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Elon Musk on AGI Timeline, US vs China, Job Markets, Clean Energy & Humanoid Robots

Questions to inspire discussion.

đŸ€– Q: How quickly will AI and robotics replace human jobs? A: AI and robotics will do half or more of all jobs within the next 3–7 years, with white-collar work being replaced first, followed by blue-collar labor through humanoid robots.

🏱 Q: What competitive advantage will AI-native companies have? A: Companies that are entirely AI-powered will demolish competitors, similar to how a single manually calculated cell in a spreadsheet makes it unable to compete with entirely computer-based spreadsheets.

đŸ’Œ Q: What forces companies to adopt more AI? A: Companies using more AI must outcompete those using less, creating a forcing function for increased AI adoption, as inertia currently keeps humans doing AI-capable tasks.

📊 Q: How much of enterprise software development can AI handle autonomously? A: Blitzy, an AI platform using thousands of specialized agents, autonomously handles 80%+ of enterprise software development, increasing engineering velocity 5x when paired with human developers.

Energy and Infrastructure.

The Next Great Transformation: How AI Will Reshape Industries—and Itself

#artificialintelligence #ai #technology #futuretech


This change will revolutionize leadership, governance, and workforce development. Successful firms will invest in technology and human capital by reskilling personnel, redefining roles, and fostering a culture of human-machine collaboration.

The Imperative of Strategy Artificial intelligence is not preordained; it is a tool shaped by human choices. How we execute, regulate, and protect AI will determine its impact on industries, economies, and society. I emphasized in Inside Cyber that technology convergence—particularly the amalgamation of AI with 5G, IoT, distributed architectures, and ultimately quantum computing—will augment both potential and hazards.

The issue at hand is not if AI will transform industries—it has already done so. The essential question is whether we can guide this change to enhance security, resilience, and human well-being. Individuals who interact with AI strategically, ethically, and with a long-term perspective will gain a competitive advantage and foster the advancement of a more innovative and secure future.

Time runs faster on Mars and scientists just proved it

Thanks to Einstein’s relativity, time flows differently on Mars than on Earth. NIST scientists have now nailed down the difference, showing that Mars clocks tick slightly faster—and fluctuate over the Martian year. These microsecond shifts could play a big role in future Mars navigation, communications, and even a solar-system-wide internet. It’s a small time gap with big consequences for space exploration.

Deneddylation of ribosomal proteins promotes synergy between MLN4924 and chemotherapy to elicit complete therapeutic responses

(Cell Reports 42, 112925; August 29, 2023)

The authors were made aware of an image duplication in their published paper. The representative photo in Figure 5B is the same as the image in Fig. 4g of Aubry et al., 2020, Oncogene 39, p. 5338–5357. The assays involved treating xenografts of the RB1021-luc retinoblastoma line, using either MLN4924 (MLN) and topotecan (TPT; Cell Reports) or the RAD51 inhibitor B02 and TPT (Oncogene). These assays were run and analyzed concurrently in 2018. For the Xenogen measurements of tumor growth, we first quantified the signal and recorded the values in tables. After all the mice were assessed, appropriate mice were placed together for representative images. Thus, the quantification, which was performed correctly, and acquisition/storage of the representative image, which was not, were performed separately. Our review of image files revealed that the representative image of the B02 + TPT series of mice was accidentally duplicated using the file name for the MLN + TPT series of mice.

Alexander Grothendieck

You deserve an explanation, so please don’t skip this 1-minute read. It’s Sunday, December 28. Our fundraiser will soon be over, but fewer people are seeing our message this December and we’re short of our goal. If you’ve lost count of how many times you’ve visited Wikipedia this year, we hope that means it’s given you at least $2.75 of knowledge. If everyone who finds Wikipedia useful gave $2.75, we’d hit our goal in a few hours.

It’s been 25 years and Wikipedia is still free. It’s still created by people, not machines, and we don’t run ads or put up paywalls because we’re not here to make a profit off your attention. In other words, it’s still the internet we were promised.

Less than 2% of our readers donate, so if you’ve never given and Wikipedia has provided you with at least $2.75 worth of knowledge, donate today. If you are undecided, remember any contribution helps.

Major breakthrough clears key obstacle for the future of quantum internet

For years, the dream of a fully secure quantum Internet has been held back by a single, stubborn obstacle: repeaters. Whenever quantum networks needed them, scientists had to fall back on traditional models — a compromise that opened the door to potential security flaws. But now, researchers have finally filled in the missing piece of the puzzle, bringing the first true quantum relays within reach.

Unlike traditional data systems, quantum communication relies entirely on light. Instead of sending electrical signals, it uses pairs of entangled photons to create an unbreakable secret key between sender and receiver. Theoretically, this makes eavesdropping impossible — any attempt to intercept the signal would immediately destroy it.

Even with its promise of speed and security, quantum communication hasn’t yet reached everyday use. The main challenge lies in preserving quantum information. Only a handful of photons can travel together, and their light signal fades quickly over long distances.

Why Everyone Is Talking About Data Centers In Space

Questions to inspire discussion.

Launch Economics & Viability.

🚀 Q: What launch cost makes space data centers economically competitive? A: Space data centers become cost-competitive with ground systems when launch costs drop to approximately $200/kg, according to Google’s Suncatcher paper, making the economics viable for moving compute infrastructure off-Earth.

💰 Q: Why might SpaceX pursue a $1.5 trillion IPO valuation? A: The projected $1.5 trillion SpaceX IPO valuation is speculated to fund the capital-intensive race to establish space-based data centers and secure the best orbital positions before competitors.

🏱 Q: Which companies can realistically build space data centers first? A: Vertically integrated organizations like SpaceX, Relativity Space, and Blue Origin lead because they control launch infrastructure, can self-fund deployment, and serve as their own customers for space compute capacity.

đŸ›°ïž Q: How would space data centers physically connect GPUs across satellites? A: Multiple free-flying satellites in formation (like 20+ Starlink satellites) use inter-satellite optical connections to enable communication between GPUs, creating high-density computing clusters in orbit.

Malicious extensions in Chrome Web store steal user credentials

Two Chrome extensions in the Web Store named ‘Phantom Shuttle’ are posing as plugins for a proxy service to hijack user traffic and steal sensitive data.

Both extensions are still present in Chrome’s official marketplace at the time of writing and have been active since at least 2017, according to a report from researchers at the Socket supply-chain security platform.

Phantom Shuttle’s target audience is users in China, including foreign trade workers who need to test connectivity from various locations in the country.

Quantum entanglement could connect drones for disaster relief, bypassing traditional networks

Any time you use a device to communicate information—an email, a text message, any data transfer—the information in that transmission crosses the open internet, where it could be intercepted. Such communications are also reliant on internet connectivity, often including wireless signal on either or both ends of a transmission.

But what if two—or 10, or 100, or 1,000—entities could be connected in such a way that they could communicate information without any of those security or connectivity concerns?

That’s the challenge that Alexander DeRieux, a Virginia Tech Ph.D. student and Bradley Fellow in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, under the advisement of Professor Walid Saad, set out to tackle using quantum entanglement. In short, they used the unique properties of quantum bits, or qubits, as a method of transmitting information.

NitroGen: A Foundation Model for Generalist Gaming Agents

We introduce NitroGen, a vision-action foundation model for generalist gaming agents that is trained on 40,000 hours of gameplay videos across more than 1,000 games. We incorporate three key ingredients: 1) an internet-scale video-action dataset constructed by automatically extracting player actions from publicly available gameplay videos, 2) a multi-game benchmark environment that can measure cross-game generalization, and 3) a unified vision-action policy trained with large-scale behavior cloning. NitroGen exhibits strong competence across diverse domains, including combat encounters in 3D action games, high-precision control in 2D platformers, and exploration in procedurally generated worlds. It transfers effectively to unseen games, achieving up to 52% relative improvement in task success rates over models trained from scratch.

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