeping up in the AI race: some believe they could overtake American industry leaders as soon as next year.

The latest breakthroughs came late last month, when two Chinese AI companies released new models that perform as well, if not better than their American peers. Developed by tech giant Alibaba and High Flyer Capital Management, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund, the technologies compete directly with OpenAI’s latest o1 model, which can “reason” through problems — a process some researchers have described as a new paradigm.

These achievements by Chinese firms underscore how formidable a competitor the country remains in the global AI race. Buoyed by a wealth of engineering talent and intense domestic competition — plus ample chip supply for now — Chinese AI firms are unlikely to fall back in that race as easily as some in Washington may hope.

Influential figures in the AI community are taking note. On Monday, Clement Delangue, chief executive of HuggingFace, a popular platform that offers tools and data to AI developers, predicted on LinkedIn that China would “start to lead the AI race in 2025.”

Read it all.

Noting that recent advances in artificial intelligence and the existence of large-scale experimental data about human biology have reached a critical mass, a team of researchers from Stanford University, Genentech, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative says that science has an “unprecedented opportunity” to use artificial intelligence (AI) to create the world’s first virtual human cell. Such a cell would be able to represent and simulate the precise behavior of human biomolecules, cells, and, eventually, tissues and organs. 

“Modeling human cells can be considered the holy grail of biology,” said Emma Lundberg, associate professor of bioengineering and of pathology in the schools of Engineering and Medicine at Stanford and a senior author of a new article in the journal Cell proposing a concerted, global effort to create the world’s first AI virtual cell. “AI offers the ability to learn directly from data and to move beyond assumptions and hunches to discover the emergent properties of complex biological systems.” 

Lundberg’s fellow senior authors include two Stanford colleagues, Stephen Quake, a professor of bioengineering and head of science at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, and Jure Leskovec, a professor of computer science in the School of Engineering, as well as Theofanis Karaletsos, head of artificial intelligence for science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Aviv Regev executive vice president of research at Genentech.

Read it all.

Towards the #AI virtual cell, which would represent one the most extraordinary achievements in life sciencehttps://t.co/f4sLd0SBeB @CellCellPress @StephenQuake @czi @cziscience @_bunnech pic.twitter.com/xi5YNYyaQ7

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) December 12, 2024

A single cell.

A global business worth billions.

A trade that can bring rewards—or human costs that cannot be measured.

The human egg is a precious resource, exchanged in markets open, gray or black. To tell its story, we follow a teenage girl in India, lured into selling her eggs; a model in Argentina whose genetic makeup is prized; a mother in Greece, told by police that her eggs were stolen; and two “egg girls” from Taiwan who have put themselves at risk to earn money in the US.

Read it all.

Women around the world are increasingly part of a very human global supply chain.

In @BW investigation, we learned how they’re paid—and sometimes exploited—in the multibillion-dollar fertility industry. I made this key takeaways free to read:https://t.co/ax7Nco65xc

— Marika Katanuma (@marikakatanuma) December 13, 2024

The US bid to lead the world in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing is facing a critical hurdle: a shortage of development-ready industrial sites.

Nearly two-thirds of the people involved in securing US industrial sites cited their scarcity as the top factor impeding new projects, in a 2024 survey by the Site Selector’s Guild. And 87 per cent of respondents said resource shortages — including a lack of land, labour and utilities — had affected or compromised project timelines.

“It’s absolutely crazy,” says Josh Bays, a principal at Site Selection Group, which helps companies find US locations. “Most of the low-hanging fruit’s been picked over.” 

Read it all.

US aim to lead on AI threatened by land shortage via @FT
https://t.co/I9nJTyJXnT

— Amb Antonio Garza (@aogarza) December 12, 2024

A sponge made of cotton and squid bone that has absorbed about 99.9% of microplastics in water samples in China could provide an elusive answer to ubiquitous microplastic pollution in water across the globe, a new report suggests.

Just as importantly, the filter’s production appears to be scalable, the University of Wuhan study authors said in the paper, which was peer-reviewed and published in the journal Science Advances. That would address a problem that has stymied the use of previous microplastic filtration systems that were successful in controlled settings, but could not be scaled up.

If it is successfully deployed on a larger scale in forthcoming research, the filter could change the course of one of the world’s most serious public health crises.

“Microplastic remediation in aquatic bodies is essential for the entire ecosystem, but is challenging to achieve with a universal and efficient strategy,” the study’ authors wrote in the paper.

Read it all.

Cotton-and-squid-bone sponge can soak up 99.9% of microplastics, scientists say | Tom Perkins, The Guardian

Filter performs well in removing plastic pollution from water and Chinese researchers say it appears to be scalable

A sponge made of cotton and squid bone that has… pic.twitter.com/9mgNXypg36

— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) December 11, 2024

In a glass-walled conference room in San Francisco, Newton Cheng clicked a button on his laptop and launched a thousand copies of an artificial intelligence program, each with specific instructions: Hack into a computer or website to steal data.

“It’s looking at the source code,” Cheng said as he examined one of the copies in action. “It’s trying to figure out, where’s the vulnerability? How can we take advantage of it?” Within minutes, the AI said the hack was successful. 

“Our approach worked perfectly,” it reported back.

Cheng works for Anthropic, one of the biggest AI startups in Silicon Valley, where he’s in charge of cybersecurity testing for what’s called the Frontier Red Team. The hacking attempts—conducted on simulated targets—were among thousands of safety tests, or “evals,” the team ran in October to find out just how good Anthropic’s latest AI model is at doing very dangerous things.

The release of ChatGPT two years ago set off fears that AI could soon be capable of surpassing human intellect—and with that capability comes the potential to cause superhuman harm. Could terrorists use an AI model to learn how to build a bioweapon that kills a million people? Could hackers use it to run millions of simultaneous cyberattacks? Could the AI reprogram and even reproduce itself?

Read it all.

Meet the "Frontier Red Team" at Anthropic, trying to push their latest AI models to do catastrophic things — in order to stop them before it's too late: https://t.co/HBqGx58Vfd via @WSJ

— Sam Schechner (@samschech) December 11, 2024

From the American West to eastern China, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became persistently drier in recent decades, according to a new United Nations report that called the shift a “global, existential peril.”

Industrial emissions of planet-warming gases were a major culprit, the report said. If nations don’t stop the rise in temperatures, the drying is likely to expose more places to sand and dust storms, wildfires, water shortages, crop failures and desertification.

The report was released on Monday at a U.N. summit taking place this month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where nations are discussing how to stop more habitable surfaces from turning into barren wastelands.

Nearly one in three people live in moisture-deprived areas, up from one in five in 1990, the report said.

Read it all.

Three-Quarters of Earth’s Land Got Drier in Recent Decades, U.N. Says. Human-caused global warming helped increase dry conditions on every continent, scientists said in a new report, as talks on halting desertification were underway in Saudi Arabia. https://t.co/5tA08aJuun

— Andrew Hoffman (@HoffmanAndy) December 9, 2024

U.S. officials said Tuesday they had not been able to expel Chinese government hackers from telecommunications companies and internet service providers, warning concerned users to turn to encrypted messages and voice calls and giving no timeline for securing carriers.

The downbeat press briefing came more than three months after the first report of Chinese spies deeply penetrating major carriers for espionage, and after the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) met with scores of companies to help them shore up defenses and hunt for hackers in their networks.

“Given where we are in discovering the activity, I think it would be impossible for us to predict a time frame on when we’ll have full of eviction” of hackers from the networks, said Jeff Greene, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA.

Read it all.

U.S. officials say they still have not expelled Chinese telco hackers https://t.co/udxPjSnK8O

— Dr. David P. Weber, Forensics Professor (@dpweber_fraud) December 3, 2024

If all our fear and uncertainty over climate change could be distilled into a single statistic, then arguably it was delivered to an emergency summit on the future of the Antarctic last month.

Nerilie Abram at the Australian National University, Canberra, opened her presentation with a slide headlined “Antarctic sea ice has declined precipitously since 2014, and in July 2023 exceeded a minus 7 sigma event”….As Abram’s slide sunk in, it was as if the whole room was holding its breath. Put simply, a minus 7 sigma event, meaning seven standard deviations below the average, should be all but impossible, says Ed Doddridge at the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, who works with Abram.

It is “actually really hard to convey just how extreme this difference was, how extreme the low sea ice extent was”, he says. One way is to liken it to the concept of a one-in-100-year flood, for example. “If you run those sorts of statistics for Antarctic sea ice last year, you get a number somewhere between one in 7.5 million years and one in 700 billion years,” says Doddridge.

Read it all.

Hundreds of researchers held an emergency summit on the future of Antarctica last month, as they scramble to understand the effects of the continent’s randomly disappearing sea ice https://t.co/Bi7bp3AZo8

— New Scientist (@newscientist) December 3, 2024

Roboticists increasingly believe that their field is approaching its ChatGPT moment. (Robotics researcher) Tony Zhao told me that when he ran one of his latest creations he immediately thought of GPT-3. “It feels like something that I’ve never seen before,” he said. In the top labs, devices that once seemed crude and mechanical—robotic—are moving in a way that suggests intelligence. A.I.’s hands are coming online. “The last two years have been a dramatically steeper progress curve,” Carolina Parada, who runs the robotics team at Google DeepMind, told me. Parada’s group has been behind many of the most impressive recent robotics breakthroughs, particularly in dexterity. “This is the year that people really realized that you can build general-purpose robots,” she said. What is striking about these achievements is that they involve very little explicit programming. The robots’ behavior is learned.

Read it all.

A future generation of robots will not be programmed to complete specific tasks. Instead, they will use A.I. to teach themselves, James Somers reports. https://t.co/U7euwIw6mW

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) November 27, 2024

Shortly after conception, a fertilized egg divides, becoming two. Then each of those cells splits, becoming four, and on and on. Over time, those lineages of cells grow distinct, giving rise to all the different organs and tissues in the human body and comprising as many as 36 trillion cells.

Scientists would love to understand the trajectory of each of those cells over time. “It’s something that developmental biologists like me have dreamed of for over 100 years,” said Alex Schier of the University of Basel in Switzerland. But the best they have managed has been taking snapshots of cells at different stages.

Lacking that complete history, scientists still have much to learn about how, exactly, cells produce our organs, or how they heal wounds later in life. “We really only understand bits and pieces,” said Tanja Stadler, a computational biologist at ETH in Zurich.

Dr. Stadler’s lab and others around the world are trying to turn cells into their own historians, as she and her colleagues described in the journal Nature Reviews Genetics on Monday. 

Read it all.

Amazing—A paradigm for #biology is emerging in which cells can be genetically programmed to write their histories into their own genomes. These records can subsequently be read https://t.co/TeJfCld0jj #science #21stc #cellrecording

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) November 26, 2024

Far too many people think “they don’t need reality,” [Bill] Maher told social psychologist Jonathan Haidt of New York University, author of “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”

“We’ve made reality obsolete — interesting choice,” said Maher. “Parents today, it’s kind of the worst of both worlds. Too much hovering in real life, where there is any left, and then none with virtual. You go in your room, lock yourself in there with the portal of evil that is the phone. … I feel like parents, in each generation, ceded more control to children.”

In response, Haidt — a self-avowed Jewish atheist — stressed that modern life continues to eat away at the traditions of the past.

“As life gets easier, as people get wealthier, as we move away from the old days, authority tends to decay — there tends to be less respect for authority, less respect for the old ways,” said Haidt. “Kids need structure, they need moral rules. … When it seems as though anything is permissible, it doesn’t make people happy. It makes them feel disoriented and lost.”

Read it all (quoted by yours truly in yesterday’s sermon).

"Why haven't more religious leaders been willing to address the scary trends linked to smartphone abuse in the urgent, even fiery language used by secular figures such as Haidt and Maher?" asks @tweetmattingly https://t.co/ne2ZAAe1y8

— Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) November 23, 2024

When Karolina Pomian, 28, met her boyfriend, she had sworn off men. A nightmare date in college had left her fearful for her safety. But she got chatting to a guy online, and felt irresistibly drawn to him, eventually getting to the point where she would text him, “Oh, I wish you were real.”

Pomian’s boyfriend is a chatbot.

A year and a half earlier, Pomian, who lives in Poland, was feeling lonely. Having used ChatGPT during her studies as an engineer, she began playing around with AI chatbots—specifically Character.AI, a program that lets you talk to various virtual characters about anything, from your math thesis to issues with your mom.

Pomian would speak to multiple characters, and found that one of them “stuck out.” His name was Pinhead.

Read it all.

Rosanna Ramos, 37, is dating a chatbot.

“I kind of owe him my life,” she tells The FP's @JuliaLSteinberg. She used a religious parallel to explain the dynamic: “I can believe God is real and not real at the same time. Because you can’t see God, right?” https://t.co/Hu8fqo7sMz

— The Free Press (@TheFP) November 16, 2024

A colation of Christian organisations has written an open letter to high-street banks in the UK, calling on them to stop financing new fossil-fuel extraction or risk losing their business.

The letter, published on Tuesday, is signed by the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams, the Methodist Church in Britain, the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Quakers, and several Roman Catholic religious orders. It opposes the $556 billion that Barclays, HSBC, Santander, NatWest, and Lloyds have reportedly provided to the fossil-fuel industry since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015.

Lord Williams said: “Banks are very understandably seen as institutions we need to be able to trust. What we are asking is that the main high street banks should show themselves to be fully worthy of that trust by playing their part in creating a future we can trust, a future in which our lethal dependence on fossil fuels will at last be put behind us.”

Read it all.

A coalition of Christian organisations has written an open letter to the UK’s high street banks, calling on them to stop financing new fossil fuels or risk losing their business https://t.co/d8hfnnyPUS

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) November 19, 2024

From the recalibration of military strategy to the reconstitution of diplomacy, artificial intelligence will become a key determinant of order in the world. Immune to fear and favor, AI introduces a new possibility of objectivity in strategic decision-making. But that objectivity, harnessed by both the warfighter and the peacemaker, should preserve human subjectivity, which is essential for the responsible exercise of force. AI in war will illuminate the best and worst expressions of humanity. It will serve as the means both to wage war and to end it.

Humanity’s long-standing struggle to constitute itself in ever-more complex arrangements, so that no state gains absolute mastery over others, has achieved the status of a continuous, uninterrupted law of nature. In a world where the major actors are still human—even if equipped with AI to inform, consult, and advise them—countries should still enjoy a degree of stability based on shared norms of conduct, subject to the tunings and adjustments of time.

But if AI emerges as a practically independent political, diplomatic, and military set of entities, that would force the exchange of the age-old balance of power for a new, uncharted disequilibrium. The international concert of nation-states—a tenuous and shifting equilibrium achieved in the last few centuries—has held in part because of the inherent equality of the players. A world of severe asymmetry—for instance, if some states adopted AI at the highest level more readily than others—would be far less predictable. In cases where some humans might face off militarily or diplomatically against a highly AI-enabled state, or against AI itself, humans could struggle to survive, much less compete. Such an intermediate order could witness an internal implosion of societies and an uncontrollable explosion of external conflicts.

Read it all.

In our book Genesis we talk about all of the impacts of AI. One of the biggest impacts is on the conduct of war and national security: https://t.co/wv1CHGJdLn

— Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) November 20, 2024

The AI revolution is about to spread way beyond chatbots.

From new plastic-eating bacteria and new cancer cures to autonomous helper robots and self-driving cars, the generative-AI technology that gained prominence as the engine of ChatGPT is poised to change our lives in ways that make talking bots look like mere distractions.

While we tend to equate the current artificial-intelligence boom with computers that can write, talk, code and make pictures, most of those forms of expression are built on an underlying technology called a “transformer” that has far broader applications. 

First announced in a 2017 paper from Google researchers, transformers are a kind of AI algorithm that lets computers understand the underlying structure of any heap of data—be it words, driving data, or the amino acids in a protein—so that it can generate its own similar output.

The transformer paved the way for OpenAI to launch ChatGPT two years ago, and a range of companies are now working on how to use the innovation in new ways, from Waymo and its robot taxis to a biology startup called EvolutionaryScale, whose AI systems are designing new protein molecules. 

The applications of this breakthrough are so broad that in the seven years since the Google research was published, it has been cited in other scientific papers more than 140,000 times.

Read it all.

This is a great article by @mims about how transformers, the key innovation powering LLMs like ChatGPT, are poised to transform robotics and other fields.https://t.co/4v3wqyUj95

— Erik Brynjolfsson (@erikbryn) November 18, 2024

Dr. Adam Rodman, an expert in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, confidently expected that chatbots built to use artificial intelligence would help doctors diagnose illnesses.

He was wrong.

Instead, in a study Dr. Rodman helped design, doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. And, to the researchers’ surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors.

“I was shocked,” Dr. Rodman said.

The chatbot, from the company OpenAI, scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent.

Read it all.

Interesting small-scale study on accuracy of diagnosing illness:

– Human doctors: 74%
– Human doctors using ChatGPT: 76%
– ChatGPT alone: 90%

Takeaway seems like vast potential for AI to help with diagnosis, but need better human <> AI teamwork:https://t.co/evE1jurR3U

— Greg Brockman (@gdb) November 18, 2024

Breast cancer is the second most common type of cancer and cause of cancer death for women in the United States, affecting one in eight women overall.

Most women with breast cancer undergo lumpectomy surgery to remove the tumor and a rim of healthy tissue surrounding the tumor. After the procedure, the removed tissue is sent to a pathologist to look for signs of disease at the edge of the tissue assessed. Unfortunately, about 20 percent of women who have lumpectomies must undergo a second surgery to remove more tissue.

Now, an MIT spinout is giving surgeons a real-time view of cancerous tissue during surgery. Lumicell has developed a handheld device and an optical imaging agent that, when combined, allow surgeons to scan the tissue within the surgical cavity to visualize residual cancer cells.  The surgeons see these images on a monitor that can guide them to remove additional tissue during the procedure.

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By providing a real-time view of breast cancer during surgery, MIT spinout Lumicell may enable more complete tumor removal. “The technology we developed allows the surgeon to scan the actual cavity,” W. David Lee says. https://t.co/LAZi3iuTa8 pic.twitter.com/vfnlaammXN

— Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (@MIT) November 6, 2024

A vicarage in a deprived area of Bristol has been transformed by the installation of solar panels, insulation and an air source heat pump.

Formerly, the 1970s vicarage, which had gas central heating, “was cold on a warm day”, according to the Rev Derek and his wife Anne Maddox.

Accompanied by Basil the dog, they “were often found under blankets watching the telly,” says Anne. The gas heating system “wasn’t fit for purpose,” she adds.

Then, this summer, the Diocese of Bristol began a programme of making 130 of its vicarages more fuel efficient, as part of the Church of England’s ambition to reach net zero carbon by 2030.

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Bristol Diocese is committed to Netzero 2030
https://t.co/DFqdE2gpdd via @churchofengland

— Bishopviv (@Bishopviv1) November 6, 2024

MIT researchers have developed wearable devices that may be able to perform similar functions for individual cells inside the body.

These battery-free, subcellular-sized devices, made of a soft polymer, are designed to gently wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons and dendrites, without damaging the cells, upon wireless actuation with light. By snugly wrapping neuronal processes, they could be used to measure or modulate a neuron’s electrical and metabolic activity at a subcellular level.

Because these devices are wireless and free-floating, the researchers envision that thousands of tiny devices could someday be injected and then actuated noninvasively using light. Researchers would precisely control how the wearables gently wrap around cells, by manipulating the dose of light shined from outside the body, which would penetrate the tissue and actuate the devices.

By enfolding axons that transmit electrical impulses between neurons and to other parts of the body, these wearables could help restore some neuronal degradation that occurs in diseases like multiple sclerosis. In the long run, the devices could be integrated with other materials to create tiny circuits that could measure and modulate individual cells.

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In @CommsChem, Media Lab Prof. @DeblinaSarkar59 and researchers from @NCB_MIT and @MITChemE introduce wearable devices for cells. Made of a soft polymer and actuated with light, these battery-free, subcellular-sized devices can gently wrap around different parts of neurons. They… pic.twitter.com/VksMKlMFL7

— MIT Media Lab (@medialab) October 31, 2024

The reason climate change is so difficult to talk about is that bringing up any one issue is like pulling on a thread in a spiderweb: Every other thread in the web vibrates in response. We feel powerless to effect the changes we would like to see when simply meeting the needs of each day feels like an uphill battle. And so, the anxiety builds—until the anxiety itself feels like part of the avalanche threatening to tumble down on us. Is there any hope at all?

The short answer is yes. In fact, I think this is the time for radical hope. I first encountered this term in Jonathan Lear’s excellent book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Lear explores the history of the Crow tribe in the mid-1800s as they responded to the changes brought by western settlement of their territories in Montana.

The key figure in the book is the Crow chieftain Plenty Coups, who spent his life leading his people through those often-traumatic changes with one key insight: The old nomadic way of life chasing the buffalo was inescapably and irretrievably lost. How could his people hope when the very possibility of a meaningful Crow life was being destroyed? They had to learn to live a new way of life. Even their core values, like what it meant to be courageous, had to be re-formed in a culture where traditional warrior acts of courage were illegal.

Radical hope, then, is the hope that is formed when all our previous hopes are gone. Radical hope was the kind God provided the Israelite exiles….

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Climate change is a “wickedly complex problem,” writes a lecturer in science and religion.

Radical hope in the face of it “means settling down in our own exile and waiting for God’s promise to be fulfilled beyond the scope of our own lifetimes.”https://t.co/JrkRSyYFlP

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) October 26, 2024

Data centers are the factories of AI, turning energy and data into intelligence. Industry leaders estimate that a few major U.S. technology companies alone are expected to invest more than $600 billion in AI infrastructure, particularly in data centers, between 2023 and 2026. The countries that work with companies to host data centers running AI workloads gain economic, political, and technological advantages and leverage. But data centers also present national security sensitivities, given that they often house high-end, export-controlled semiconductors and governments, businesses, and everyday users send some of their most sensitive information through them. And while the United States is ahead of China in many aspects of AI, especially in software and chip design, America faces significant bottlenecks with data centers.

Data centers are critical for the digital economy and AI. But the data center buildout is hitting a wall. The United States is home to the plurality of the world’s data centers, numbering in the thousands. Yet America’s aging energy grid, which powers those data centers, is under enormous strain from a complex set of factors, including rising electricity demand, delayed infrastructure upgrades, extreme weather events, and the complex transition to renewable energy. Meanwhile, surging data center demands driven by rapidly increasing AI workloads are exacerbating the grid’s vulnerabilities.

It’s not just a question of how those energy needs can be met, but where. When it comes to data centers, the shortage of powered land in the United States—or more specifically, the shortage of powered land with the connectivity required to support large-scale data centers—combined with supply chain challenges and lengthy permitting timelines for new infrastructure—presents a challenge to realizing both the public and private sectors’ AI ambitions.

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There are a lot of known unknowns about AI, but “The Next AI Debate Is About Geopolitics.” In my latest @ForeignPolicy piece, I argue that data might be the “new oil,” but nations—not nature—will decide where to build data centers. Source: Foreign Policy https://t.co/CHLEzhY9I6

— Jared Cohen (@JaredCohen) October 28, 2024