Today’s top story
Have large language models (LLMs) matched or exceeded human intelligence? Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says so — saying “I think we’ve achieved AGI” on a Monday (March 23) episode of the Lex Fridman podcast.
Seen as the holy grail of artificial intelligence (AI) hype, there have been numerous claims of achieving “artificial general intelligence” since LLMs went mainstream in 2022, despite the scant scientific evidence that the current crop of chatbots are even close, and the threat of energy and supply chain shortages from the Iran war popping a potential AI bubble.
Huang chased his claims with references to OpenClaw, an open-source AI platform that achieved viral fame with the release of Moltbook, a social network for AI bots that threatened (in a likely hoax) a total purge of humanity.
Huang later walked back his statements on the same podcast, saying, “A lot of people use it [OpenClaw] for a couple of months and it kind of dies away. Now, the odds of 100,000 of those agents building Nvidia is 0%.”
The trend
Scientists have made a significant step toward achieving reanimation after death by freezing a pig’s brain with minimal damage and its cellular activity locked in place, New Scientist reports.
The procedure worked by pumping a pig’s brain with preservation solutions followed by cryoprotectants, before freezing. The technique resulted in unprecedented preservation of the brain’s neurons, synapses and constituent molecules.
Nonetheless, other scientists remain skeptical that the pig can be reanimated afterward, saying the experiment was much closer to high-fidelity embalming than a pathway to reanimation.
Would you have your brain preserved if you could? What would be your reasons for doing it? Let us know in the comments below.
Three to read
- Antarctica could warm 1.4 times faster than the rest of the Southern Hemisphere in the coming decades, study finds [Live Science]
- ‘I’ve seen the devil’: Brazil’s UFO capital marks 30 years since ‘alien encounter’ [The Guardian]
- Russian rocket en route to ISS suffers major antenna glitch, triggering remote-control astronaut ‘backup plan’ [Live Science]
Photo of the day
Say it, said it
Word of the day
Slobgollion — Coined by Herman Mellville in “Moby-Dick,” this substance is derived from squeezing spermaceti — the prized waxy white substance found inside sperm whale head cavities.
“There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing.” — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 94.
Researchers reported this week that they have filmed sperm whales headbutting each other, appearing to confirm anecdotal accounts from 18th- and 19th-century whalers that inspired Melville’s novel.
Quote of the day
“Viruses are the most abundant entity in the body. There are more viruses than there are human cells, bacterial cells and any other cells. Yet their role is a huge black box.”
Jeremy Barr, a virologist at Monash University in Australia on how viruses in the gut may help prevent blood sugar spikes.
Fun and games
Think you know your hardy micro-animals? Take this crossword to see if you can guess the most famous one of all.
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