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News
Microsoft deploys new state of matter in its first quantum computing chip
Microsoft has unveiled Majorana 1, a groundbreaking quantum computing chip utilizing topological superconductors to create more stable and reliable qubits. This innovation could enable quantum computers to solve complex problems in years instead of decades, with potential applications in data encryption, drug discovery, and environmental sustainability. While the technology shows promise, experts advise cautious optimism due to the challenges in scaling and practical implementation.
Apple has unveiled the iPhone 16e, its latest budget-friendly smartphone priced at $599. Replacing the iPhone SE, the 16e features a 6.1-inch OLED display, A18 chip, 48MP camera, and Apple’s first in-house C1 5G modem. Notable changes include the removal of the Home button, Lightning port, and Mute switch, aligning its design with higher-end models. Pre-orders begin February 21, with availability starting February 28.
AI ‘godfather’ predicts another revolution in the tech in next five years
Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, predicts a significant AI revolution within the next three to five years, focusing on enabling systems to comprehend and interact with the physical world—a crucial step toward fully autonomous vehicles and domestic robots. He and fellow AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, recent recipients of the £500,000 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, emphasize the importance of advancing AI’s understanding beyond language to achieve intelligence comparable to that of animals.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman just raised $25 million to take on cancer with AI
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and cancer researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee have launched Manas AI, an AI-driven startup with $24.6 million in initial funding, aiming to revolutionize drug discovery. Initially focusing on breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma, the company plans to expand to other diseases, utilizing Microsoft’s data centers for its AI operations. Despite the promise of AI in accelerating medical research, the field has yet to produce approved drugs, with some companies facing challenges.
Google’s new policy tracks all your devices with no opt-out
Google’s new privacy policy, effective March 1, consolidates user data across its services—like Gmail, YouTube, and Maps—into a single profile, enhancing targeted advertising and personalized services. Users cannot opt out of this data merging without discontinuing use of Google’s services. This change has raised significant privacy concerns among users and advocates.
Nvidia’s Singapore GPU sales are 28% of its revenue, but only 1% are delivered to the country
A U.S. investigation into DeepSeek’s alleged acquisition of restricted Nvidia AI GPUs through Singapore has revealed that while Singapore accounts for 28% of Nvidia’s revenue, less than 1% of these products are physically delivered there. This discrepancy suggests that Singapore may be serving as a billing hub, with products shipped elsewhere, potentially circumventing export controls. Nvidia maintains that it complies with all legal requirements, and Singaporean officials note that centralized billing is common practice among multinational companies.
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Reads
Elon Musk’s x.AI has unveiled Grok 3, an advanced AI chatbot featuring enhanced reasoning, rapid processing, and innovative tools like DeepSearch for swift, targeted information retrieval. Trained on the powerful Colossus Supercomputer, Grok 3 outperforms competitors such as o3-mini, DeepSeek-V3, Gemini 2.0, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in various benchmarks. Its user-friendly design and upcoming features like voice mode and audio-to-text conversion make it a versatile tool for diverse applications.
A multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. The dataset consists of 2,700 challenging questions across over a hundred subjects. We publicly release these questions, while maintaining a private test set of held out questions to assess model overfitting.
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Fun
A website lets users “spend” a virtual version of Elon Musk’s vast fortune.