A trader who lost $25 million after accidentally copying and pasting the wrong transfer address is offering a $2.5 million reward to white hackers in the hopes of getting their money back.
A Bloomberg report suggested Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni could accept a proposal for a 28% tax hike on crypto rather than a 42% one.
Bitcoin hit $90,000, but holding it is proving to be a challenge. Cointelegraph explains why.
The bitcoiners gathered at OP_Next were decidedly in favor of progress – but not too much progress, and certainly not too fast.
Read more Crypto prices continue melting upwards since Donald Trump’s election victory as investors reprice digital assets in anticipation of a friendlier government.
Read more Liquidation, hacks and thefts have plagued the industry. It’s time for a hard-wired cheat-proof feature that pays on-chain creditors in an orderly way, says StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson.
Read more Stablecoin exchange balances grew to a yearly high of $41 billion this week, providing dry powder to buy digital assets, one analyst noted.
Read more Monday’s bitcoin rally propelled El Salvador and Bhutan’s crypto stashes to $500 million and $1.1 billion respectively.
Read more This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment
Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce, and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are a rapid, scalable way to teach them to do new things, but the robots often fail when they’re pulled out of virtual worlds and asked to do the same tasks in the real one.
Now, there’s potentially a better option: a new system that uses generative AI models in conjunction with a physics simulator to develop virtual training grounds that more accurately mirror the physical world. Robots trained using this method worked with a higher success rate than those trained using more traditional techniques during real-world tests.
Researchers used the system, called LucidSim, to train a robot dog in parkour, getting it to scramble over a box and climb stairs, despite never seeing any real world data. The approach demonstrates how helpful generative AI could be when it comes to teaching robots to do challenging tasks. It also raises the possibility that we could ultimately train them in entirely virtual worlds. Read the full story.
—Rhiannon Williams
Africa’s AI researchers are ready for takeoff
When we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology. But it’s high time we talk about another player: Africa.
African AI researchers are forging their own path, developing tools that answer the needs of Africans, in their own languages. Their story is not only one of persistence and innovation, but of preserving cultures and fighting to shape how AI technologies are used on their own continent. However, they face many barriers. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 How Silicon Valley is planning to work with Donald Trump
Avoiding antitrust regulation and boosting growth are at the top of Big Tech’s agenda. (WP $)
+ Tech executives overwhelmingly supported Kamala Harris. (Vox)
+ Trump’s policies could make it harder to hire and retain overseas talent. (Insider $)
+ Immigrant tech workers are rushing to secure visas before Trump’s inauguration. (Forbes $)
2 People are abandoning X following the US election result
Threads and Bluesky are experiencing an influx of new users. (Bloomberg $)
+ Trump loved Twitter during his first Presidency. Will he during his second? (Insider $)
3 The Biden administration plans to back a controversial cybercrime treaty
Critics fear it could be abused by authoritarian regimes to pursue dissidents. (Politico)+ The treaty would also make electronic evidence more available to the US. (Bloomberg $)
4 DNA testing firm 23andMe is firing 40% of its workforce
Things aren’t looking good for the embattled company. (WSJ $)
+ The company is axing all its therapy programs, too. (Reuters)
+ How to delete your 23andMe data. (MIT Technology Review)
5 How oil and gas companies are masking their methane emissions
The odorless, colorless gas is notoriously tough to track, but satellites are changing that. (FT $)
+ Even if we reach net zero, parts of the planet will keep getting warmer. (New Scientist $)+ Why methane emissions are still a mystery. (MIT Technology Review)
6 This database tracks license plate cameras across the world
The project, called DeFlock, aims to give drivers the choice to avoid certain routes. (404 Media)
7 Baidu has unveiled its AI-integrated smart glasses
The device can track calorie consumption, among other features. (FT $)
+ Smartglasses are a growing trend in China. (SCMP $)
+ The coolest thing about smart glasses is not the AR. It’s the AI. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Everything we know about Uranus is wrong
A brief flyby 40 years ago coincided with a rare spike in solar activity. (NYT $)
9 How Ukraine is rewilding amid the war
Ecologists believe the conflict’s catastrophes can birth environmental gains. (Undark Magazine)
+ Ukraine has a plan for getting Trump onside. (Vox)
10 To find alien life, look to the mountains
Who knows what’s trapped under tectonic plates? (The Atlantic $)
Quote of the day
“I did not say I was uncomfortable talking about it. I said we’re not going to talk about it.”
—Michael Barratt, an astronaut and medical doctor, refuses to elaborate on a medical issue an astronaut experienced during a recent mission, Ars Technica reports.
The big story
Zimbabwe’s climate migration is a sign of what’s to come
December 2021
Julius Mutero has spent his entire adult life farming a three-hectare plot in Zimbabwe, but has harvested virtually nothing in the past six years. He is just one of the 86 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who the World Bank estimates will migrate domestically by 2050 because of climate change.
In Zimbabwe, farmers who have tried to stay put and adapt have found their efforts woefully inadequate in the face of new weather extremes. Droughts have already forced tens of thousands from their homes. But their desperate moves are creating new competition for water in the region, and tensions may soon boil over. Read the full story.
—Andrew Mambondiyani
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet ’em at me.)
+ Here’s how to make perfect cacio e pepe every time.
+ New York is a wonderful place—even if you’re a native New Yorker, there’s always something new to try for the first time.
+ The 2024 Nature’s Best Photo Awards are full of delights.
+ Good luck to the brave souls skiing in central London.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
When we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology.
But it’s high time we talked about another player: Africa.
As MIT Technology Review has written before, AI is creating a new colonial world order, where the technology is enriching a small minority of people at the expense of the rest of the world.
African AI researchers are determined to change that. They’re forging their own path, developing tools that answer the needs of Africans, in their own languages.
However, they face many barriers. AI research is eye-wateringly expensive, and African startups and researchers get a fraction as much funding as their Western or Asian counterparts. They have to innovate and rely on open-source resources to do more with less.
Despite that, the African AI story reflects not only persistence and innovation, but a determination to preserve cultures and shape how AI technologies are used on the continent. Read more here from Abdullahi Tsanni, who went to this year’s Deep Learning Indaba, a machine-learning conference held annually in Senegal, to learn about the opportunities and barriers the African AI scene faces.
And then some personal news! This edition will be my last newsletter, and from next week you’ll be in the extremely capable hands of my colleague James O’Donnell. It’s been a delight writing this newsletter for the past two or so years, and I’m so grateful you’ve joined me on this journey covering everything from snowballs of bullshit to Taylor Swift’s deepfakes. I’m not going anywhere, though. I’ll be diving deeper into the AI beat at MIT Technology Review to bring you stories on what’s happening in AI and how the technology is changing us and our societies. Stay tuned for more!
Finally, while I have you, this week we’re running our biggest sale of the year, with 50% off an annual subscription to MIT Technology Review. New subscribers receive a free digital report on generative AI and the future of work. Subscribe here.
Now read the rest of The Algorithm
Deeper Learning
Why AI could eat quantum computing’s lunch
Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics. Those expectations have been especially high in physics and chemistry, where the weird effects of quantum mechanics come into play. In theory, this is where quantum computers could have a huge advantage over conventional machines.
Enter AI: But while the field struggles with the realities of tricky quantum hardware, another challenger is making headway in some of these most promising use cases. AI is now being applied to fundamental physics, chemistry, and materials science in a way that suggests quantum computing’s purported home turf might not be so safe after all.
Given the pace of recent advances, a growing number of researchers are now asking whether AI could solve a substantial chunk of the most interesting problems in chemistry and materials science before large-scale quantum computers become a reality. Read more from Edd Gent here.
Bits and Bytes
The Saudis are planning a $100 billion AI powerhouse
Speaking of the race for AI dominance, this piece looks at how Saudi Arabia wants in on AI action. And it’s putting its money where its mouth is. The country is investing a massive sum to develop a tech hub that it hopes will rival the neighboring United Arab Emirates. (Bloomberg)
AI is making it harder to believe what is real and what is not
Two recent examples show just how influential AI slop can be in warping our sense of reality. In Dublin, crowds gathered in the city center to wait for a Halloween parade to take place. There was no parade planned, but the listing was created by AI and then picked up by social media users and local media. By way of contrast, some social media users dismissed shocking images of the devastating recent floods in Spain as AI-generated, although they were entirely real.
AI companies are getting comfortable offering their technology to the military
Militaries around the world have been pouring money into new technologies, including AI. Meta and Anthropic are the latest tech companies to start courting them, joining the likes of Google and OpenAI. (The Washington Post)
OpenAI is shifting its strategy as the improvement in its AI tools slows down
The current paradigm in AI development is to make things bigger to make them better. But OpenAI’s new model, code-named Orion, only performs slightly better than its predecessors. Instead, OpenAI is shifting to improving models after their initial training. (The Information)