Month: December 2023

Enlarge / Stars over the Grand Canyon. (credit: Mitchell Yee)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's December 8, and today's photo comes from the floor of the Grand Canyon. The photographer, Mitchell Yee, admits that this is not the best shot one might capture from this remote location, but there's a reason—he shot it on his iPhone in August.

"While it's a fairly ordinary photo, what was amazing to me was the level of quality of cell phone photography," he told me. "Normally, I'd haul out my big Nikon but since we were hiking down to the bottom of the canyon to meet our dories, weight was constrained. So I skipped the extra 15–20 pounds of camera, lens(es), and tripod and instead enjoyed the 9-mile hike with my 18-pound pack. Of course, this shot could have been much improved with a 'real' camera on a tripod. But there I was, flat on my back on a sand berm, with the best camera I had at that moment, my iPhone 13 mini, and I still made the shot I wanted."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

On November 22, a few days after OpenAI fired (and then re-hired) CEO Sam Altman, The Information reported that OpenAI had made a technical breakthrough that would allow it to “develop far more powerful artificial intelligence models.” Dubbed Q* (and pronounced “Q star”) the new model was “able to solve math problems that it hadn’t seen before.”

Reuters published a similar story, but details were vague.

Both outlets linked this supposed breakthrough to the board’s decision to fire Altman. Reuters reported that several OpenAI staffers sent the board a letter “warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity.” However, “Reuters was unable to review a copy of the letter,” and subsequent reporting hasn’t connected Altman’s firing to concerns over Q*.