It's Just Technology
Ever wonder how AI (artificial intelligence) works? Find out how machines learn to help you with everyday interactions with technology products. T
his is an excerpt from a larger lesson, “Discover AI in Daily Life,” from Applied Digital Skills, Google’s free, online, video-based curriculum.
The leaderless investing collectives known as decentralized autonomous organizations are generating a lot of eyerolls. Thanks to high flexibility and low regulation, they’ll also soon generate a lot of profits.
“This is an incredibly risky move. I don’t know if I agree with this.’’ Erick Calderon, the founder of a company named Art Blocks in a risk-oblivious field, nonfungible tokens, was nonetheless concerned. It was February 2021, and Calderon was one of 59 investors who had banded together to potentially buy a rare set of 150 popular NFTs, CryptoPunks, directly from their producer, Larva Labs.
The group, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called Flamingo, had pooled $10 million and met weekly via Zoom (audio-only to protect those wanting anonymity) to figure out what to do with it. The CryptoPunk opportunity, at about four ether ($7,200 at the time) per punk, would eat 10% of that, which is partly why Calderon aired his concerns on the group’s Discord channel.
The tension got thicker when members discovered one of their own—someone going by the pseudonym “Pranksy”—had tried to front-run the deal, opening a back channel with Larva Labs to buy 150 punks for himself. In the end, Flamingo members voted to spring for the punks, which were recently valued at $30 million. As for Pranksy, he left the DAO “by mutual agreement,” telling Forbes he was “somewhat naïve [about] the DAO process.”
Got lots of data? Machine learning can help! In this episode of Cloud AI Adventures, Yufeng Guo explains machine learning from the ground up, using concrete examples.
Artificial intelligence was developed to mimic – and even potentially surpass – human intelligence. And in some ways, it already has. But can it replace humans altogether or is it best used working alongside humanity?
Quantum computing promises to revolutionize how we solve problems. The advantages that come from using quantum mechanics to solve hard problems are colossal. But we are still a long way from demonstrating solving a functionally useful problem. The main reason is that to solve these problems we require a lot of qubits, as for complex problems the quantum algorithms often require error correction. Which dramatically increases the number of qubits required, from tens to thousands, or even more. Thus, we need to find techniques to scale the production of qubits in a compact and reliable manner. In this latest work from a team at MIT, two-dimensional materials were used to construct superconducting qubits.
They use a combination of NbSi2 and hBN to form a Josephson junction and perform tests on the Qubit’s performance compared to traditional fabricated superconducting qubits. They demonstrate that the performance is very similar despite having a significantly smaller size. This is a promising demonstration of fabricating with 2D materials.
The world’s largest fusion energy machine has more than doubled its own world record for energy production. We asked a scientist what this milestone means for the future.
Since our inaugural roundup of the Blockchain 50, published in 2019, the billion-dollar companies (minimum, by sales or market value) on our annual list have moved beyond test projects and now rely on “distributed ledger” technology to do serious work. A lot of the action is in the back office, verifying insurance claims or facilitating real estate deals. It has also become vital to supply chains, whether checking the provenance of conflict minerals like cobalt or tracking auto parts for Renault. Nearly half of the Blockchain 50 are based outside the United States; 14% are Chinese. New this year: venture capital firms, which as a group invested more than $32 billion in the sector in 2021.
Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether grab all the headlines, especially after booming last year and then losing more than $1 trillion in value since November. But in many ways, speculative cryptocurrencies are the least intriguing blockchain application. The most lasting impact will come as more and more multinationals integrate blockchains into their daily operations, unleashing untold efficiencies.
In the past year a new trend in the crypto world has boomed: NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. They started as a way for digital artists to have ownership over their work but have transformed into a dizzying new multi-billion-dollar marketplace. Are they worth the hype?
Some see Web 3.0 as the next generation of the internet, a decentralized version of the web-based on the blockchain. Here are the key principles behind it, and why skeptics are unconvinced it could scale globally.
Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, have gone in the last year from a relatively obscure blockchain technology to a market valued at around $44 billion. WSJ explores how NFTs are transforming the art market and tells the story of who is behind the buzz.