The notoriously secretive Meta has set a milestone for transparency. The company this week offered the entire research community access to a fully-trained large language model (LLM). Named the Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT), the system mirrors the performance and size of OpenAI’s vaunted GPT-3 model. This mimicry is deliberate. While GPT-3 has a stunning ability to produce human-like text, it also has a powerful capacity for biases, bigotry, and disinformation. OPT’s creators said their syste
There’s plenty of column inches given to the environmental advantages of electric vehicles, like reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emission. But there’s a salty little secret often obscured by those who wax lyrical about EVs — the environmental impact of the lithium mined to make EV batteries. So I decided to take a deep dive into what it is, where it comes from, how it’s mined, its environmental impact, and what we can do to make it greener. And don’t worry — no geology degree is need
When a star explodes and dies in a supernova, it takes on a new life of sorts. Pulsars are the extremely rapidly rotating objects left over after massive stars have exhausted their fuel supply. They are extremely dense, with a mass similar to the Sun crammed into a region the size of Sydney. Pulsars emit beams of radio waves from their poles. As those beams sweep across Earth, we can detect rapid pulses as often as hundreds of times per second. With this knowledge, scientists are always on the l
When you think of an electric vehicle, chances are you’ll picture a car. But there’s a quiet revolution going on in transport. It turns out electrification can work wonders for almost all of our transport options, from electric bikes to motorbikes to buses to freight trains and even to tractors and heavy trucks. There will soon be no need to burn petrol and diesel in an internal combustion engine. This matters, because electric transport will be vital in our efforts to stem climate change. If al
Samsung just announced a new kind of storage solution for mobile devices called UFS 4.0. It’s the latest version of the Universal Flash Storage standard. The new version comes two years after UFS 3.1’s release, and will likely improve the overall speed and performance of upcoming phones and tablets. Before we look at its advantages over the previous versions, let’s run through some basics. What’s UFS? Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is a type of flash storage designed for mobile devices. Its speci
In a popular video, Youtuber GCP Grey makes the claim that autonomous vehicles (AVs) will solve traffic jams. Whilst the basic logic underlying his claim is accurate, it couldn’t be further removed from the truth because it utterly ignores externalities. As does this laughably inaccurate article from 2016 that claims we’ll only need 15-25% of our current number of cars after AV technology becomes widely adopted. GCP Grey’s claim is essentially that AVs can react faster than humans and communicat
This article was originally published on .cult by Luis Minvielle. .cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world. In the programming world, few aspects seem as inescapable as the infamous coding bootcamps. One way or another, you’ll hear about them: From scanning through your best friend’s resume to checking your LinkedIn feed, you’ll eventuall
Twitter debuted a new feature called Circle last night that might help you shitpost better. This function, available to select users on Android, iOS, and the web, will let you tweet stuff to a restricted audience of 150 people. This is very similar to Instagram’s Close Friends feature that allows you to share a Story to a select number of people. Prior to this feature’s announcement, you had to lock your account to share your tweets with just your followers. But now, you can ‘tune’ your audience
Sony’s WH-1000XM4 is one of the best noise-canceling headphones money can buy. So were its predecessors going back to the company’s OG premium noise-canceling headphone, the MDR-1000X. In other words, Sony has a pretty great streak going on, so I was excited to see leaks of the new WH-1000XM5 begin to pop up. Leaked images of the new headphones posted by The Walkman Blog show a design that departs significantly from Sony’s usual aesthetic for the series. Behold: Credit: The Walkman Blog Someone
The world of AI research is in shambles. From the academics prioritizing easy-to-monetize schemes over breaking novel ground, to the Silicon Valley elite using the threat of job loss to encourage corporate-friendly hypotheses, the system is a broken mess. And Google deserves a lion’s share of the blame. How it started There were approximately 85,000 research papers published globally on the subject of AI/ML in the year 2000. Fast-forward to 2021 and there were nearly twice as many published in t