Cutaway view of a fictional space colony concept painted by artist Rick Guidice as part of a NASA art program in the 1970s. This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Elon Musk once joked: "I would like to die on Mars. Musk is, in fact, deadly serious about colonizing the Red Planet. Part of his motivation is the idea of having a "back-up" planet in case some future catastrophe renders the Earth uninhabitable. Musk has suggested that a million people may be calling Mars home by 2050 -- and he's hardly alone in his enthusiasm. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen believes the world can easily support 50 billion people, and more than that once we settle other planets. And Jeff Bezos has spoken of exploiting the resources of the moon and the asteroids to build giant space stations. "I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system," he has said. Not so fast, cautions science journalist Adam Becker.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a powerful approach for compressing a large model into a smaller, more efficient model, particularly beneficial for latency-sensitive applications like recommender systems. However, current KD research predominantly focuses on Computer Vision (CV) and NLP tasks, overlooking unique data characteristics and challenges inherent to recommender systems. This paper addresses these overlooked challenges, specifically: (1) mitigating data distribution shifts between teacher and student models, (2) efficiently identifying optimal teacher configurations within time and budgetary constraints, and (3) enabling computationally efficient and rapid sharing of teacher labels to support multiple students. We present a robust KD system developed and rigorously evaluated on multiple large-scale personalized video recommendation systems within Google. Our live experiment results demonstrate significant improvements in student model performance while ensuring consistent and reliable generation of high quality teacher labels from a continuous data stream of data.

While we still don't know all the details, there have been reports that researchers at OpenAI had made a "breakthrough" in AI that had alarmed staff members. Reuters and The Information both report that researchers had come 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. According to the people who spoke to Reuters, some at OpenAI believe this could be a milestone in the company's quest to build artificial general intelligence, a much-hyped concept referring to an AI system that is smarter than humans. The company declined to comment on Q*. Social media is full of speculation and excessive hype, so I called some experts to find out how big a deal any breakthrough in math and AI would really be.

Big models have greatly advanced AI's ability to understand, generate, and manipulate information and content, enabling numerous applications. However, as these models become increasingly integrated into everyday life, their inherent ethical values and potential biases pose unforeseen risks to society. This paper provides an overview of the risks and challenges associated with big models, surveys existing AI ethics guidelines, and examines the ethical implications arising from the limitations of these models. Taking a normative ethics perspective, we propose a reassessment of recent normative guidelines, highlighting the importance of collaborative efforts in academia to establish a unified and universal AI ethics framework. Furthermore, we investigate the moral inclinations of current mainstream LLMs using the Moral Foundation theory, analyze existing alignment algorithms, and outline the unique challenges encountered in aligning ethical values within them. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel conceptual paradigm for aligning the ethical values of big models and discuss promising research directions for alignment criteria, evaluation, and method, representing an initial step towards the interdisciplinary construction of the ethically aligned AI This paper is a modified English version of our Chinese paper https://crad.ict.ac.cn/cn/article/doi/10.7544/issn1000-1239.202330553, intended to help non-Chinese native speakers better understand our work.

In recent years, we've seen an influx of self-proclaimed "cozy games," video games explicitly designed to invoke good vibes. To help those who could use some help winding down, we've rounded up a selection of games that purposefully deemphasize fail states, violence, overwhelming grinds, intense competition and other aggressive urges, but aren't overly cute for the sake of it or so stripped-down that they're boring. This open-ended sim has you fix up a dilapidated farm and interact with nearby townsfolk. Apart from being one of our favorite couch co-op games, the farming life sim Stardew Valley is also notable for its relaxing qualities. It's a game that's willing to meet you at your pace: If you want to putter around your farm, casually chat up townsfolk, brew beer or fish for a few hours, you can.

There's a whole marketing industry out there trying to persuade the world to buy Australian lamb. But our latest international success story is a bit more digital – not to mention eldritch – than meaty. Cult of the Lamb, a video game about indoctrinating cute animals into your dark sect and then sacrificing them for greater power, has topped the sales charts on release (temporarily overthrowing the latest Spider-Man game on PC) and has hit more than a million units sold in a week, according to its publisher. "It's been pretty crazy!" says Julian Wilton, one of the three core members of the game's Melbourne- and UK-based developer, Massive Monster. Wilton first met fellow founders Jay Armstrong and James Pearmain on a forum dedicated to internet-based flash games over a decade ago.

There used to be a time where video games were sneered at and overlooked by the culturati as lowbrow schlock but games are, and always have been, a lively and responsive form of artistic expression. It's not always immediately clear when a game was made in Australia, which makes it a little harder to celebrate homegrown hits – which we should do, because we have a thriving community of developers who punch well above their weight. The Australian independent games scene is vibrant, dynamic and overdue an apology. As I have (graciously, selflessly) decided, we're all going to yank games from the declasse and appreciate them properly – so here are 10 great Australian-made games, all variously ruminative, charming, effervescent, sincere, generous, visceral, cheeky, and beautiful. Glad we have that sorted.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. I spent the latter half of last week in London for the Bafta Games Awards – a ceremony whose existence still seems to surprise people, despite the fact that they've been running in some form for 18 years. I suppose it doesn't help that the institution is literally called the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, but video games are a big deal at the UK's prestigious arts organisation, more so now than ever. It's never been a paid thing, though I have eaten a shameful number of cocktail sausages during jury deliberations.)

The peaceful, zen-like puzzle gameplay of Unpacking (the real game, that is) will soon be available to the PlayStation crowd. As Polygon says, Witch Beam and Humble Games have announced that Unpacking will be available on PS4 and PS5 this spring. The game is already available in digital form on Macs, Switch, Windows PCs and Xbox consoles. Unpacking was considered one of the stand-out games of 2021 precisely because it served as an antidote to the chaos and noise of the real world (and, we'd add, many other video games). All you do is unpack items as you settle into a new home -- and, ultimately, a new life.

Witch Beam was right, playing "Unpacking" is a Zen experience. Its soundtrack, a synthy mix of acoustic guitar and lofi beats by BAFTA award-winning composer Jeff van Dyck, sets the mood while you sort through the boxes at your own pace with no timers or scores to worry about. Between considering each item's worth and whether to keep it, carefully packing everything away to (hopefully) make the trip in one piece, wondering what you'll find in the next box, and inevitably lingering on the nostalgia one thing or the other kicks up, it's hard to do mindlessly. That duality -- the simple satisfaction of mechanically putting everything in its place alongside the more ambiguous emotions stirred up in the process -- is why "Unpacking's" story still feels compelling with minimal dialogue and exposition.