One of the most interesting twists resulting from Hurricane Maria striking Puerto Rico was Elon Musk's offer that Tesla could help Puerto Rico solve its energy crisis, with a long-term, 21st century fix. After all, its electrical grid was devastated, with almost all the power wiped out. It didn't help that even prior to this disaster its system was antiquated and badly in need of repairs. It is telling that we don't have similar offers to rebuild the Puerto Rico's health care system, which is similarly devastated. Or, for that matter, our system, which is its own kind of disaster. Mr. Musk was asked on Twitter if Tesla could help Puerto Rico using solar and battery power, and he responded in the affirmative, saying it had done so on smaller islands but faced no scalablity issues...
Elon Musk
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Artificial Intelligence Is Not as Smart as You (or Elon Musk) Think
In March 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, who at the time was the best human Go player in the world. It represented one of those defining technological moments like IBM’s Deep Blue beating chess champion Garry Kasparov, or even IBM Watson beating the world’s greatest Jeopardy! champions in 2011. Yet these victories, as mind-blowing as they seemed to be, were more about training algorithms and using brute-force computational strength than any real intelligence...
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Artificial Intelligence Nonprofit OpenAI Launches With Backing From Elon Musk And Sam Altman
Today, OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company was announced to the world. Its director, Ilya Sutskever, is a research scientist at Google. This comes a day after Facebook open-sourced its AI hardware. Its reason for existing was explained in an introductory post: Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman is taking the same position for OpenAI. There are quite a few other interesting names involved, including Y Combinator’s Sam Altman and Tesla/SpaceX’s Elon Musk acting as co-chairs...
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Coronavirus and the Recurring Mistake of Fighting the Wrong Wars
What do the coronavirus and Navy ships have in common? For that matter, what do our military spending and our healthcare spending have in common? More than you might think, and it boils down to this: we spend too much for too little, in large part because we tend to always be fighting the wrong wars.I started thinking about this a couple weeks ago due to a WSJ article about the U.S. Navy's "aging and fragmented technology." An internal Navy strategy memo warned that the Navy is "under cyber siege" by foreign adversaries, leaking information "like a sieve." It grimly pointed out...
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Does Elon Musk And OpenAI Want To Democratise Or Sanitise Artificial Intelligence?
As reported in Forbes yesterday, Elon Musk announced the OpenAI research initiative, with the explicit goal to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." Details are sparse at this time given its recent inception, but Musk has a history of being outspoken about the dangers of artificial intelligence, calling it the biggest existential threat that humanity may face in years to come.
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Does Regulation Destroy Innovation Or Save It?
With election day fast approaching, entrepreneurs will soon have a chance to cast a vote for president that in some way expresses how they feel about the government’s role in fostering innovation. Read More »
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Elon, Do We Have a Disaster for You!
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Introducing OpenAI
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the work is difficult, but we believe the goal and the structure are right. We hope this is what matters most to the best in the field.
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Is It Time to Purchase Your Own Quantum Computer?
I want to talk about quantum computing – and why healthcare needs to looking ahead to it. Let’s start with this: for the low, low price of $5,000, you could have your very own quantum computer. Spin Q Technology, a Chinese company, has recently introduced its Spin Q, a less expensive, less powerful version of its Spin Q Gemini, which went for $50,000. Other quantum computers, such as those by Google, IBM, or D-Wave, have a few more zeroes in their price. Spin Q Technology has a clear goal in offering this version:We believe that low-cost portable quantum computer products will facilitate hands-on experience for teaching quantum computing at all levels, well-prepare younger generations of students and researchers for the future of quantum technologies."
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Let's Place Some Big Bets - Reinventing Medical Care
When we think about market research and Big Data, think about Henry Ford's (possibly apocryphal) quote: Most of our healthcare innovations and reforms take the existing healthcare system as a given and try to build upon it in some way. They add more on-ramps to the healthcare superhighway, widen its lanes, try to smooth the pavements, maybe even automate our driving on it. But sometimes we need to tear the highway down. Here, in brief, are some big bets I'd like to see someone take on...
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Nanoparticles On My Mind
Nanoparticles are everywhere! By that I mean, of course, that there seems to be a lot of news about them lately, particularly in regard to health and healthcare.But, of course, literally they could be anywhere and everywhere, which helps account for their potential, and their potential danger. Let's start with one of the more startling developments: a team at the University of Miami's College of Engineering, led by Professor Sakhrat Khizroev, believes it has figured out a way to use nanoparticles to "talk" to the brain without wires or implants.They use "a novel class of ultrafine units called magnetoelectric nanoparticles (MENPs)" to penetrate the blood-brain barrier.
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Open Source is Helping to Drive the Artificial Intelligence Renaissance
We're only a few days into 2017, and it's already clear that one of the biggest tech categories of this year will be artificial intelligence. The good news is that open source AI tools are proliferating and making it easy for organizations to leverage them. AI is also driving acquisitions. As Computerworld is reporting, in the past year, at least 20 artificial intelligence companies have been acquired, according to CB Insights, a market analysis firm. MIT Technology Review is out with its five big predictions for AI this year. Here is a bit on what they expect, and some of the open source AI tools that you should know about...
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Why Elon Musk Is A Utility Executives's Worst Nightmare
Attention US utility executives: You have a decade at most before the boom in renewable energy makes your century-old business model as relevant as a rotary telephone. In the time it takes to get a transmission line built in California, solar energy production and other new technologies could render obsolete the monopoly business of selling electricity at a fixed price for a fixed profit to a captive audience of consumers.
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