Even if Colossal can make what it terms “a functional proxy for the dodo,” there won’t be a clear answer about where to put it. The big agricultural industry in Mauritius is sugarcane farming, and there are plenty of rats and other non-native predators around. “It would not really be a dodo—it would be a […]
Monthly Archives: January 2023
The Download: hope for renewables, and AI’s role in journalism
The news: Powering the world with renewable energy will take a lot of raw materials. The good news is, when it comes to aluminum, steel, and rare-earth metals, there’s plenty to go around, according to a new analysis. Greater pay off: Although emissions are an unavoidable side effect of extracting the materials, over the next […]
Yes, we have enough materials to power the world with renewable energy
This study only focused on technologies that generate electricity. It didn’t include all the materials that would be needed to store and use that electricity, like the batteries in electric vehicles or grid storage. Demand for battery materials is expected to explode between now and 2050. Annual production of graphite, lithium, and cobalt will all […]
Could ChatGPT do my job?
So far, newsrooms have pursued two very different approaches to integrating the buzziest new AI tool, ChatGPT, into their work. Tech news site CNET secretly started using ChatGPT to write entire articles, only for the experiment to go up in flames. It ultimately had to issue corrections amid accusations of plagiarism. Buzzfeed, on the other […]
ChatGPT: AI can produce academic papers good enough for journals – just as some ban it
Some of the world’s biggest academic journal publishers have banned or curbed their authors from using the advanced chatbot, ChatGPT. Because the bot uses information from the internet to produce highly readable answers to questions, the publishers are worried that inaccurate or plagiarised work could enter the pages of academic literature. Several researchers have already […]
GitHub says hackers cloned code-signing certificates in breached repository
reader comments 3 with 0 posters participating Share this story GitHub said unknown intruders gained unauthorized access to some of its code repositories and stole code-signing certificates for two of its desktop applications: Desktop and Atom. Code-signing certificates place a cryptographic stamp on code to verify it was developed by the listed organization, which in […]
MusicLM: Google AI generates music in various genres at 24 kHz
Enlarge / An AI-generated image of an exploding ball of music. Ars Technica reader comments 26 with 0 posters participating Share this story On Thursday, researchers from Google announced a new generative AI model called MusicLM that can create 24 KHz musical audio from text descriptions, such as “a calming violin melody backed by a […]
Massive Yandex code leak reveals Russian search engine’s ranking factors
Enlarge / The Russian logo of Yandex, the country’s largest search engine and a tech company with many divisions, inside the company’s headquarters. SOPA Images / Getty Images reader comments 32 with 0 posters participating Share this story Nearly 45GB of source code files, allegedly stolen by a former employee, have revealed the underpinnings of […]
The Download: military drones, and forbidden US chips
New report: Generative AI in industrial design and engineering Generative AI has the potential to transform industrial design and engineering, making it more important than ever for leaders in those industries to stay ahead. So MIT Technology Review has created a new research report that highlights the potential benefits—and pitfalls— of this new technology. The […]
Mass-market military drones have changed the way wars are fought
Explosions in Armenia, broadcast on YouTube in 2020, revealed this new shape of war to the world. There, in a blue-tinted video, a radar dish spins underneath cyan crosshairs until it erupts into a cloud of smoke. The action repeats twice: a crosshair targets a vehicle mounted with a spinning dish sensor, its earthen barriers […]