The Data That Powers AI Is Disappearing Fast
Kevin Roose | The New York Times
“Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training AI models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an MIT-led research group. The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used AI training data sets, discovered an ’emerging crisis in consent,’ as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.”
How One Bad CrowdStrike Update Crashed the World’s Computers
Lily Hay Newman, Matt Burgess, and Andy Greenberg | Wired
“Only a handful of times in history has a single piece of code managed to instantly wreck computer systems worldwide. The Slammer worm of 2003. Russia’s Ukraine-targeted NotPetya cyberattack. North Korea’s self-spreading ransomware WannaCry. But the ongoing digital catastrophe that rocked the internet and IT infrastructure around the globe over the past 12 hours appears to have been triggered not by malicious code released by hackers, but by the software designed to stop them.”
Tiny Solar-Powered Drones Could Stay in the Air Forever
Matthew Sparkes | New Scientist
“A drone weighing just 4 grams is the smallest solar-powered aerial vehicle to fly yet, thanks to its unusual electrostatic motor and tiny solar panels that produce extremely high voltages. Although the hummingbird-sized prototype only operated for an hour, its makers say their approach could result in insect-sized drones that can stay in the air indefinitely.”
How Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Became Tech’s Steely Eyed AI Gambler
Karen Weise and Cade Metz | The New York Times
“Though it could be years before he knows if any of this truly pays off, Mr. Nadella sees the AI boom as an all-in moment for his company and the rest of the tech industry. He aims to make sure that Microsoft, which was slow to the dot-com boom and whiffed on smartphones, dominates this new technology.”
Chinese Nuclear Reactor Is Completely Meltdown-Proof
Alex Wilkins | New Scientist
“A large-scale nuclear power station in China is the first in the world to be completely impervious to dangerous meltdowns, even during a full loss of external power. …To test this [capability in the power station], which became commercially operational in December 2023, [Zhe] Dong and his team switched off both modules of HTR-PM as they were operating at full power, then measured and tracked how the temperature of different parts of the plant went down afterwards. They found that HTR-PM naturally cooled and reached a stable temperature within 35 hours after the power was removed.”
The AI-Powered Future of Coding Is Near
Will Knight | Wired
“I am by no means a skilled coder, but thanks to a free program called SWE-agent, I was just able to debug and fix a gnarly problem involving a misnamed file within different code repositories on the software-hosting site GitHub. I pointed SWE-agent at an issue on GitHub and watched as it went through the code and reasoned about what might be wrong. It correctly determined that the root cause of the bug was a line that pointed to the wrong location for a file, then navigated through the project, located the file, and amended the code so that everything ran properly.”
Balloons Will Surf Wind Currents to Track Wildfires
Sarah Scoles | MIT Technology Review
“Urban Sky aims to combine the advantages of satellites and aircraft by using relatively inexpensive high-altitude balloons that can fly above the fray—out of the way of airspace restrictions, other aircraft, and the fire itself. The system doesn’t put a human pilot at risk and has an infrared sensor system called HotSpot that provides a sharp, real-time picture, with pixels 3.5 meters across.”
Here’s the Real Reason AI Companies Are Slimming Down Their Models
Mark Sullivan | Fast Company
“OpenAI is one of a number of AI companies to develop a version of its best ‘foundation’ model that trades away some intelligence for some speed and affordability. Such a trade-off could let more developers power their apps with AI, and may open the door for more complex apps like autonomous agents in the future.”
Will Space-Based Solar Power Ever Make Sense?
Kat Friedrich | Ars Technica
“Is space-based solar power a costly, risky pipe dream? Or is it a viable way to combat climate change? Although beaming solar power from space to Earth could ultimately involve transmitting gigawatts, the process could be made surprisingly safe and cost-effective, according to experts from Space Solar, the European Space Agency, and the University of Glasgow. But we’re going to need to move well beyond demonstration hardware and solve a number of engineering challenges if we want to develop that potential.”
Image Credit: Edward Chou / Unsplash
Source: This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through July 20)
