The Week’s Greatest Tech Stories From The Internet (Through September 14)

OpenAI Publishes New AI Model, Strawberry Named Code, That Solves Problems Step by Step
Will Knight | The ropes
“Today the company announced a new development that demonstrates a revolutionary approach—a model that can logically ‘reason’ through many complex problems and is much smarter than existing AI The new model, called OpenAI o1, can solve problems that hamper existing AI models, including the most powerful version of OpenAI, GPT-4o.

Google says it’s made with Quantum Computing breakthroughs that reduce errors
Sophia Chen | MIT Technology Review
“One big challenge has been that quantum computers can store or manipulate information incorrectly, preventing them from creating algorithms long enough to be useful. New research from Google Quantum AI and colleagues in the study show that they can indeed add features to reduce these errors…’These bug fixes really work, and I think they will get better,’ wrote Michael Newman. , a member of the Google team, at X.

Driverless Semis Could Be Months Away
Timothy B. Lee | Ars Technica
“On a sunny December morning, an 18-wheeler pulls into a truck depot in Palmer, Texas, south of Dallas. The driver will get out of the truck and help move his trailer to a second location equipped with powerful sensors. This second truck will head south on Interstate 45 toward Houston. …Trucks travel 200 miles between Dallas and Houston all the time. But there will be something special about the middle leg of the trip: There will be no one in the car.

Geothermal Energy Can Surpass Nuclear Energy
Staff Editors | Economist
“How big can EGS be [or enhanced geothermal systems] get? It is big enough. Although the DOE’s research suggests that only about 40GW of conventional geothermal resources exist in the US, new strategies increase the theoretical capacity to 5,500GW, which is more than the size of the country, with strong potential. more than half of the provinces. The heat is definitely there.”

CRISPR-Enhanced Viruses Are Being Used Against UTIs
Emily Mullin | The ropes
“The rise of the world Antibiotic resistance makes bacterial infections more difficult to treat and increases the risk of disease spread, severe illness and death. Once considered miracle drugs, antibiotics are now losing their effectiveness against ever-changing bacteria. Another company aims to treat infections with a different strategy: manipulating tiny viruses called bacteriophages with CRISPR. ”

OpenAI Fund Raising Talks Could Value Company at $150 Billion
Cade Metz, Mike Isaac, Tripp Mickle, and Michael J. de la Merced New York Times
“If the new deal is completed, OpenAI will be more important than SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by Elon Musk (who was also one of the co-founders of OpenAI). It may it’s twice as valuable as Intel, the venerable giant, whose market value has dropped to $83 billion as it can’t keep up with the AI ​​boom.

Transistor-Like Qubits Hit Key Benchmark
Dina Genkina | IEEE Spectrum
“An Australian team has recently demonstrated significant progress in metal-oxide-semiconductor-based (or MOS-based) multi-computers. They showed that their two-qubit gates—logical operations involving more than one quantum bit, or qubit—perform without error 99 percent of the time. In addition, these MOS-based computers are compatible with existing CMOS technology, which will make it easier to create a larger number of qubits on a single chip than with other methods.

Inside Google’s 7-Year Plan to Give AI a Robot’s Body
Hans Peter Brondmo | Quote
“When Alphabet’s AI-powered robot head shot to the moon, I believed a lot. One, robots can’t come fast enough. For one, they don’t have to look like us. …I am more convinced than ever that robots need to come. However, I have concerns that Silicon Valley, which is focused on ‘less viable products’ and VCs’ general reluctance to invest in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race ‘e to provide an AI robot body. And most of the money invested is focused on the wrong things. That’s why. ”

The AI ​​Spending Spree, in charts
Nate Rattner and Tom Dotan | The Wall Street Journal
“Artificial intelligence has sparked the biggest boom in spending in modern American history, as companies and investors are betting hundreds of billions of dollars that the technology will transform the global economy and on a daily basis which will bring huge profits. The question is when all those investments will pay off.

Image credit: Laura Skinner / Unsplash