Month: April 2024

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

X has named a new head of safety about nine months after Ella Irwin resigned last June, following Elon Musk's criticism of Irwin's team's decision to restrict a transphobic documentary. Shortly after Irwin left, former head of brand safety AJ Brown similarly resigned. And that regime notably took over where former safety chief Yoel Roth—who also clashed with Musk—left off.

Stepping into the safety chief role next is Kylie McRoberts, who was promoted after leading X "initiatives to increase transparency in our moderation practices through labels" and "improve security with passkeys," X's announcement said.

As head of safety, McRoberts will oversee X's global safety team, which was rebranded last month to drop "trust" from its name. On X, Musk had said that "any organization that puts ‘Trust’ in their name cannot [be] trusted, as that is obviously a euphemism for censorship."

Enlarge / The original YouTube thumbnail for Dudesy's Carlin special shows an AI-generated comedian sporting Carlin's signature gray ponytail look. (credit: Carlin estate vs. Dudesy lawsuit)

The George Carlin estate has settled its lawsuit with Dudesy, the podcast that purportedly used a "comedy AI" to produce an hour-long stand-up special in the style and voice of the late comedian.

Dudesy's "George Carlin: Dead and Loving It" special, which was first uploaded in early January, gained hundreds of thousands of views and plenty of media attention for its presentation as a creation of an AI that had "listened to all of George Carlin’s material... to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today." But even before the Carlin estate lawsuit was filed, there were numerous signs that the special was not actually written by an AI, as Ars laid out in detail in a feature report.

Shortly after the Carlin estate filed its lawsuit against Dudesy in late January, a representative for Dudesy host Will Sasso told The New York Times that the special had actually been "completely written by [Dudesy co-host] Chad Kultgen."

Enlarge / Quantinuum's H2 "racetrack" quantum processor. (credit: Quantinuum)

Today's quantum computing hardware is severely limited in what it can do by errors that are difficult to avoid. There can be problems with everything from setting the initial state of a qubit to reading its output, and qubits will occasionally lose their state while doing nothing. Some of the quantum processors in existence today can't use all of their individual qubits for a single calculation without errors becoming inevitable.

The solution is to combine multiple hardware qubits to form what's termed a logical qubit. This allows a single bit of quantum information to be distributed among multiple hardware qubits, reducing the impact of individual errors. Additional qubits can be used as sensors to detect errors and allow interventions to correct them. Recently, there have been a number of demonstrations that logical qubits work in principle.

On Wednesday, Microsoft and Quantinuum announced that logical qubits work in more than principle. "We've been able to demonstrate what's called active syndrome extraction, or sometimes it's also called repeated error correction," Microsoft's Krysta Svore told Ars. "And we've been able to do this such that it is better than the underlying physical error rate. So it actually works."

Enlarge (credit: Lygenesis)

For the first time, scientists are attempting to grow a new, miniature liver inside of a person. It sounds like science fiction; in fact, the idea was the plot of a Grey’s Anatomy episode that aired in 2018. Now, biotech company LyGenesis is trying to turn the concept into reality.

Today, LyGenesis announced that an initial volunteer has received an injection of donor cells to turn one of their lymph nodes into a second liver. The procedure was carried out in Houston on March 25 as part of a clinical trial that will test the experimental treatment in 12 adults with end-stage liver disease.

These patients usually require a liver transplant, but donor organs are in short supply. LyGenesis is hoping to spur the growth of enough healthy liver tissue that patients don’t need a transplant. “We’re using the lymph node as a living bioreactor,” says Michael Hufford, cofounder and CEO of Pittsburgh-based LyGenesis. He says just 10 to 30 percent in additional liver mass could have meaningful effects for patients with end-stage liver disease.