Month: January 2024

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center to begin the Ax-3 commercial crew mission. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)

For the third time, an all-private crew is heading for the International Space Station. The four-man team lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Thursday, kicking off a 36-hour pursuit of the orbiting research laboratory. Docking is scheduled for Saturday morning.

This two-week mission is managed by Houston-based Axiom Space, which is conducting these private astronaut missions as a stepping stone toward building a fully commercial space station in low-Earth orbit by the end of this decade.

Axiom's third mission, called Ax-3, launched at 4:49 pm EST (21:49 UTC) Thursday. The four astronauts were strapped into their seats inside SpaceX's Dragon Freedom spacecraft atop the Falcon 9 rocket. This is the 12th time SpaceX has launched a human spaceflight mission, and could be the first of five Dragon crew missions this year.

Enlarge / Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies and developer of AlphaGO, attends the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park on November 2, 2023 in Bletchley, England. (credit: Toby Melville - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

A system developed by Google’s DeepMind has set a new record for AI performance on geometry problems. DeepMind’s AlphaGeometry managed to solve 25 of the 30 geometry problems drawn from the International Mathematical Olympiad between 2000 and 2022.

That puts the software ahead of the vast majority of young mathematicians and just shy of IMO gold medalists. DeepMind estimates that the average gold medalist would have solved 26 out of 30 problems. Many view the IMO as the world’s most prestigious math competition for high school students.

“Because language models excel at identifying general patterns and relationships in data, they can quickly predict potentially useful constructs, but often lack the ability to reason rigorously or explain their decisions,” DeepMind writes. To overcome this difficulty, DeepMind paired a language model with a more traditional symbolic deduction engine that performs algebraic and geometric reasoning.

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on September 27, 2023. (credit: Getty Images)

On Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company is working on building "general intelligence" for AI assistants and "open sourcing it responsibly," and that Meta is bringing together its two major research groups (FAIR and GenAI) to make it happen.

"It's become clearer that the next generation of services requires building full general intelligence," Zuckerberg said in an Instagram Reel. "This technology is so important, and the opportunities are so great that we should open source and make it as widely available as we responsibly can so that everyone can benefit."

Notably, Zuckerberg did not specifically mention the phrase "artificial general intelligence" "AGI" by name in his announcement, but a report from The Verge seems to suggest he is steering in that direction. AGI is a somewhat nebulous term for a hypothetical technology that is equivalent to human intelligence in performing general tasks without the need for specific training. It's the stated goal of Meta competitor OpenAI, and one that many have feared might pose an existential threat to humanity or replace humans working intellectual jobs.