I’m a boomer who’s about to retire at 59. I’m nervous about retirement because I’ll have less income and too much free time.

I’m a boomer who’s about to retire at 59. I’m nervous about retirement because I’ll have less income and too much free time.

For the last 20 years, I've had the same two alarms set ever weekday — one at 5:15 a.m. and one at 9:17 a.m.As a Texas high school teacher, the 5:15 alarm is really just a formality. After 20 years of early rising, I'm up before the sun with no prompting required. The 9:17 a.m. alarm is also deeply ingrained; it's the official attendance time when I'm required to pause my instruction and take attendance. It's Texas' official "time of record" by which schools are funded on daily attendance.It's the schedule I've followed for two decades. But after this week,…
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Data Mixing Made Efficient: A Bivariate Scaling Law for Language Model Pretraining

Data Mixing Made Efficient: A Bivariate Scaling Law for Language Model Pretraining

arXiv:2405.14908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models exhibit exceptional generalization capabilities, primarily attributed to the utilization of diversely sourced data. However, conventional practices in integrating this diverse data heavily rely on heuristic schemes, lacking theoretical guidance. This research tackles these limitations by investigating strategies based on low-cost proxies for data mixtures, with the aim of streamlining data curation to enhance training efficiency. Specifically, we propose a unified scaling law, termed BiMix, which accurately models the bivariate scaling behaviors of both data quantity and mixing proportions. We conduct systematic experiments and provide empirical evidence for the predictive power and fundamental…
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Innovation in Europe: exploring the winners of the EIT Awards

Innovation in Europe: exploring the winners of the EIT Awards

The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) celebrates the entrepreneurial and societal achievements of its innovators. By highlighting ground-breaking innovations and the teams behind them, the EIT Awards inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs across Europe.  The EIT Awards also showcase how the EIT Community, Europe's largest innovation ecosystem, supports the development of entrepreneurial skills, products and services which address Europe's biggest challenges. The winners of the 2024 EIT Awards were announced at the EIT Summit in Brussels, highlighting the achievements of the most innovative projects within the EIT community in three categories that represent the driving dynamics of…
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Microsoft’s AI chatbot will ‘recall’ everything you do on its new PCs

Microsoft wants laptop users to get so comfortable with its artificial intelligence chatbot that it will remember everything you’re doing on your computer and help figure out what you want to do next.The software giant on Monday revealed an upgraded version of Copilot, its AI assistant, as it confronts heightened competition from big tech rivals in pitching generative AI technology that can compose documents, make images and serve as a lifelike personal assistant at work or home.The announcements ahead of Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference in Seattle centered on imbuing AI features into a product where Microsoft already has the…
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Startup Datavolo raises over $21M to transform how generative AI models access unstructured data – SiliconANGLE

Startup Datavolo raises over $21M to transform how generative AI models access unstructured data – SiliconANGLE

Multimodal data pipeline startup Datavolo Inc. today revealed its ambitious plans to transform the way data is fed into artificial intelligence systems, after closing on more than $21 million in funding. The round was led by General Catalyst and saw participation from Citi Ventures, Human Capital, MVP Ventures and Rob Bearden, the former chief executive officer at Cloudera Inc. It brings its total amount raised to more than $25 million. Datavolo is led by its co-founders, CEO Joe Witt (pictured, left) and Chief Operating Officer Luke Roquet (right). It has built what they says is a revolutionary new data pipeline system based…
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Visual Deformation Detection Using Soft Material Simulation for Pre-training of Condition Assessment Models

Visual Deformation Detection Using Soft Material Simulation for Pre-training of Condition Assessment Models

arXiv:2405.14877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of geometric quality assurance in manufacturing, particularly when human assessment is required. It proposes using Blender, an open-source simulation tool, to create synthetic datasets for machine learning (ML) models. The process involves translating expert information into shape key parameters to simulate deformations, generating images for both deformed and non-deformed objects. The study explores the impact of discrepancies between real and simulated environments on ML model performance and investigates the effect of different simulation backgrounds on model sensitivity. Additionally, the study aims to enhance the model's robustness to camera positioning by…
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AI may be to blame for our failure to make contact with alien civilisations

AI may be to blame for our failure to make contact with alien civilisations

Artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed at an astounding pace over the last few years. Some scientists are now looking towards the development of artificial superintelligence (ASI) — a form of AI that would not only surpass human intelligence but would not be bound by the learning speeds of humans. But what if this milestone isn’t just a remarkable achievement? What if it also represents a formidable bottleneck in the development of all civilisations, one so challenging that it thwarts their long-term survival? This idea is at the heart of a research paper I recently published in Acta Astronautica. Could AI…
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