AM radio could very easily fit into the hallowed category of “perfected technology.” It’s been around for over a century, the physics and engineering are very well understood, and there have been no major technological advancements in its design for at least a couple decades. Which is perhaps why it’s so understandable that so many […]
For the first time, a large language model—a key driver of recent AI hype and hope—has been added to MLPerf, a set of neural-network training benchmarks that have previously been called the Olympics of machine learning. Computers built around Nvidia’s H100 GPU and Intel’s Habana Gaudi2 chips were the first to be tested on how […]
You might be able to take the girl off the farm, but you can’t necessarily take the farm out of the girl, as the saying goes. That was the case for Melba Crawford, who as a teenager couldn’t wait to leave her family’s farm in Illinois to pursue an engineering career. MELBA M. CRAWFORD EMPLOYER […]
Electric motors have helped bring legged robots into the mainstream, offering a straightforward and compact way of controlling robotic limbs with all the fancy control features you need for safe and nimble motion. What you can’t get out of electric motors (more than once, anyway) is the kind of instantaneous power needed to match the […]
While driving home one night recently, I saw a spectacularly bright meteor flash across the sky in front of my car. A good-sized chunk of interplanetary detritus must have been on its way to a crash landing not too far away, I said to myself. My next thought was that if I had a bearing […]
Shortly after their first releases to the public, text-to-image artificial intelligence models like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney also became the focal points in debates around the ethics of their usage. Anton Troynikov is a cofounder of Chroma, a startup working to improve AI interpretability—that is, making what goes on under the hood of AI systems […]
In mid-2021, the term “Web3” suddenly exploded into the public consciousness. As people scrambled to figure out what it was—cryptocurrencies? blockchain? nonfungible tokens?—venture capital firms were pouring money into new startups, over US $30 billion before the year was out. Meanwhile, Molly White, a software engineer, started reading up on the tech in case that […]
Aalyria, a recent spinout from Google, is trying to build on other companies’ near successes. The company is revamping the software platform from the ambitious-yet-failed startup Loon to optimize and reconfigure networks in real time, using whatever connections are available. Aalyria is combining that tech with free-space lasers originally developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory […]
At Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., Lighter Than Air (LTA) Research is floating a new approach to a technology that saw its rise and fall a century ago: airships. Although airships have long since been supplanted by planes, LTA, which was founded in 2015 by CEO Alan Weston, believes that through a combination of […]
In 2000, at a trade fair in Germany, an obscure Singapore company called Trek 2000 unveiled a solid-state memory chip encased in plastic and attached to a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connector. The gadget, roughly the size of a pack of chewing gum, held 8 megabytes of data and required no external power source, drawing […]