Category Archives: Singularity

Think this is nifty? Its a version of the weekly Under 30 newsletter, and would be even niftier in your inbox.

One of the great pleasures of editing the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for the past 4.5 years has been learning about companies with zany solutions to the worlds most pressing problems. When I review submissions, Ill brew myself a strong cup of coffee, open my computer, and often truly chuckle. Though many are ridiculous (and ineffective), the ones that make the Under 30 lists continue to delight in this time ofvery hotdarkness.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a small magazine story about some of the wackiest honorees Ive encountered: the upcyclers. These founders, all still under 30, are tackling climate change by turning trash into energy and clothing. Take ICTYOS, which collects discarded fish skins from sushi restaurants in Lyon, France, and transforms them into luxe leather that can be made into belts, jackets and purses. Another favorite: Brooklyn-based Algiknit, whose Helmut Lang-trained founder spools seaweed into yarnwith $18 million in funding.

Read the full story below. Maybe youll laugh into your caffeinated drink, too :).

DAVID CANNON / GETTY IMAGES

Golf Tournaments, A Private Jet And A Red Ferrari: A Tech CEO Lived Large While His Employees Went Unpaid

A Forbes investigation found that Chris Kirchner, of the $240 million Goldman Sachs-backed startup Slync.io, fired executives after they asked questions about the companys funds. Now, hes facing a lawsuit for wrongful termination and claims of fraudulent behavior.

ClassDojo, founded by Under 30s, is on a $125 million mission to bring kids to the metaverse. The company says software made by its 30-person team is used by 95% of U.S. schools and has a $1.25 billion valuation. Seems like they did their homework. (Forbes)

The Seattle Mariners are actually winning. Meet the woman who is working to turn the hot streak into bigger profits, starting with her Bon Jovi karaoke selection. (Forbes)

These guys built Gordian, a company that upsells airline customers on seats, baggage and boarding, by cold calling airlines. And theyve raised $33 million to bring it to cruising altitude. (Forbes)

A few weeks ago I wrote about female founders from the girlboss heyday, and the movements shadow on women entrepreneurs. This is a profile of Wing founder Audrey Gelman, who had raised $167 million for her members-only womens coworking club, and shuttered the company in the pandemic Now shes running an antique store in Brooklyns Cobble Hill neighborhood. (Vanity Fair)

Ah, continuing to define office culture sans the officeat this stage, its permanent and involves Ted Lasso Zoom dressup. (Forbes)

With $2 trillion in recent crypto losses, what is the richest NFT artist Beeple doing? A lot of thingsnone of which involve regret. (New York)

General Catalyst, backer of Under 30 heavy hitter companies like Airbnb, Cadre and Canva, launched a $670 million healthcare fund. (Forbes)

In news you can use, heres how to recognize the physical symptoms of burnout. (New York Times)

An important read to combat this news cycle: A happiness columnists three rules for happiness. (The Atlantic)

Despite a drawdown in venture capital spending, the livestream shopping platform Whatnotpopular for sports cards, rare toys and other collectibleshas raised $260 million in fresh funding. (Forbes)

Repurposing animals, vegetables and minerals with the Forbes 30 Under 30, in 30 words or less.

Calling mermaids: Tessa Callaghan is turning algae into clothing.

Tessa Callaghan, 29 Cofounder, Aligknit Callaghans Brooklyn-based business spins seaweed into yarn, which is less polluting than traditional textile production. She has raised nearly $18 million from venture capitalists and Dutch incubator Fashion for Good.

Rubn Escudero, 27; Maria Jara Perea, 23; Iigo Monreal, 24

cofounders, SmallOps

Olive oil: tasty! And convertible to biogas. These Spaniards, with patent-pending tech and $170,000 in grants (theyre pitching VCs) are opening a plant to turn discarded olive oil into fuel.

Elle Liu, 29

Cofounder, Eucalypso

Cotton sheets gave this former SoulCycle product manager night sweats and acne, so she designed skin-soothing eucalyptus- ber bedding. A queen set costs $185; 2021 revenue was $2.6 million.

By Anthony Tellez

When the invasion of Ukraine began in February, Easton LaChappelle was immediately trying to find out how he could help out casualties of the war. As the CEO of Unlimited Tomorrow, a next generation New York-based prosthetics company that uses 3D printing and scanning technology to make custom and affordable prosthetics, LaChappelle was looking for ways to get his tech on the ground in Ukraine. "I saw what was going on. There was a high number of casualties for them that were causing amputations. We started seeing these news stories about these individual people. And I think that resonates with all of us and we all want to do something about that," says LaChappelle, who made the 30 Under 30 Healthcare list in 2021.

His goal is to raise $1 million dollars through a GoFundMe campaign and provide the prosthetics to at least 100 Ukrainian citizens who have suffered injuries. In trying to achieve this milestone, LaChappelle is working with Singularity Group, a company that focuses on using emerging technologies to solve the worlds biggest social problems. With their global network and LaChappelles quick and affordable means of manufacturing bionic arms, the two companies were able to navigate the logistics of getting prosthetics to war victims in a span of about two months.

Currently, Unlimited Tomorrow is taking its streamlined process for producing prosthetics to hospitals in Ukraine. We have a scanner in a hospital in Lviv. We train the medical staff in about two minutes and how to 3D Scan. We get those scans instantly to our back end database, says LaChappelle, who relies on Singularitys network in nearby Warsaw and a network of Ukraine-based drivers to get his prosthetics delivered to those in need.

While traditional manufacturing methods for prosthetics involve making molds, requiring patients to leave their home and wait anywhere from two to six months to receive the prosthetic limb, Unlimited Tomorrow is able to deliver an individual a prosthetic in four to eight weeks. As the war rages on, LaChappelle is confident that he can continue to help those in need. It's just going to continue to take coordination, partnership and assistance from local governments, healthcare systems, partners, like Singularity Group and boots on the ground, he said.

BRYAN VAN DER BEEK/THE FORBES COLLECTION

Facebook Billionaire Eduardo Saverins B Capital Raises $250 Million For Its Early Stage VC Fund

B Capitals latest fund comes amid a slump in deals globally, with venture capital-led investments in startups around the world dropping 23% in the second quarter of 2022 compared to the previous three months, according to CB Insights.

Guerin Blask for Forbes

Still Open: Forbes Under 30 2023 Nominations

You have until September 1!

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The Company Transforming Seeweed Into Yarn And Other Upcyclers - Forbes

Everything has to end eventually but does that include the universe itself? And if so, how? And when? It might be hard to imagine a catastrophe big enough to affect the entirety of existence, but physicists do expect it all to end at some point and it may come sooner than we think. Here are some of the leading hypotheses about how the universe could end, and when.

To figure out how the cosmos could come to a close, physicists look back to the beginning. About 13.8 billion years ago, space and time burst forth from an incredibly dense singularity, an event thats come to be known as the Big Bang. The universe rapidly expanded from that point, with matter cooling and condensing into galaxies and all the stars and planets they contain.

But the universe is still expanding, and doing so at an accelerating pace, thanks to a mysterious force that scientists call dark energy. As that name suggests, we know very little about how this force works or why its pushing everything away from everything else, but it has some pretty major implications for the ultimate fate of the universe. How it plays out depends on how you tweak the numbers in the models.The Big Freeze

According to our best models of the evolution of the universe, the most likely scenario is whats called the Big Freeze. If dark energy keeps accelerating the expansion of the universe forever and calculations suggest that it will then the cosmos is in for a slow death thats drawn out for a googol years. That unfathomable number is a one followed by 100 zeroes.

If you could watch a patch of sky in fast-forward over billions of years, the stars would start to turn red, then fade out completely. Thats because the expanding universe would stretch the wavelength of their light farther and farther towards the red end of the spectrum, before rendering them completely invisible to the eye.

Of course, even if you couldnt see them, the distant stars and galaxies would still exist at least for a few trillion years. But after a while, the expansion would dilute the dust and gas floating around in space, until there isnt enough concentrated in any one region to fuel the birth of new stars. With no more being born, stars eventually become an endangered and then extinct species, as the last of them die off.

So begins the universes Degenerate Era, about 100 trillion years from now. By this point, only white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes exist, but these too will fade white dwarfs and some neutron stars will slowly cool into invisible, inert black dwarfs, while other neutron stars will collapse into black holes.

By the year 10 tredecillion (a one followed by 43 zeroes), there wont be anything but black holes left. And even these arent eternal as Stephen Hawking predicted, black holes slowly give off radiation until they eventually evaporate.

After about 1 googol years, once all the black holes are gone too, the universe settles into its final age the Dark Era. Light and matter are distant memories, and the remaining loose particles will live the loneliest possible existence, rarely having the chance to whizz within a light-year of each other, let alone interact. And nothing else will ever happen, for eternity.The Big Rip

A similar scenario leads to a far more dramatic death, much sooner. In this model, dark energy doesnt just accelerate the expansion of the universe at a steady pace, it accelerates exponentially, eventually tearing the very fabric of reality apart an ending called the Big Rip.

Theres a physical limit to the distance into space that we could ever see, even if you had the most powerful telescope possible. That limit is dictated by the speed of light at a certain point, objects are too far away for their light to have had enough time to reach Earth. This region is called the observable universe.

In the Big Rip model, the exponentially accelerating expansion pushes more and more objects beyond that boundary, meaning that the observable universe is constantly shrinking. Any two objects that are farther apart than this boundary allows can no longer influence each other through the fundamental forces, like gravity or electromagnetism.

As that distance shrinks, large scale structures of the universe will begin to crumble as gravitys influence shrinks, it wont be able to hold galaxy clusters together, and theyll start dissolving. Eventually the same will happen to the galaxies themselves, sending stars drifting off on their own. Later, the cosmic event horizon will shrink beyond the scale of an individual star system, meaning planets will no longer be bound to their orbits around stars.

In the final few minutes of existence, that event horizon would shrink smaller than the scale of molecules, disrupting the forces that hold matter together, shredding stars, planets and everything on them. And finally, those loose atoms themselves would be ripped apart particle by particle. The last victim is the fabric of spacetime itself.

The scientists who propose this model predict that, if it were to happen, the universe has about 22 billion years left to live. Thankfully though, other scientists believe that this scenario involves parameters that arent realistic, so is less likely to occur than some of the other ideas on this list.The Big Crunch

Perhaps the universe will end in the exact opposite way instead of expanding forever into nothingness, it changes course and collapses in on itself in a so-called Big Crunch.

In the cosmic tug of war between gravity trying to pull everything together and dark energy trying to push it apart, scientists usually stack their chips in favor of dark energy, which would ultimately lead to a Big Freeze or Big Rip ending. But we cant completely count gravity out of the running.

If the density of matter in the universe is high enough, its gravity could overcome the expansion and trigger a contraction phase instead. Everything will begin to move towards everything else as the universe shrinks once again. Much like our current expansion phase, anyone alive at the time wouldnt be directly affected at least until near the end.

Galaxy clusters would start to merge, then galaxies themselves, and eventually individual stars would collide more regularly. But the real trouble begins with the cosmic microwave background the background radiation of the universe left over from the Big Bang. As its photons are shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum, this radiation heats up, until eventually it becomes hotter than stars. That means the stars can no longer radiate their heat outwards, and will continue to get hotter and hotter until they evaporate.

In the last few minutes, the temperature of the universe would be so extremely hot that atoms themselves fall apart. Not that theyll have long to worry about that, since theyll be sucked into the black holes that are taking up an increasing percentage of the shrinking universe.

Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang.

Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet. Or, according to a recent study, it could be quite soon, cosmically speaking, as the universe reverses course about 100 million years from now. In that model, the contraction phase would take about a billion years before we return to that singularity.The Big Bounce

But that might not be the end. A variation on the above hypothesis suggests that moments before the universe collapses into an infinitely dense singularity, its saved by quantum processes and reverses course once again, beginning a new period of expansion thats effectively another Big Bang for a brand new universe. This model is known as the Big Bounce.

While it might sound a little too convenient, proponents of the idea say that there is some precedent in the world of quantum physics after all, as the universe shrinks towards a singularity, it becomes so small that quantum rules take over from the large-scale classical physics were familiar with.

At that point, quantum tunneling can occur, where particles can overcome barriers that by all accounts they shouldnt have enough energy to pass through. This drives processes like radioactive decay and, according to a recent study, could also allow a contracting universe to escape the fate of total collapse and begin expanding again.

Intriguingly, support for the Big Bounce arises out of another theory called loop quantum gravity, which was created as a way to explain gravity in terms of quantum mechanics.

The fun implication of the Big Bounce hypothesis is that we might be in the middle of a never-ending chain of universes being created and destroyed.The Big Slurp

The final doomsday scenario on this list is perhaps the most unsettling, because it could already be barreling down on us and we wouldnt know until it hit. Its called a false vacuum decay, or more colloquially the Big Slurp.

Its a law of physics that a system will naturally try to become stable. To do so it moves from a state of high energy to one with lower energy, until it stabilizes into its lowest possible energy state. For quantum fields, this is known as its vacuum state.

Its thought that all known quantum fields are in their stable vacuum states except for one: the Higgs field. It seems to be in a false vacuum state, which means that it currently appears stable but is predicted to not be in its lowest energy state.

But that could change without warning. Literally any second, the Higgs field could suddenly slip into a lower energy state, taking out a huge chunk (if not all) of the universe in the process.

All it would take is for one tiny point in space to collapse into this lower energy state, which would send a bubble of vacuum decay expanding outwards at the speed of light. Moving that fast, we couldnt even see it coming until the wall of that bubble slammed into Earth.

What happens once were inside this bubble? No ones really sure, but it will probably rewrite the laws of nature. Theres a chance that life might be possible under these new physics but the universe could be so completely different that we cant even imagine it. Worst case scenario, all matter is destroyed.

If theres good news to be found, its that theres a lot of uncertainty to the idea. Some models predict that false vacuum decay isnt likely to occur for many billions of years yet, or that its impossible altogether. Others suggest that it should have happened by now, indicating our current universe might actually be the strange new physics inside the bubble.

The Higgs field could also be more stable than we give it credit for. It was, after all, only confirmed relatively recently with the discovery of the Higgs boson, so theres still plenty left to learn through further study.

Or maybe the false vacuum bubble has just swallowed the Sun and will be here in eight minutes.

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The end of everything: 5 ways the universe could be destroyed - New Atlas

Ranveer Singh in 'Ranveer vs Wild with Bear Grylls'. He has recently started sporting a double-ponytail look, making him an all-rounder in embracing non-binary fashion fluidity, which also of course includes monochromatic suits.

At 37, Ranveer Singh is the rarest of pop confections. Before him, Bollywood hadnt seen a star whose love affair with Gucci is as intense as his role-prep routines, both of which cant parallel his effusive odes to his wife Deepika Padukone, a star as influential, talented and radiant as he, if not more.

He also aces the puttar act often, notably in his latest reality show on Netflix, Ranveer vs Wild with Bear Grylls, in which he upped his breathless susurrations of Jai Shiv Shambhu to escape the wrath of snakes with loud, anthemic repetitions of Jai Bajrang Bali to bump himself up the rappel to reach the pinnacle. All this while, during the one-hour long show, Singh relentlessly regurgitated the purpose behind this dangerous journey: to get a flower for his lady love.

In his carefully crafted high-voltage brand persona, chivalry and metrosexuality co-exista potential heartthrob for cisgender women as well as anybody on the GBTQ spectrum who likes men. He can ooze cowboy masculinity one day and daintily mimic Alia Bhatts twirls in Gangubai Kathiawadi songs the next day.

With 20 films, four Filmfare awards, a two-year-old production company named Maa Kasam Films, a record label Incink that promotes rappers from across India, and a fashionist who can inspire the best of designers and stylists, Singhs singularity in Bollywood defies categorisations.

Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt in episode 1 of 'Koffee with Karan Season 7'.

Im Ranveer Singh, and I am the Lamborghini of Men, Singh once announced at an awards function. The Lambo logo is a charging bullso did he mean he was a man of strength, determination and the ability or at least a desire to disrupt everything that comes in his way? If he did, he probably wasnt far off in self-estimation. He knows how to hold an audience in his roles as well as in talk shows and interviews. In the first episode of Koffee with Karan Season 7 last Sunday, Singh appeared with Alia Bhatt and mimicked Hrithik Roshan, called Uorfi Javed (a social media paparazzi-friendly personality known to wear bras made out of tarpaulin and other such fashion innovations) a fashion icon besides maintaining a perfect balance between political correctness and verbal gimmickry.

So what mountains did Singh climb to reach this pinnacle?

Born Ranveer Singh Bhavnani (he dropped his last name because, by his own admission, it wasnt that saleable and sleek a name), his grandparents moved to Bombay from Karachi, Sindh, in present-day Pakistan. His only industry bloodline is with maternal second cousin Sonam Kapoor. He studied theatre and writing in a university in Indiana, US, worked a few years in advertising as a copywriter in Mumbai, worked as an assistant director, but left it tall to pursue acting. He would go for all kinds of auditions, and refuse all minor roles. Aditya Chopra lunched him in Band Baaja Baarat in 2010, which also got him the Best Male Debut award at the Filmfare Awards. Since then, he has played a gruffy, testosterone-fuelled, bisexual villain in Padmavat (2016), a slum rapper on the cusp of success in Gully Boy (2019), and played Kapil Dev in '83 (2021). His last film, Jayeshbhai Zordaar is a standard melodramatic Bollywood message film that nails patriarchy and upholds rights of the girl child. Singh will next be in a Rohit Shetty comedy called Cirkus (possibly a fool-proof BO jangler), a Karan Johar comedy Rocky Aur Rani Ki Amar Prem Kahani opposite Alia Bhatt and a Hindi language remake of Shankars Tamil film Anniyan.

The aspirational brand credo that Singh continues to chisel and transform incessantly, especially for post-millennialsa Bollywood man who is everything and anything, and flamboyantly soensures he is always in the news. His luxury-meter is over the top: a Lamborghini Urus Pearl Capsule, Aston Martin Rapide S, Mercedes-Benz GLS, Land Rover Range Rover Vogue, and Jaguar XJ L comprise the cream of his automobile collection; his fashion tastes veer from baroque Versace shirts to customised neon-pink shararas, Franck Muller wristwatches, velvet pantsuits and a profusion of Gucci. He has recently started sporting a double-ponytail look, making him an all-rounder in embracing non-binary fashion fluidity, which also of course includes monochromatic suits.

Singh is a self-confessed fan of Govinda; he has said that Govindas character in Raja Babu is his spirit character, whatever that could mean. Id like a sea-facing villa in Goa with a swimming pool where I can cook, paint, watch movies and do yoga. And Id like to be surrounded by my many children, he recently said in an interview.

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The singularity of Ranveer Singh in Bollywood - Moneycontrol

The list of challenges space explorers will face is formidable. Theyll have to produce breathable air, clean water, and food in extremely hostile environments lacking all of the above. Theyll also have to peacefully coexist with small groups of fellow explorers in tight quarters for long periods of time, all while minimizing exposure to the searing radiation thats ubiquitous virtually anywhere they go.

Assuming explorers overcome these challenges, theres another that doesnt get the love it deserves, according to researchers at Japans Kyoto University.

Long-term settlement of Earth orbit, the moon, Mars, and beyond requires explorers forsake Earths gravitythe steady downward force every Earthly animal has evolved to navigate over billions of years. Studies of astronauts spending weeks or months in microgravity have shown atrophied muscles, bone loss, vision loss, and changes to immune systems. There have, of course, been no studies of humans living on planetary bodies with low-gravity, but its likely adult explorers would contend with health issuesand how all this might affect childbirth and normal development in kids is unknown.

Assuming some kind of artificial gravity would lessen these risks considerably, Kyoto University partnered with construction company, Kajima Corp, to explore futuristic concepts that might one day offer tourists and settlers a healthy dose of good ol Earth gravity.

Their far-future vision? A towering sci-fi space cone, called the Glass, that would stand 1,312 feet (400 meters) tall and 656 feet (200 meters) across. This habitat would spin around its axis once every 20 seconds so that people living on its inner walls would enjoy Earth gravityalongside trees, grass, and a lake that would do MC Escher proud. The plans call for spinning habitats on the moon and Mars, where gravity is notably less than on Earth.

In addition to the habitat itself, the three-part proposal, outlined in a press release and video last week, also sketched out a system for transportation between Earth, Mars, and the moon called Hexatrack, which would include standardized vehicles for travel between habitats on the surface of the planet or moon and base stations in orbit.

Obviously, all this is more of a beautiful concept to solve a real problem than anything remotely practical today.

The sheer size of the endeavorakin to building the Empire State Building upside-down on the moon or Mars, spinning it like a top, and then layering water, soil, and other internal structures through its interiorwould demand huge amounts of resources and technical know-how. And without exceptional design, living in such an environment, where the ground visibly curves at your feet and the tug of local gravity is at odds with the structures artificial gravity, could be pretty disorienting. The team envisions our migration to the moon and Mars wont hit its stride until the latter half of this century, but even that timeframe for work on this scale seems optimistic.

For now, the idea is more at home among other futuristic space concepts. Though focused on off-planet living, for example, the vision for ONeill cylinders, proposed in the mid-70s, came complete with spin-based gravity, lakes, farmland, and even artificial sunshine. At the moment, though, were much closer to realizing small, private space bubbles in orbit, like those designed by Axiom Space, than we are to off-Earth megastructures such as these.

Still, as going to space on reusable rockets gets cheaper, and alternative methods of shooting stuff into orbitlike this space catapultemerge, we may hone our abilities to both build structures and also find, mine, and exploit resources out there. Theres an abundance of raw materials for sustaining our presence in space. Eventually, we may begin engineering ever bigger structures in orbit and elsewhere, and wild concepts mooted today, could look a bit more realistic.

Regardless, theres little question that bringing some extra gravity with us would help the cause. Maybe someone will build spinning conical towers on the moonor maybe therell be a better, more practical alternative by then.

In either case, its fun to dream.

Image Credit: Takuya Ono and Kajima Co. Ltd.

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Japan Proposes a Wild Concept for Making Artificial Gravity on the Moon - Singularity Hub

Stranger Things fans will be familiar with this scene: Eleven, a girl with telekinetic powers, stares intently at a Coke can. Without physically touching the can, she completely crushes it using her mind alone.

Changing objects with the mind has long been a trope in science fiction. Now, thanks to metasurfaces, two studies just showed that its potentially possible.

Metamaterials are artificial composites with bizarre optical properties. Often arranged in tandem, they can interact with electromagnetic waves, including visible light, in ways that are impossible for natural materials. This gives them a superpower: they can readily adapt their propertiesfor example, bending light in different waysrather than relying on the properties of the materials theyre made of.

Why care? Our brains generate electromagnetic waves as they process information. Depending on the brains statefor example, if its relaxed versus concentratingdifferent frequencies of brain waves take over. So why not use the brain as a source to trigger changes in metamaterials?

In the first study, published in eLight, the team used a brainwave extraction module that allowed volunteers to control a metasurfacea 2D version of metamaterialswith their minds alone. The whole system is wireless and relies on Bluetooth. They extracted brainwaves from the volunteer as she relaxed or concentrated, and through a controller, changed how the linked metasurface scattered light. Not as dramatic as bending a Coke can, surebut a futuristic demonstration of using the mind to control physical material.

A second study took the idea a smidge further. Different metasurfaces can talk to each other based on electromagnetic properties. Here, the team hooked up two people to metasurfaces to text with their minds. One volunteer was the transmitter, the other the receiver. By concentrating, the transmitters brain waves changed the metasurfaces properties to encode different binary messages. Upon decoding, the receiver got the textall without lifting a single finger.

For now, the futuristic tech is still in its infancy. But scientists imagine theyll one day be able to use metamaterials for a myriad of purposes: monitoring the attention status of a driver, for example, or incorporating them into non-invasive brain-machine interfaces.

Combined with intelligent algorithms such as machine learning, the presented two works may further open up a new direction to advanced bio-intelligent metasurface systems, said Dr. Xiangang Luo at the Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in either of the studies.

Metasurfaces are like a fever dream. Normally we expect our materials to behave consistently: glass bottles shatter under pressure; wood cracks; cotton is soft. Metamaterials change this paradigm. Often made up of an amalgamation of materialspiezoelectric materials are a favoritethey readily change their structural and light-bending properties under the effect of electromagnetic fields.

This has led to preliminary invisibility cloaks, dynamic camouflaging, superlenses, and 3D-printed millibots that could one day roam your body to intelligently deliver drugs when needed.

Metasurfaces are metamaterials 2D cousin. Here, the repeating structures in metamaterials weave into a sheet-like structure, maintaining their ability to control nearly all the characteristics of electromagnetic waves, said Dr. Shaobo Qu at Air Force Engineering University in China, who led the telekinesis trial. Programmable metasurfaces (PMs) are a step up, in that their functions can be controlled in a predictable manner by outside influences to switch operating modeslike a bathroom smart mirror with several light settings depending on your mood.

Normally, electromagnetic waves come from a generator. But our brains burst with different frequencies of these waves, which collectively represent electrical signals across large regions. Beta waves, for example, cycle roughly 15 to 40 times a second, and are associated with an engaged mind. Theta waves, in contrast, correlate with daydreaminga sort of mental relaxation. Scientists have found that it is possible to control your brain waves and actively shift them from one state to another through neurofeedback.

Brain waves can be readily picked up by a cap of embedded electrodes. This led the team to wonder: can we use these signals to control metasurfaces?

In one study, Qu proposed a simple design using a brainwave extraction module. Its got three parts: the sensor, controller, and actuator. The sensor collects brainwaves through electrodes placed on the scalp. Here, the team used a commercially available module, ThinkGear AM, an affordable chip popular with the DIY EEG brainwave-hacking community.

Recorded data is then transmitted to the controller through Bluetooth. The controller is also made from a low-cost component, with Arduino at its heart. Brain wave signals are converted into a measure for attention, and fed into the actuator. Depending on the persons level of attention, the actuator bins the data into four groups and outputs different voltages.

The four threshold intervals correspond to distracted, neutral, concentrated, and extremely concentrated attention intensity, respectively, the team explained.

The high or low voltage corresponds to a 1 or 0 coding sequence. These sequences then map to different material properties for the metasurface, which in turn controls how it scatters light.

The end result? In a proof of concept, a volunteer sat in an anechoic chambera room designed to block out surrounding sound or electromagnetic waves. With dry electrodes on her head, she closed her eyes as she cycled through different concentration states. By measuring the light-scattering properties of the metasurface, the team found a strong correspondence between her attention intensity and the material properties.

The study doesnt show that its possible to physically move materials with your mind. But it does show that its possible to remotely control a material based on thought alone. For now, the technology is mostly a cool proof of evidence that paves the road for mind-controlled materials for health monitoring or smart sensors. A major roadblock is how to deal with outside electromagnetic noise, which could occlude neural control signals.

Telekinesis already blows my mind. But what about telepathy?

A separate study used metasurfaces as a telephone of sorts to help two people text simple messages, all without lifting a finger.

Direct brain-to-brain communication isnt new. Previous studies using non-invasive setups had participants playing 20 questions with their brain waves. Another study built a BrainNet for three volunteers, allowing them to play a Tetris-like game using brainwaves alone. The conduit for those mindmelds relied on cables and the internet. One new study asked if metasurfaces could do the same.

Led by Dr. Tie Jun Cui at the Institute of Electromagnetic Space, Southeast University in China, the study linked a well-known brainwave signal, P300, to the properties of a metasurface. Their setup, electromagnetic brain-computer-metasurface (EBCM), used brainwaves to control a particular type of metasurface known as an information metasurface, which can code 0s and 1s like an electronic circuit board.

The experiment had two volunteers: a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter had his brain waves monitored with EEG, with a specific focus on the P300 signal. The signals were then decoded into binary code, which was then used to control the transmitters metasurface properties. These changes wirelessly changed the receivers metasurface, which was then decoded and translated back into text information for the receiver to read.

The setup successfully transmitted four text sequences: hello world, Hi, Sue, Hi, Scut and BCI metasurface. Its a slow process, averaging roughly five seconds for each character, but could be improved with some quick-spelling paradigms, the team said.

We are still far from tech-based telekinesis and telepathy. But those superpowers may not be as far-fetched as once thought. For now, the teams are eager to adopt their setups for bettering health.

Our work may further open up a new direction to explore the deep integration of metasurface, human brain intelligence, and artificial intelligence, so as to build up new generations of bio-intelligent metasurface systems, said Cui.

Image Credit: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

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Metasurfaces Open the Door to Telekinesis and Telepathy With Technology - Singularity Hub

NEW YORK, June 29, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C., a nationally recognized shareholder rights law firm, is investigating potential claims against Cognyte Software Ltd. ( CGNT), Singularity Future Technology, Inc. ( SGLY), Medallion Financial Corp. ( MFIN), and RBB Bancorp ( RBB). Our investigations concern whether these companies have violated the federal securities laws and/or engaged in other unlawful business practices. Additional information about each case can be found at the link provided.

Cognyte Software Ltd. ( CGNT)

On April 5, 2022, Cognyte reported its fourth quarter 2021 financial results, including revenue of $125 million, which was about $3.5 million below the midpoint of the Company's own guidance. Cognyte cited "lower conversions within its product pipeline," along with supply chain issues. During the related conference call, Cognyte's Chief Executive Officer stated that "a longer sales cycle [resulted] in the lower-than-expected bookings in Q4" and acknowledged that management "didn't execute well."

On this news, Cognyte's stock fell $3.63, or 31.1%, to close at $8.03 per share on April 5, 2022, thereby injuring investors.

For more information on the Cognyte investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/CGNT

Singularity Future Technology, Inc. ( SGLY)

On May 5, 2022, Hindenburg Research (Hindenburg) published a report entitled Singularity Future Technology: This Nasdaq-Listed Companys CEO Is a fugitive, on the Run for Allegedly Operating a Massive Ponzi Scheme. The Hindenburg report alleged, among other things, that singularitys CEO, Yang Jie, is a fugitive on the run from Chinese authorities for running an alleged $300 million Ponzi scheme that lured in over 20,000 victims and fled to the U.S. while at least 28 other individuals involved in the case were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 6 months to 15 years. The Hindenburg report further alleged that Singularitys massive [cryptocurrency] mining rig deal appears to be a brazen undisclosed related party deal and that [w]e see little evidence that Singularitys proprietary crypto mining rigs ever existed in the first place. The photos and descriptions of Singularitys miners match precisely with another brand called KOI Miner.

On this news, Singularitys stock price fell $1.95 per share, or 28.89%, to close at $4.80 per share on May 5, 2022.

For more information on the Singularity Future investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/SGLY

Medallion Financial Corp. ( MFIN)

On December 29, 2021, the SEC charged Medallion and its President and Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Murstein, with illegally engaging in two schemes in an effort to reverse the companys plummeting stock price. Specifically, the two had engaged in illegal touting by paying Ichabods Cranium and others to place positive stories about the company on various websites, including Huffington Post, Seeking Alpha, and TheStreet.com.

On this news, Medallions stock fell up to 27% during intraday trading on December 29, 2021, thereby injuring investors.

For more information on the Medallion investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/MFIN

RBB Bancorp ( RBB)

On February 18, 2022, RBB Bancorp announced the abrupt departure of Tammy Song, the EVP and Chief Lending Officer of RBB Bancorps wholly owned subsidiary Royal Business Bank.

Four days later, on February 22, 2022, RBB Bancorp announced its President and CEO (Alan Thian) would take a leave of absence, effective immediately, pending an internal investigation being conducted by a special committee of the Companys board of directors.

On this news, RBB Bancorps stock price declined by $2.69 per share, or approximately 10.45%, from $25.75 to $23.06 over two trading days.

For more information on the RBB Bancorp investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/RBB

About Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C.:

Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C. is a nationally recognized law firm with offices in New York, California, and South Carolina. The firm represents individual and institutional investors in commercial, securities, derivative, and other complex litigation in state and federal courts across the country. For more information about the firm, please visit http://www.bespc.com. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Contact Information:

Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C.Brandon Walker, Esq. Melissa Fortunato, Esq.(212) 355-4648[emailprotected]www.bespc.com

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Bragar Eagel & Squire, PC Is Investigating Cognyte, Singularity Future, Medallion, and RBB and Encourages Investors to Contact the Firm -...

A little under a year ago, the worlds biggest direct air capture (DAC) plant got up and running in Iceland. Christened Orca after the Icelandic word for energy, the plant was built by Swiss company Climeworks in partnership with Icelandic carbon storage firm Carbfix. Orca can capture about 4,000 tons of carbon per year (for scale, thats equal to the annual emissions of 790 cars).

Now Climeworks is building another facility that makes Orca seem tiny by comparison. The company broke ground on its Mammoth plant this week. With a CO capture capacity of 36,000 tons per year, Mammoth will be almost 10 times larger than Orca.

While Orca has 8 collector containers each about the size and shape of a standard shipping container, Mammoth will have 80. The containers are blocks of fans and filters that suck in air and extract its CO2, which Carbfix mixes with water and injects underground, where a chemical reaction converts it to rock.

The vast amount of energy required for this process will come from Hellisheii Power Station in south-western Iceland. Sitting on a lava plateau, the facility is the third-largest geothermal plant in the world, with an output of 303 megawatts of electricity and 400 megawatts of thermal energy.

DACs energy usage, particularly when its considered in conjunction with the (relatively minuscule) amount of CO2 its capturing, is its biggest drawback. Sourcing the energy from renewable sources helps, but its still not unlimited nor free.

Orca and Mammoth both employ solid DAC technology, which uses sorbent filters that chemically bind with CO2 (as opposed to liquid systems, which pass air through chemical solutions to remove the CO2). The filters need to be heated and placed under a vacuum to release and capture the concentrated CO2, which must then be compressed under extremely high pressure.

According to the International Energy Agency, there are 19DAC plants operating worldwide today. They capture more than 0.01megatons (10,000 tons) of carbon dioxide a year. Along with Mammoth, another plant that will reportedly capture one million metric tons per year of CO2 is slated to start construction in Texas by this December.

Climeworks was launched by Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph Gebald in 2009 out of ETH Zrich, the main technical university in Switzerland. Since then, Wurzbacher told CNBC, DAC technology has improved by leaps and bounds. We started with milligrams of carbon dioxide captured from the air, he said. Then we went from milligrams to grams, from grams to kilograms to tons to 1,000 tons. That sort of leveling up over the course of 13 years is no small feat.

To meet its future goals, though, the company will have its work cut out for it; theyre aiming to remove millions of tons of CO2 per year by 2030 and a billion per year by 2050.

Meanwhile, global emissions topped 36 billion tons last year. 36,000 tons (the quantity of CO2 that will be captured by the Mammoth facility) is a negligible fraction of that total. Is it even worth the energy usage, construction and maintenance costs, and frankly, the effort? Or would the geothermally-generated electricity go to better use powering electric cars?

There will be all sorts of trade-offs and tough decisions to make as we continue to grapple with the climate crisis. Even if automation and increases in energy efficiency drive down the cost of direct air capture, its unclear whether it will be a viable solution. Climeworks CEO Gebald is optimistic; Nobody has ever built what we are building in DAC, and we are both humble and realistic that the most certain way to be successful is to run the technology in the real world as fast as possible, he said. Construction of the Mammoth plant is expected to be complete in 18 to 24 months.

Image Credit: Climeworks

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A New Carbon Capture Plant Will Pull 36,000 Tons of CO2 From the Air Each Year - Singularity Hub

It wasnt science that convinced Google engineer Blake Lemoine that one of the companys AIs is sentient. Lemoine, who is also an ordained Christian mystic priest, says it was the AIs comments about religion, as well as his personal, spiritual beliefs, that helped persuade him the technology had thoughts, feelings, and a soul.

Im a priest. When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt, Lemoine said in a recent tweet. Who am I to tell God where he can and cant put souls?

Lemoine is probably wrong at least from a scientific perspective. Prominent AI researchers as well as Google say that LaMDA, the conversational language model that Lemoine was studying at the company, is very powerful, and is advanced enough that it can provide extremely convincing answers to probing questions without actually understanding what its saying. Google suspended Lemoine after the engineer, among other things, hired a lawyer for LaMDA, and started talking to the House Judiciary Committee about the companys practices. Lemoine alleges that Google is discriminating against him because of his religion.

Still, Lemoines beliefs have sparked significant debate, and serve as a stark reminder that as AI gets more advanced, people will come up with all sorts of far-out ideas about what the technology is doing, and what it signifies to them.

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Because its a machine, we dont tend to say, Its natural for this to happen, Scott Midson, a University of Manchester liberal arts professor who studies theology and posthumanism, told Recode. We almost skip and go to the supernatural, the magical, and the religious.

Its worth pointing out that Lemoine is hardly the first Silicon Valley figure to make claims about artificial intelligence that, at least on the surface, sound religious. Ray Kurzweil, a prominent computer scientist and futurist, has long promoted the Singularity, which is the notion that AI will eventually outsmart humanity, and that humans could ultimately merge with the tech. Anthony Levandowski, who cofounded Googles self-driving car startup, Waymo, started the Way of the Future, a church devoted entirely to artificial intelligence in 2015 (the church was dissolved in 2020). Even some practitioners of more traditional faiths have begun incorporating AI, including robots that dole out blessings and advice.

Optimistically, its possible that some people could find real comfort and wisdom in the answers provided by artificial intelligence. Religious ideas could also guide the development of AI, and perhaps, make the technology ethical. But at the same time, there are real concerns that come with thinking about AI as anything more than technology created by humans.

I recently spoke to Midson about these concerns. We not only run the risk of glamorizing AI, and losing sight of its very real flaws, he told me, but also of enabling Silicon Valleys effort to hype up a technology thats still far less sophisticated than it appears. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Lets start with the big story that came out of Google a few weeks ago. How common is it that someone with religious views believes that AI or technology has a soul, or that its something more than just technology?

While this story sounds really surprising the idea of religion and technology coming together the early history of these machines and religion actually makes this idea of religious motives in computers and machines a lot more common.

If we go back into the Middle Ages, the medieval period, there were automata, which were basically self-moving devices. Theres one particular automata, a mechanical monk, that was particularly designed to encourage people to reflect on the intricacies of Gods creation. Its movement was designed to call upon that religious reverence. At the time, the world was seen as an intricate mechanism, and God as the big clockwork designer.

Jumping from the mechanical monk to a different type of mechanical monk: Very recently, a German church in Hesse and Nassau made BlessU-2 to commemorate the 500-year anniversary of the Reformation. BlessU-2 was basically a glorified cash machine that would dispense blessings and move its arms and have this big, religious, ritualized kind of thing. There were a lot of mixed reactions to it. One in particular, was an old woman who was saying that, actually, a blessing that she got from this robot was really meaningful. It was a particular one that had significance to her, and she was saying, Well, actually, somethings going on here, something that I cant explain.

In the world of Silicon Valley and tech spaces, what kinds of other similar claims have popped up?

For some people, particularly in Silicon Valley, theres a lot of hype and money that can get attached to grandiose claims like, My AI is conscious. It brings a lot of attention. It activates a lot of peoples imaginations precisely because religion tends to go beyond what we can explain. Its that supernatural attachment.

Theres a lot of people that will willingly fan the flames of these conversations in order to sustain the hype. I think one of the things that can be quite dangerous is where that hype isnt kept in check.

Every so often, Ill be talking with Alexa or Siri and ask some big life questions. For instance, if you ask Siri if God is real, the bot will respond: Its all a mystery to me. There was also this recent example of a journalist asking GPT-3, the language model created by the AI research lab OpenAI, about Judaism and seeing how good its answers could be. Sometimes the answers from these machines seem really inane, but other times they seem really wise. Why is that?

Joseph Weizenbaum designed Eliza, the worlds first chatbot. Weizenbaum did some experiments with Eliza, which was just a rudimentary chatbot, a language processing software. Eliza was designed to emulate a Rogerian psychotherapist, so your average counselor, basically. Weizenbaum didnt tell participants that they were going to be talking to a machine, but they were told, youre going to be interacting through a computer with a therapist. People would say, Im feeling quite sad about my family and then Eliza would pick up on the word family. It would pick up on certain parts of the sentence, and then almost throw it back as a question. Because thats what we expect from a therapist; theres no meaning that we expect from them. It is that reflective screen, where a computer doesnt need to understand what its saying to convince us that its doing its job as a therapist.

Weve got a lot more complex AI software, software that can contextualize words in sentences. Googles LaMDA technology has a lot of sophistication. Its not just looking for a simple word in the sentence. It can contextually locate words in different kinds of structures and settings. So it gives you the impression that it knows what its talking about. One of the key sticking points around conversations around chatbots is, how much does the interlocutor the machine that were talking to genuinely understand what is being said?

Are there examples of bots that dont provide particularly good answers?

Theres a lot of caution about what these machines do and dont do. Its all about how they convince you that they understand and those kinds of things. Noel Sharkey is a prominent theorist in this field. He really does not like these robots that convince you that they can do more than they actually can do. He calls them show bots. One of the main examples that he uses of the show bots is Sophia, the robot which has been given honorary citizenship status in Saudi Arabia. This is more than a basic chatbot because it is in a robot body. You can clearly tell that Sophia is a robot, for no other reason than the fact that the back of its head is a transparent casing, and you can see all the wires and things.

For Sharkey, all of this is just an illusion. This is just smoke and mirrors. Sophia doesnt actually warrant personhood status by any stretch of the imagination. It doesnt understand what its saying. It doesnt have hopes, dreams, feelings, or anything that would make it as human as it might appear. The fact is, duping people is problematic. It has a lot of swing-and-miss phrases. It sometimes malfunctions, or says questionable, eyebrow-raising things. But even where it is at its most transparent, we are still going along with some level of illusion.

Theres a lot of times when robots have that Its a puppet on a string thing. Its not doing as many independent things as we think it is. Weve also had robots going to testimonials. Pepper the robot went to a government testimonial about AI. It was a House of Lords evidence hearing session, and it sounded like Pepper was speaking for himself, saying all the things. It was all pre-programmed, and that wasnt entirely transparent to everyone. And again, its that misapprehension. Its managing the hype that I think is the big concern.

It kind of reminds me of that scene from The Wizard of Oz where the real wizard is finally revealed. How does the conversation around whether or not AI is sentient relate to the other important discussions happening about AI right now?

Microsoft Tay was another chatbot that was sent out into Twitter and had a machine algorithm where it would learn from its interaction with people in the Twittersphere. Trouble is, Tay was trolled and within 16 hours had to be pulled from Twitter because it was misogynistic, homophobic, and racist.

How these robots whether sentient or not are made very much in our image is another huge set of ethical issues. A lot of algorithms will be trained on datasets that are entirely human. They speak of our history, of our interactions, and theyre inherently biased. There are demonstrations of algorithms that are biased on the basis of race.

The question of sentience? I can see it as a bit of a red herring, but actually, its also tied into how we make machines in our image and what we do with that image.

Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, two prominent AI ethics researchers, raised this concern before they were both fired by Google: by thinking about the sentience discussion and the AI as a freestanding thing, we might miss the fact that the AI is created by humans.

We almost see the machine in a certain way, as detached, or even kind of God-like, in some ways. Going back to that black box: Theres this thing that we dont understand, its kind of religious-like, its amazing, its got incredible potential. If we watch all these adverts about these technologies, its going to save us. But if we see it in that kind of detached way, if we see it as kind of God-like, what does that encourage for us?

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Blake Lemoine, Google, and searching for souls in the algorithm - Vox.com

Joint Solutions with IBM, Intezer, and Swimlane Broadens Singularity Marketplace Use Cases

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 22, 2022--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SentinelOne (NYSE: S), an autonomous cybersecurity platform company, today announced integrations with IBM, Swimlane, and Intezer, increasing use case offerings available via SentinelOnes Singularity Marketplace. The new integrations cover security information and event management (SIEM), security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), and malware analysis.

"SentinelOne is committed to helping customers defend themselves from threats in the manner that best fits their workflows," said Ruby Sharma, Head of Technology Partnerships, SentinelOne. "We continuously partner with leading and innovative cybersecurity vendors to expand the offerings available via the Singularity platform. We are excited about our new integrations with IBM, Swimlane, and Intezer which give customers the optionality they seek in running their cybersecurity programs."

Streamlined Detection and Response Workflows with IBMWith a seamless API integration between SentinelOne Singularity XDR and IBM Security QRadar SIEM and SOAR, the integration consolidates visibility across SentinelOne managed endpoints, cloud workloads, identities, and additional SOC tools, incorporating SentinelOne context for automated detection and response. SentinelOne filters its context-rich detections through IBMs QRadar SIEM for correlation, triage, and investigation. If an alert is deemed actionable in QRadar SIEM, the incident is escalated to QRadar SOAR where security analysts can begin incident remediation and response. The joint solution allows IBM customers to maximize SOC operations through unified investigations, enhanced visibility, and intelligent automation across incident response workflows.

"The Singularity XDR and QRadar integration doubles down on the commitment to an open ecosystem, simplifying SOC operations and delivering on a modern approach to threat management," said Robert Dibattista, Director of Product Management, IBM. "Were excited to see the continued successes of this partnership, and more importantly, the value our clients can derive."

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Multiply SecOps Workforce with Swimlanes Robust Low-Code AutomationThe SentinelOne integration with Swimlane increases visibility and triage accuracy, reduces alert fatigue, and accelerates mean-time-to-respond. It leverages SentinelOne Singularity XDR APIs in order for Swimlane to trigger low-code automation playbooks, case management processes, and populate modular dashboards or reports. Swimlane combines SentinelOnes telemetry sources with human data into a single system of record. This joint solution provides centralized case management, automated incident enrichment, and alert remediation.

"To keep pace with the constantly expanding attack surface, overburdened security teams need solutions that extend their visibility and response capabilities," said Mike Kay, Sr. Vice President of Business Development, Swimlane. "Swimlane and SentinelOnes partnership delivers a solution to these challenges by combining SentinelOnes dynamic endpoint visibility and deep correlation with Swimlanes low-code automation playbooks, case management, dashboards, and reporting. Together, we are able to help customers reduce silos and gain a system of record that demonstrates the business value of security programs."

Accelerate Alert Triage and Automate Malware Analysis with IntezerSentinelOne and Intezer combine to automatically triage incidents and provide advanced malware analysis verdicts, lessening the load on busy security teams. When SentinelOne detects a malicious activity, customers now have the option to automatically share alert data with Intezer for deep analysis. Intezers analysis is returned to SentinelOne for consolidated visibility and mitigation.

"Too many teams face challenges hiring and retaining skilled security professionals," said Itai Tevet, CEO and Co-founder, Intezer. "However, they can feel empowered by introducing more automation into their workflows for alert triage, response, and threat hunting with Intezers integration that combines seamlessly with SentinelOnes Singularity platform."

All integrations are available via SentinelOnes Singularity Marketplace. For more information visit http://www.sentinelone.com.

About SentinelOneSentinelOnes cybersecurity solution encompasses AI-powered prevention, detection, response and hunting across endpoints, containers, cloud workloads, and IoT devices in a single autonomous XDR platform.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220622005350/en/

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In 2020, OpenAIs machine learning algorithm GPT-3 blew people away when, after ingesting billions of words scraped from the internet, it began spitting out well-crafted sentences. This year, DALL-E 2, a cousin of GPT-3 trained on text and images, caused a similar stir online when it began whipping up surreal images of astronauts riding horses and, more recently, crafting weird, photorealistic faces of people that dont exist.

Now, the company says its latest AI has learned to play Minecraft after watching some 70,000 hours of video showing people playing the game on YouTube.

Compared to numerous prior Minecraft algorithms which operate in much simpler sandbox versions of the game, the new AI plays in the same environment as humans, using standard keyboard-and-mouse commands.

In a blog post and preprint detailing the work, the OpenAI team say that, out of the box, the algorithm learned basic skills, like chopping down trees, making planks, and building crafting tables. They also observed it swimming, hunting, cooking, and pillar jumping.

To the best of our knowledge, there is no published work that operates in the full, unmodified human action space, which includes drag-and-drop inventory management and item crafting, the authors wrote in their paper.

With fine-tuningthat is, training the model on a more focused data setthey found the algorithm more reliably performed all of these tasks, but also began to advance its technological prowess by fabricating wooden and stone tools and building basic shelters, exploring villages, and raiding chests.

After further fine-tuning with reinforcement learning, it learned to build a diamond pickaxea skill that takes human players some 20 minutes and 24,000 actions to accomplish.

This is a notable result. AI has long struggled with Minecrafts wide-open gameplay. Games like chess and Go, which AIs already mastered, have clear objectives, and progress toward those objectives can be measured. To conquer Go, researchers used reinforcement learning, where an algorithm is given a goal and rewarded for progress toward that goal. Minecraft, on the other hand, has any number of possible objectives, progress is less linear, and deep reinforcement learning algorithms are usually left spinning their wheels.

In the 2019 MineRL Minecraft competition for AI developers, for example, none of the 660 submissions achieved the competitions relatively simple goal of mining diamonds.

Its worth noting that to reward creativity and show that throwing computing power at a problem isnt always the answer, the MineRL organizers placed strict limits on participants: they were allowed one NVIDIA GPU and 1,000 hours of recorded gameplay. Though the contestants performed admirably, the OpenAI result, achieved with more data and 720 NVIDIA GPUs, seems to show computing power still has its benefits.

With its video pre-training (VPT) algorithm for Minecraft, OpenAI returned to the approach its used with GPT-3 and DALL-E: pre-training an algorithm on a towering data set of human-created content. But the algorithms success wasnt enabled by computing power or data alone. Training a Minecraft AI on that much video wasnt practical before.

Raw video footage isnt as useful for behavioral AIs as it is for content generators like GPT-3 and DALL-E. It shows what people are doing, but it doesnt explain how theyre doing it. For the algorithm to link video to actions, it needs labels. A video frame showing a players collection of objects, for example, would need to be labeled inventory alongside the command key E which is used to open the inventory.

Labeling every frame in 70,000 hours of video would beinsane. So, the team paid Upwork contractors to record and label basic Minecraft skills. They used 2,000 hours of this video to teach a second algorithm how to label Minecraft videos, and that algorithm, IDM, annotated all 70,000 hours of YouTube footage. (The team says IDM was over 90 percent accurate when labeling keyboard and mouse commands.)

This approach of humans training a data-labeling algorithm to unlock behavioral data sets online may help AI learn other skills too. VPT paves the path toward allowing agents to learn to act by watching the vast numbers of videos on the internet, the researcher wrote. Beyond Minecraft, OpenAI thinks VPT can bring new real-world applications, like algorithms that operate computers at a prompt (imagine, for instance, asking your laptop to find a document and email it to your boss).

Much to the chagrin of the MineRL competition organizers perhaps, the results do seem to show that computing power and resources still move the needle on the most advanced AI.

Never mind the cost of computing, OpenAI said the Upwork contractors alone cost $160,000. Though to be fair, manually labeling the whole data set wouldve run into the millions and taken considerable time to complete. And while the computing power wasnt negligible, the model was actually quite small. VPTs hundreds of millions of parameters are orders of magnitude less than GPT-3s hundreds of billions.

Still, the drive to find clever new approaches that use less data and computing is valid. A kid can learn Minecraft basics by watching one or two videos. Todays AI requires far more to learn even simple skills. Making AI more efficient is a big, worthy challenge.

In any case, OpenAI is in a sharing mood this time. The researchers say VPT isnt without risktheyve strictly controlled access to algorithms like GPT-3 and DALL-E partly to limit misusebut the risk is minimal for now. Theyve open sourced the data, environment, and algorithm and are partnering with MineRL. This years contestants are free to use, modify, and fine-tune the latest in Minecraft AI.

Chances are good theyll make it well past mining diamonds this time around.

Image Credit: SIMON LEE / Unsplash

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OpenAI's New AI Learned to Play Minecraft by Watching 70000 Hours of YouTube - Singularity Hub