Also on today’s menu:
Artificial Intelligence Suffers From Hallucinations
X-ing Out Of Twitter Hits A Roadblock
Vogtle Unit 3 Now In Commercial Operation
You may recall the storyline: Admiral James T. Kirk is ordered to take command of the USS Enterprise in the year 2273 for the first time since her historic five-year mission in order to stop a massive alien spacecraft that has destroyed three Klingon cruisers and the Federation’s Epsilon IX space station. It turns out that the “alien” spacecraft known as V’Ger actually is a self-evolved version of NASA’s Voyager probe seeking its creator.
Today, in the year 2023, we learn that NASA has lost contact with its Voyager 2 probe, launched in 1977 (two years before “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” was released). The probe is now more than 12.3 billion miles from earth, hurtling at an estimated speed of 34,390 mph through interstellar space.
Last month, NASA sent the wrong command to the spacecraft, tilting its antenna two degrees away from Earth, causing it to stop receiving commands and sending data — not far off from the fictional tale of the Voyager. However, NASA is hoping to resume communication when the probe is due to reset in October.
Artificial Intelligence Suffers From Hallucinations
Artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT are prone to spouting falsehoods, known as “hallucination, confabulation, or just plain making things up,” according to the Associated Press.
“I don’t think that there’s any model today that that doesn’t suffer from some hallucination,” said Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude 2. “They’re really just sort of designed to predict the next word, and so there will be some rate at which the model does that inaccurately.”
Emily Bender, a linguistics professor and director of the University of Washington’s Computational Linguistics Laboratory, said the problem is not fixable. “It’s inherent in the mismatch between the technology and the proposed use cases,” she said, referring to the way students are using AI to write papers and businesses are looking to chatbots to speed up work.
Google is pitching a news-writing AI product to news organizations, and the Associated Press is exploring use of the technology as part of a partnership with OpenAI, which is paying to use part of AP’s text archive to improve its AI systems.
X-ing Out Of Twitter Hits A Roadblock
Elon Musk has removed the brightly flashing “X” from the San Francisco headquarters of the company formerly known as Twitter, just days after installing it, in response to complaints and the launching of an investigation into the unpermitted structure. The complaints included concerns about its structural safety and illumination.
Musk has rebranded the company as X and removed the Twitter sign with its iconic blue bird logo. For a time, the “er” at the end of “Twitter” remained up due to the abrupt halt of the sign takedown in the wake of the city of San Francisco’s investigation.
Vogtle Unit 3 Now In Commercial Operation
Georgia Power Company has announced that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, is now in commercial operation — the first new nuclear plant to be built in more than 30 years. Its completion is seven years late and $17 billion over budget.
The plant is capable of producing 1,100 megawatts of electricity, enough to provide power to 500,000 homes and businesses. The power will go to utilities in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, as well as the 2.7 million customers of Southern Company, a subsidiary Georgia Power.
A fourth reactor is nearing completion at the site, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said radioactive fuel could be loaded into Unit 4 before the end of September, with Unit 4 scheduled to enter commercial operation by March.
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