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Moving quickly and carefully in two layers of gloves, Florian Krauss sets a cube of ice into a gold-plated cylinder that glows red in the light of the aiming laser. He steps back to admire the machine, covered with wires and gauges, that turns polar ice into climate data.

If this were a real slice of precious million-year-old ice from Antarctica and not just a test cube, he’d next seal the extraction vessel under a vacuum and power on the 150-megawatt main laser, slowly causing the entire ice sample to sublimate directly into gas. For Krauss, a PhD student at the University of Bern in Switzerland, this would unlock its secrets, exposing the concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide trapped within.

To better understand the role atmospheric carbon dioxide plays in Earth’s climate cycles, scientists have long turned to ice cores drilled in Antarctica, where snow layers accumulate and compact over hundreds of thousands of years, trapping samples of ancient air in a lattice of bubbles that serve as tiny time capsules. By analyzing those bubbles and the ice’s other contents, like dust and water isotopes, scientists can connect greenhouse-gas concentrations with temperatures going back 800,000 years.

Hubertus and Florian in front of LISE 1
Fischer (right) and Krauss with their LISE apparatus.COURTESY PHOTO

Europe’s Beyond EPICA (European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) initiative, now in its third year, hopes to eventually retrieve the oldest core yet, dating back 1.5 million years. This would extend the climate record all the way back to the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, a mysterious period that marked a major change in the frequency of Earth’s climatic oscillations—cycles of repeating glacial and warm periods.

Successfully drilling a core that old—a years-long endeavor—might be the easy part. Next, scientists must painstakingly free the trapped air from that ice. Krauss and his colleagues are developing an innovative new way to do that.

“We’re not interested in the ice itself—we’re just interested in the air samples included, so we needed to find a new way to extract the air from the ice,” he says.

Melting isn’t an option because carbon dioxide easily dissolves into water. Traditionally, scientists have used mechanical extraction methods, grinding up samples of individual layers of ice to free the air. But grinding wouldn’t be effective for the Beyond EPICA ice in the university’s storage freezer, which is kept at 50 °C below zero. The oldest ice at the very bottom of the core will be so compressed, and the individual annual layers so thin, that bubbles won’t be visible—they’ll have been pressed into the lattice of ice crystals, forming a new phase called clathrate.

“At the very bottom, we expect 20,000 years of climate history compressed in only one meter of ice,” says Hubertus Fischer, head of the past climate and ice core science group at Bern. That’s a hundredth the thickness of any existing ice core record.

The new method Krauss and Fischer are developing is called deepSLice. (A pizza menu is taped to the side of the device right under the laser warning labels, a gift from a pizzeria in Australia with the same name.) DeepSLice has two parts. The Laser-Induced Sublimation Extraction Device, or LISE, fills half a room in the team’s lab space. LISE aims a near-infrared laser continuously at a 10-centimeter slice of ice core so that it turns directly from solid to gas under extremely low pressure and temperature. The sublimated gas then freezes into six metal dip tubes cooled to 15 K (-258 °C), each containing the air from one centimeter of ice core. Finally the samples are loaded into a custom-made absorption spectrometer based on quantum cascade laser technology, which shoots photons through the gas sample to measure concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide simultaneously. Another big advantage of this system is that it takes a lot less ice (and work) than the old method of analysis, in which scientists measured methane by melting ice (it doesn’t dissolve into water) and measured carbon dioxide by grinding ice.

DeepSLice offers “a unique capability that nobody else has,” says Christo Buizert,

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By: Christian Elliott
Title: The ice cores that will let us look 1.5 million years into the past
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/21/1077657/ice-core-earth-history/
Published Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

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Finding value in generative AI for financial services

UBS report cover

With tools such as ChatGPT, DALLE-2, and CodeStarter, generative AI has captured the public imagination in 2023. Unlike past technologies that have come and gone—think metaverse—this latest one looks set to stay. OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is perhaps the best-known generative AI tool. It reached 100 million monthly active users in just two months after launch, surpassing even TikTok and Instagram in adoption speed, becoming the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

UBS report cover 1

According to a McKinsey report, generative AI could add $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually in value to the global economy. The banking industry was highlighted as among sectors that could see the biggest impact (as a percentage of their revenues) from generative AI. The technology “could deliver value equal to an additional $200 billion to $340 billion annually if the use cases were fully implemented,” says the report.

For businesses from every sector, the current challenge is to separate the hype that accompanies any new technology from the real and lasting value it may bring. This is a pressing issue for firms in financial services. The industry’s already extensive—and growing—use of digital tools makes it particularly likely to be affected by technology advances. This MIT Technology Review Insights report examines the early impact of generative AI within the financial sector, where it is starting to be applied, and the barriers that need to be overcome in the long run for its successful deployment.

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT

The main findings of this report are as follows:

Corporate deployment of generative AI in financial services is still largely nascent. The most active use cases revolve around cutting costs by freeing employees from low-value, repetitive work. Companies have begun deploying generative AI tools to automate time-consuming, tedious jobs, which previously required humans to assess unstructured information.
UBS web ready 5
There is extensive experimentation on potentially more disruptive tools, but signs of commercial deployment remain rare. Academics and banks are examining how generative AI could help in impactful areas including asset selection, improved simulations, and better understanding of asset correlation and tail risk—the probability that the asset performs far below or far above its average past performance. So far, however, a range of practical and regulatory challenges are impeding their commercial use.Legacy technology and talent shortages may slow adoption of generative AI tools, but only temporarily. Many financial services companies, especially large banks and insurers, still have substantial, aging information technology and data structures, potentially unfit for the use of modern applications. In recent years, however, the problem has eased with widespread digitalization and may continue to do so. As is the case with any new technology, talent with expertise specifically in generative AI is in short supply across the economy. For now, financial services companies appear to be training staff rather than bidding to recruit from a sparse specialist pool. That said, the difficulty in finding AI talent is already starting to ebb, a process that would mirror those seen with the rise of cloud and other new technologies.
UBS web ready 2
More difficult to overcome may be weaknesses in the technology

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By: MIT Technology Review Insights
Title: Finding value in generative AI for financial services
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/26/1083841/finding-value-in-generative-ai-for-financial-services/
Published Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2023 01:00:00 +0000

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The Download: unpacking OpenAI Q* hype, and X’s financial woes

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This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Unpacking the hype around OpenAI’s rumored new Q* model

Ever since last week’s dramatic events at OpenAI, the rumor mill has been in overdrive about why the company’s board tried to oust CEO Sam Altman.

While we still don’t know all the details, there have been reports that researchers at OpenAI had made a “breakthrough” in AI that alarmed staff members. The claim is that they came up with a new way to make powerful AI systems and had created a new model, called Q* (pronounced Q star), that was able to perform grade-school level math.

Some at OpenAI reportedly believe this could be a breakthrough in the company’s quest to build artificial general intelligence, a much-hyped concept of an AI system that is smarter than humans.

So what’s actually going on? And why is grade-school math such a big deal? Our senior AI reporter Melissa Heikkilä called some experts to find out how big of a deal any such breakthrough would really be. Here’s what they had to say.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things AI. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 X is hemorrhaging millions in advertising revenue 
Internal documents show the company is in an even worse position than previously thought. (NYT $)
 Misinformation ‘super-spreaders’ on X are reportedly eligible for payouts from its ad revenue sharing program. (The Verge)
It’s not just you: tech billionaires really are becoming more unbearable. (The Guardian)

2 The brakes seem to now be off on AI development 
📈
With Sam Altman’s return to OpenAI, the ‘accelerationists’ have come out on top. (WSJ $)
Inside the mind of OpenAI’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever. (MIT Technology Review)

3 How Norway got heat pumps into two-thirds of its households
Mostly by making it the cheaper choice for people. (The Guardian)
Everything you need to know about the wild world of heat pumps. (MIT Technology Review)

4 How your social media feeds shape how you see the Israel-Gaza war
Masses of content are being pumped out, rarely with any nuance or historical understanding. (BBC)
China tried to keep kids off social media. Now the elderly are hooked. (Wired $)

5 US regulators have surprisingly little scope to enforce Amazon’s safety rules
As demonstrated by the measly $7,000 fine issued by Indiana after a worker was killed by warehouse machinery. (WP $)

6 How Ukraine is using advanced technologies on the battlefield 
The Pentagon is using the conflict as a testbed for some of the 800-odd AI-based projects it has in progress. (AP $)
Why business is booming for military AI startups. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Shein is trying to overhaul its image, with limited success
Its products seem too cheap to be ethically sourced—and it doesn’t take kindly to people pointing that out. (The Verge)
 Why my bittersweet relationship with Shein had to end. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Every app can be a dating app now 
💑
As people turn their backs on the traditional apps, they’re finding love in places like Yelp, Duolingo and Strava. (WSJ $)
+ Job sharing apps are also becoming more popular. (BBC)

9 People can’t get enough of work livestreams on TikTok
It’s mostly about the weirdly hypnotic quality of watching people doing tasks like manicures or frying eggs. (The Atlantic $)

10 A handy guide to time travel in the movies
Whether you prioritize scientific accuracy or entertainment value, this chart has got you covered. (Ars Technica)

Quote of the day

“It’s in the AI industry’s interest to make people think that only the big players can do this—but it’s not true.”

—Ed Newton-Rex, who just resigned as VP of audio at Stability.AI, says the idea that generative AI models can only be built by scraping artists’ work is a myth in an interview with The Next Web. 

The big story

The YouTube baker fighting back against deadly “craft hacks”

rainbow glue coming out of a hotglue gun onto a toothbrush, surrounded by caution tape
STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | ENVATO, GETTY

September 2022

Ann Reardon is probably the last person you’d

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By: Charlotte Jee
Title: The Download: unpacking OpenAI Q* hype, and X’s financial woes
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/27/1083894/the-download-openai-q-hype-x-financial-woes/
Published Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2023 13:11:00 +0000

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The Download: OpenAI’s wild year, and tech’s cult of personality

This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Inside OpenAI’s wild year

Few companies can say they’ve had more of a rollercoaster year than OpenAI. At the beginning of 2023, the world’s hottest AI startup was riding high on the success of its ChatGPT chatbot. Now, it’s dusting itself off from an attempted coup which saw Sam Altman ousted and reinstated as the company’s CEO within a few short days.

Our AI experts have been following OpenAI’s every move throughout the year, often with exclusive access to the people building the revolutionary products and systems. Check out just some of the highlights from the past year—and what we think is coming next.

+ ChatGPT is everywhere. Here’s where it came from. While ChatGPT may have looked like an overnight sensation, it was actually built on decades of research.

+ Back in April, our senior AI editor Will Douglas Heaven had exclusive conversations with four OpenAI insiders to learn more about how they built the viral chatbot.

+ One of the year’s hottest topics was how ChatGPT was already changing education—from cutting corners for science homework, to writing entire theses. But some teachers believe that generative AI could actually make learning better. (Bonus: check out high school senior Rohan Mehta’s robust defense of ChatGPT in the classroom)

+ OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it. The company’s AI services may be breaking data protection laws, and there is no resolution in sight. Read the full story.

+ Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, was one of the key executives to turn against and try to overthrow CEO Sam Altman in the recent OpenAI revolt. When Will Douglas Heaven met him earlier this year, Sutskever told him about his new priority—figuring out how to stop an artificial superintelligence from going rogue. Read the full story.

+ What’s next for OpenAI. Read our timeline of how the recent drama unfolded, and what it means for the AI industry at large. Read the full story.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 X and OpenAI are cults of personality
While both companies claim to be reshaping the world, they each really answer to one man. (WP $)
We shouldn’t miss the chance to hold OpenAI accountable. (FT $)
Wall Street still sees an opportunity to make money, though. (Motherboard)
AI is a real capitalist’s game these days. (NYT $)

2 Pro-China foreign influencers are Beijing’s latest propaganda tool
Vloggers based in the US are doing the Chinese government’s job for them. (FT $)
China’s young workers are embracing the digital nomad dream. (Reuters)

3 No, AI isn’t human
It’s important to keep reminding ourselves that no matter how convincingly its systems mimic us, they aren’t rational beings. (Vox)
We’re living in the age of uncensored AI. (The Atlantic $)
AI just beat a human test for creativity. What does that even mean? (MIT Technology Review)

4 Australia doesn’t exist
That’s according to Microsoft’s Bing search results, fueled by conspiracy theories. (The Guardian)

5 India’s powerful influencers could sway its elections 
Marketing firms are racing to hire the social media personalities with the biggest followings. (Wired $)

6 Keep an eye on these retail bots this Black Friday
Some are a lot more helpful than others. (WSJ $)

7 Crypto pig butchering schemes are a billion-dollar industry 
But we still know next to nothing about the criminals orchestrating them. (Reuters)
Crypto’s biggest beasts are falling, one by one. (NY Mag $)
The involuntary criminals behind pig-butchering scams. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Social media these days is seriously depressing
Negative news doesn’t just affect us—it changes society, too. (Wired $)
It’s not just you—Zoom meetings really are exhausting. (IEEE Spectrum)
How to log off. (MIT Technology Review)

9 Your messy bedroom’s days are numbered
This laundry-grasping robot is ready to pick up the slack—and stinky socks. (New Scientist $)

10 It’s time to read Napoleon’s sprawling Wikipedia page
Because Ridley Scott, his latest biographer, certainly won’t have. (Slate $)
The new biopic is a surprising lol-fest. (The Atlantic $)

Quote of the day

“When Sam didn’t have a home, Microsoft gave him one without hesitation — and when the whole company didn’t have a home, Microsoft gave them one.”

—Barry Briggs, a former Microsoft executive, tells the Financial Times how Satya Nadella’s savvy handling of the OpenAI drama is likely to further cement the relationship between the two companies.

The big story

California’s coming offshore wind boom faces big engineering hurdles

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By: Rhiannon Williams
Title: The Download: OpenAI’s wild year, and tech’s cult of personality
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/24/1083869/the-download-openais-wild-year-and-techs-cult-of-personality/
Published Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2023 13:10:00 +0000

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