UK Funds Lunar Nuclear Micro-Reactor

UK Space Agency announced £2.9 million of new funding for a nuclear micro-reactor by Rolls-Royce. They want nuclear power to support a future Moon base for astronauts. This follows a £249,000 study funded by the UK Space Agency in 2022. Rolls-Royce plan to have a reactor ready to send to the Moon by 2029. Scientists …

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US Space Development Agency Wants to Almost Double Budget to $4.7 Billion in 2024

The US Space Development Agency (SDA) is requesting a $4.7 billion budget for fiscal 2024 which is up from $2.6 billion this year. They want to launch satellites for a data relay, called the Transport Layer, and a missile warning and tracking, called the Tracking Layer. SDA is responsible for rapidly developing and fielding large …

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Big Language Models Can Train Small and Cheap Language Models

Large language models can train smaller language models and uplevel them quickly. Stanford researchers trained Alpaca 7B, a model fine-tuned from the LLaMA 7B model on 52K instruction-following demonstrations. they used GPT 3.5 to train it. On our preliminary evaluation of single-turn instruction following, Alpaca behaves qualitatively similarly to OpenAI’s text-davinci-003, while being surprisingly small …

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500 Wh/kg Silicon Anode Amprius Battery for Drones and Electric Passenger Planes

Amprius Technologies’ batteries deliver up to double the energy density over standard lithium-ion batteries. This means the battery cells provide more energy and power with much less weight and volume. Amprius will have a quarterly investor call at 5 pm EST, 2pm PST today. TODAY, Amprius Technologies, Inc. (“Amprius” or the “Company”) (NYSE: AMPX), a …

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Gen 2 AI Text to Video

Gen-2: The Next Step Forward for Generative AI. It is a multi-modal AI system that can generate novel videos with text, images, or video clips. Arxiv- Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models Text-guided generative diffusion models unlock powerful image creation and editing tools. While these have been extended to video generation, current approaches …

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Artificial General Intelligence is Happening, Just a Question of How Much

Stephen McAleese, at Less Wrong, used scaling rules and formulas to try to predict the performance of GPT-4. He underpredicted the capabilities of GPT-4. However, he was not widely wrong. GPT-4 came out earlier than he expected and had better performance than expected. Multi-task Language Understanding on MMLU was better than expected. GPT-4 can work …

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Higher 2021 COVID Vaccination Correlates to Increased Excess Deaths in 2022

A preprint paper shows a correlation between high covid vaccination in 2021 and increased excess deaths in 2022 in Europe. Analysis of 31 countries, January to September, 2022 in 31 EU member states, plus Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Switzerland found that all-cause mortality, increased more the higher the 2021 vaccination uptake. Countries with more covid vaccines …

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Last Energy Gets $19 Billion in Contracts for Simple 20 MW Nuclear Fission Reactors

Last Energy is a startup working to make low-cost small pressure water reactors (20 MW) with simple off the shelf parts. They are designing to keep things simple, use as much off the shelf parts as possible and to use workers with existing training and skills. The demonstration model project showcases Last Energy’s standard, modular …

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Is Cryptocurrency a Scam? Is the Financial System a Scam?

There are many accusations that Cryptocurrency is a complete scam and blockchain-backed technologies are mostly scams. There have clearly been large scams in the area of cryptocurrency. Crypto companies and exchanges have failed, There has been hacking, theft, and fraud. The algorithmic stablecoin Terra failed last year. In December 2022, JPMorgan Chase Institute reported that …

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Google Open Bard Which is AI Competition to ChatGPT

Google has opened access to Bard which is an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. This is part of Google’s answer to Chatgpt. Bard is powered by a research large language model (LLM), specifically a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA, and will be updated with newer, more capable models over time. …

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