Thinking Machines Lab, led by a group of prominent former OpenAI researchers, is betting that fine-tuning cutting-edge models will be the next frontier in AI. Thinking Machines Lab, a heavily funded startup cofounded by prominent researchers from OpenAI, has revealed its first product--a tool called Tinker that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models. "We believe [Tinker] will help empower researchers and developers to experiment with models and will make frontier capabilities much more accessible to all people," said Mira Murati, cofounder and CEO of Thinking Machines, in an interview with WIRED ahead of the announcement. Big companies and academic labs already fine-tune open source AI models to create new variants that are optimized for specific tasks, like solving math problems, drafting legal agreements, or answering medical questions. Typically, this work involves acquiring and managing clusters of GPUs and using various software tools to ensure that large-scale training runs are stable and efficient.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham gives her take on the spending freeze on USAID on'The Ingraham Angle.' Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk's DOGE efforts to slash government waste and streamline the federal bureaucracy include the hiring of several up-and-coming young software engineers tasked with "modernizing federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity." Six young men between the ages of 19 and 24 -- Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger and Ethan Shaotran -- have taken up various roles furthering the DOGE agenda, according to a report from Wired. Bobba was part of the highly regarded Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology program at UC Berkeley and has held internships at the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund, Meta and Palantir. "Let me tell you something about Akash," Grata AI CEO Charis Zhang posted on X about Bobba in recent days. "During a project at Berkeley, I accidentally deleted our entire codebase 2 days before the deadline. Akash just stared at the screen, shrugged, and rewrote everything from scratch in one night -- better than before. We submitted early and got first in the class. I trust him with everything I own."

Add to this our culture's obsession with intelligent machines and you can see why more and more people are convinced these chatbots are more than simple software. Last year, an engineer at Google, Blake Lemoine, claimed that the company's own language model LaMDA was sentient (Google said the claim was "wholly unfounded"), and just this week, users of a chatbot app named Replika have mourned the loss of their AI companion after its ability to conduct erotic and romantic roleplay was removed. As Motherboard reported, many users were "devastated" by the change, having spent years building relationships with the bot. In all these cases, there is a deep sense of emotional attachment -- late-night conversations with AI buoyed by fantasy in a world where so much feeling is channeled through chat boxes.

Tesla is building a humanoid robot "sometime next year" called the Tesla Bot, announced at the company's AI Day event. The robot will use the same artificial intelligence that the electric car company uses for its vehicles, will be approximately 173 centimetres tall (5ft 8in), weigh around 57kg, and be built from "lightweight materials" with a display somewhere on its body to show information. Mr Musk says the robot is "intended to be friendly and navigate through a world built for humans" but will be built at a "mechanical level" so someone could "run away from it, and most likely overpower it." Tesla's website says the robot is general purpose for jobs that are "unsafe, repetitive or boring", such as going to a shop and picking up groceries. "Essentially, in the future, physical work will be a choice. If you want to do it, you can, but you won't need to do it", Mr Musk said.

The idea of AI has been around for decades. But recent advances have completely transformed what we can achieve with the technology. And as a result, many experts believe we're teetering on the edge of an AI revolution. This is fantastic news if you're struggling with really knotty problems like how to cure incurable diseases, or solve world hunger, or even design safer and faster ways of getting from A to B. Here, smart machines are already paving the way to doing things that would have been impossible without them. But there are downsides to creating machines that can think and act way faster than humans; and often in ways that we don't fully understand.

Pope Francis has urged Catholics to pray that artificial intelligence (AI) does not rebel against humankind. The pontiff, who made the appeal in his prayer intention for November, warned against rising inequality that could result from advanced robotics, and instead called for AI to work for everyone. "Artificial intelligence is at the heart of the epochal change we are experiencing," Francis said. "Robotics can make a better world possible if it is joined to the common good. "Indeed, if technological progress increases inequalities, it is not true progress.

At Landing AI, we are building next generation AI products and solutions to help transform traditional industries like manufacturing and agriculture. This is an ambitious goal that requires close collaboration between people from different disciplines, including product, machine learning engineers and software engineers. In this blog post, we talk with some of our software engineers, who play an important role in building and executing AI solutions, to get their perspectives on what a software engineer's work life is like at Landing AI. What is it like working as a SDE at Landing AI? What's your typical day look like? Pingyang: Besides designing and building various kinds of innovative systems and solutions, I have also been spending a lot of my time learning new things that I was not able to learn elsewhere. I got more opportunities to build tools and frameworks that I'm not allowed to touch or modify in big companies.

Elon Musk has revealed more details about his mysterious brain-computer interface startup, claiming it will allow people to hear sounds that were previously beyond their range. Neuralink's brain chip technology could also help restore movement to someone with a fully severed spinal cord, according to Musk. The SpaceX and Tesla boss founded Neuralink in 2016 but has only held one major public presentation about how its technology will actually work. The ultimate aim is to provide a direct connection between a brain and a computer, using a "sewing machine-like" device to stitch threads to an implanted brain chip. A research paper published last year in conjunction with the event explained how these threads would connect to a single USB-C cable to provide "full-bandwidth data streaming" to the brain.

Elon Musk is sounding the alarm that there is a strong possibility that humans will be overtaken by artificial intelligence within the next five years. The billionaire engineer, who co-founded the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI in 2015 and was an early investor in DeepMind, has often warned in recent years about the species-ending threat posed by advanced AI. "My assessment about why AI is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are. And this is hubris and obviously false," Musk told The New York Times. Musk added that the invaluable experience of working with different types of AI at Tesla has given him the confidence to say "that we're headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans, and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn't mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird."

Elon Musk has been sounding the alarm about the potentially dangerous, species-ending future of artificial intelligence for years. In 2016, the billionaire said human beings could become the equivalent of "house cats" to new AI overlords. He has since repeatedly called for regulation and caution when it comes to new AI technology. But of all the various AI projects in the works, none has Musk more worried than Google's DeepMind. "Just the nature of the AI that they're building is one that crushes all humans at all games," Musk told The New York Times in an interview.