Caltech isn’t the only organization that has become interested in solar power stations. The Chinese government is planning a 2028 mission to demonstrate the technology in low Earth orbit. And last November, science ministers in the E.U. greenlit Solaris, a joint project between the European Space Agency (ESA) and aerospace company Airbus to look into the possibility of building gigantic solar power stations in geostationary orbit over Europe. (Whether intentional or not, the linkage to the world of mid-century sci-fi remains, with the project sharing the title of Stanislaw Lem’s classic 1961 novel.)

 

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https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Solar+Energy

 

Read the full article at: time.com

After months of anticipation, OpenAI has released a powerful new image- and text-understanding AI model, GPT-4, that the company calls “the latest milestone in its effort in scaling up deep learning.”

GPT-4 is available today via OpenAI’s API with a waitlist and in ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI’s premium plan for ChatGPT, its viral AI-powered chatbot.

Read the full article at: techcrunch.com

The metaverse continues to not only capture the attention of various international organizations but also attract a high amount of investment dollars and act as a catalyst for the entrepreneurship ecosystem. While some experts consider it a concept and others see it as a movement or escape, the CAGR and market size it is estimated to reach clearly signal it to be a product and a service poised to disrupt the human-computer experience as we know it. The metaverse global market, which was valued at $22.79 billion in 2021, is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 39.8% from 2022 to 2030.

 

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Read the full article at: www.forbes.com

OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E and ChatGPT, has released a free tool that it says is meant to “distinguish between text written by a human and text written by AIs.” It warns the classifier is “not fully reliable” in a press release and “should not be used as a primary decision-making tool.” According to OpenAI, it can be useful in trying to determine whether someone is trying to pass off generated text as something that was written by a person.

The tool, known as a classifier, is relatively simple, though you will have to have a free OpenAI account to use it. You just paste text into a box, click a button, and it’ll tell you whether it thinks the text is very unlikely, unlikely, unclear if it is, possibly, or likely AI-generated.

 

 
 

Read the full article at: www.theverge.com

The difference we have with ChatGPT is that it doesn’t so much present a threat to the university experience, but rather directly into the heart of the purpose of a university education – its ability to ‘teach you how to think’. There have been shadows of this in the past, for instance the hostility towards Wikipedia (Coomer 2013), the emergence of essay mills, not to mention simple, now common place tools such as spell checkers and calculators. I remember vividly a very angry professor in the early 2000s telling me that reading lists with hyperlinks would make students baby birds, with wide open mouths expecting to be spoon fed. We’ve pretty much moved through all those advancements in technology and realised their benefits, but this one, I would argue, is different. Not because it does not have its benefits, but because of the sheer volume and scale of what’s coming will be meaningfully different and ultimately challenge the foundations upon which we measure that ability to think – university assessment.

 

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https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=ChatGPT

 

https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=AI

 

https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Ethics

 

Read the full article at: katelindsayblogs.com

On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person’s voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker’s emotional tone.

Its creators speculate that VALL-E could be used for high-quality text-to-speech applications, speech editing where a recording of a person could be edited and changed from a text transcript (making them say something they originally didn’t), and audio content creation when combined with other generative AI models like GPT-3.

 

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https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=AI

 

https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Ethics

 

 

Read the full article at: arstechnica.com

Most Metaverse business projects will be dead by 2025

McKinsey forecasts market value of $5 trillion by 2030, Citi says up to $13 trillion, but Canalys doesn’t agree

CANALYS CHANNELS FORUM The metaverse is a solution looking for a B2B problem – that problem being how to help Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg drum up billions of dollars in revenues – and it’s going to fail in the not-too-distant future.

That is if you believe the good folk at Canalys, who are seemingly already buffing a gravestone for Zuck’s version of the internet that we recently pointed out nobody really wants.

“Is the metaverse the next digital frontier or an overhyped money pit?” asked Matthew Ball, chief analyst at Canalys, at the company’s Channels Forum in Barcelona.

“Tens of billions of dollars have already been invested, costs and delays to Meta’s own progress is a barometer.

 

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https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Metaverse

 

Read the full article at: www.theregister.com

As a platform company, our approach to workplace productivity and collaboration is to ensure the software experiences we deliver can benefit users on all their favorite devices. In that spirit, today we are announcing several ways we are partnering with Meta to provide customers with more choice and security as they venture into the metaverse.

First, we are bringing Mesh for Microsoft Teams to Meta Quest devices. Mesh for Teams builds on years of research and Microsoft Cloud innovation, from Azure Digital Twins to Dynamics 365 Remote Assist and Teams video meetings. It is designed to help people gather virtually in the place where work happens on any device, including smartphones, laptops and mixed-reality headsets. Mesh for Teams with Meta Quest Pro and Meta Quest 2 devices will enable people to connect and collaborate as though they are together in person.

 

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https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Metaverse

 

Read the full article at: blogs.microsoft.com

The Register has reported from Gartner’s Symposium event in Australia, where the intraverse was described as, “an interactive space that melds an intranet and a metaverse”.

Gartner reportedly encouraged attendees to not “think of a metaverse as a single thing to build”, but instead “a collection of techs such as augmented reality to be used as a training or collaboration environment, or a way to add AI avatars as a customer service option”.

 

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https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Metaverse

 

 

Read the full article at: www.techradar.com

A new type of cancer therapy that uses a common virus to infect and destroy harmful cells is showing big promise in early human trials, say UK scientists.

One patient’s cancer vanished, while others saw their tumours shrink.

The drug is a weakened form of the cold sore virus – herpes simplex – that has been modified to kill tumours.

Larger and longer studies will be needed, but experts say the injection might ultimately offer a lifeline to more people with advanced cancers.

 

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https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Cancer

 

https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Research

 

Read the full article at: www.bbc.com