Nov 4, 2024

This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 2) Benj Edwards | Ars Technica “We’ve always used tools to build new tools, and developers are using AI to continue that tradition. On Tuesday, Google’s CEO revealed that AI systems now generate more than a quarter of new code for its products, with human programmers overseeing the computer-generated contributions. The statement, made during Google’s Q3 2024 earnings call, shows how AI tools are already having a sizable impact on software development.” Eli Tan | The New York Times “Amid its push to grow its fleet of autonomous robot taxis and expand into new cities, Waymo has raised $5.6 billion from outside investors, its largest funding round to date. …The fresh money comes behind Waymo’s first taste of commercial success. Its robot taxis are now completing over 100,000 rides each week in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles, double its number in May, and will be operating in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta by 2025 through a partnership with Uber.” Will Knight | Wired “Physical Intelligence, also known as PI or π, was founded earlier this year by several prominent robotics researchers to pursue the new robotics approach inspired by breakthroughs in AI’s language abilities. ‘The amount of data we’re training on is larger than any robotics model ever made, by a very significant margin, to our knowledge,’ says Sergey Levine, a cofounder of Physical Intelligence and an associate professor at UC Berkeley.” Tom Clynes | IEEE Spectrum “The PPPL team invented this nuclear-fusion reactor, completed last year, using mainly off-the-shelf components. Its core is a glass vacuum chamber surrounded by a 3D-printed nylon shell that anchors 9,920 meticulously placed permanent rare-earth magnets. Sixteen copper-coil electromagnets resembling giant slices of pineapple wrap around the shell crosswise.” Katherine Blunt | The Wall Street Journal “The investment is a bet on AI’s huge energy needs and the mounting stress it is putting on the US power grid. …The companies said they are now working together with large tech companies to accelerate their access to electricity, which has become constrained in parts of the US as data-center developers compete for power sources and access to the grid. ‘The capital needs are huge, and one of the big bottlenecks—maybe the bottleneck—is electricity availability,’ ECP founder and senior partner Doug Kimmelman said. Ted C. Fishman | IEEE Spectrum “To the casual observer, the data industry can seem incorporeal, its products conjured out of weightless bits. But as I stand beside the busy construction site for DataBank’s ATL4, what impresses me most is the gargantuan amount of material—mostly concrete—that gives shape to the goliath that will house, secure, power, and cool the hardware of AI. Big data is big concrete. And that poses a big problem.” Andrew J. Hawkins | The Verge “Waymo has long touted its ties to Google’s DeepMind and its decades of AI research as a strategic advantage over its rivals in the autonomous driving space. Now, the Alphabet-owned company is taking it a step further by developing a new training model for its robotaxis built on Google’s multimodal large language model (MLLM) Gemini.” Eric Berger | Ars Technica “Here’s our best attempt to piece together the milestones and major goals of the Starship program over the next several years before it unlocks the capability to land humans on the Moon for NASA’s Artemis Program and begins flying demonstration missions to Mars. For fun, we’ve also included some estimated dates for each of these milestones. These represent our best guesses, and they’re almost certainly wrong.” Ethan Siegel | Big Think “It’s easy to have planets that orbit around a single star, and in a double star system, you can either orbit close to one star or far from both members. These configurations are stable, but adding a third star into the mix was thought to render the formation of planets unstable, as mutual gravitational interactions would eventually force their ejection. That wisdom got thrown out the window with the discovery of GW Orionis, which boasts multiple massive dust rings and possibly even more planets, all orbiting three stars at once.”