Unbound: No 199
Northern Lights Alert: Sun’s Activity At 23-Year High With Aurora This Weekend, Scientists Say
by Jamie Carter | Forbes
Alarm over artificial intelligence has reached a fever pitch in recent months. Just this week, more than 300 industry leaders published a letter warning AI could lead to human extinction and should be considered with the seriousness of “pandemics and nuclear war”.
Terms like “AI doomsday” conjure up sci-fi imagery of a robot takeover, but what does such a scenario actually look like? The reality, experts say, could be more drawn out and less cinematic – not a nuclear bomb but a creeping deterioration of the foundational areas of society.
DeepMind’s Gemma Scope peers under the hood of large language models
by Ben Dickson | Venturebeat
Large language models (LLMs) have become very good at generating text and code, translating languages, and writing different kinds of creative content. However, the inner workings of these models are hard to understand, even for the researchers who train them.
This lack of interpretability poses challenges to using LLMs in critical applications that have a low tolerance for mistakes and require transparency. To address this challenge, Google DeepMind has released Gemma Scope, a new set of tools that sheds light on the decision-making process of Gemma 2 models.
Gemma Scope builds on top of JumpReLU sparse autoencoders (SAEs), a deep learning architecture that DeepMind recently proposed.
The Best Things About Apple Intelligence Are Kind of Boring and That's Brilliant
Expert Opinion By Jason Aten | Inc.
When Apple introduced updates to its operating systems at WWDC this summer, the only thing anyone wanted to know was what Apple had planned for artificial intelligence. The iPhone maker was generally considered to be far behind competitors like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, which are all either developing their own large language models, or integrating those of the de facto leader, OpenAI.
Apple, as you might expect, took a measured approach, mostly focusing on making Siri smarter and more useful, as well as a handful of text and image generation tools. It called its flavor of AI, Apple Intelligence, because, of course.
🌙 NASA - Best Photo from Last Week
Ranger 7 Snaps the Moon
On July 31, 1964, the Ranger 7 spacecraft took this photo, the first image of the Moon taken by a United States spacecraft. 17 minutes later, it crashed into the Moon on the northern rim of the Sea of Clouds as intended. The 4,316 images sent back helped identify safe Moon landing sites for Apollo astronauts.
Until 1964, no closeup photographs of the lunar surface existed. Ranger 7 returned the first high resolution close-up photographs of the lunar surface. The mission marked a turning point in America’s lunar exploration program, taking the country one step closer to a human Moon landing.
Learn more about Ranger 7.
Image credit: NASA/JPL
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