Futurology

All the 100s of billions of dollars Silicon Valley is pouring into AI depend on one thing. Earning it back in the future. OpenAI, which made $13 billion last year, thinks it might make $200 billion in 2030. New data points to a different reality; AI use may be declining in big corporate customers. Though perhaps it's a blip, and it may begin climbing again.

AI use is still spreading worldwide, and open-source efforts are the equal of Silicon Valley's offerings. Even if the current Silicon Valley AI leaders fail, that won't stop. But the US is piggybacking on the Silicon Valley boom to try to reach AGI. That effort may be affected.

Link to graph of the data, source US Census Bureau - PDF 1 page

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/41849856

If an LLM can't be trusted with a fast food order, I can't imagine what it is reliable enough for. I really was expecting this was the easy use case for the things.

It sounds like most orders still worked, so I guess we'll see if other chains come to the same conclusion.

380 GW of new solar power has been installed globally in the first six months of 2025; 64% up on the same period last year. GWEC projects that 2025 will see 139 GW of new wind installations. Assuming solar keeps increasing at the near rate in the second half of 2025, the total renewables figure for 2025 will top 1,000 GW for the first time ever. Even if solar slowed down to half its current rate of growth, that will still be true.

Three times the entire global nuclear capacity. Let that sink in. That took decades to build. Now renewables can do three times more in just one year.

Consider something else. Renewables growth has years, if not decades, of further growth ahead of it. Economies of scale mean that as more of it gets built, it keeps getting cheaper. And it's already the cheapest electricity there is. When will the first 2,000 GW year be?

"Swiss firm Novartis’s radioligand therapy, which delivers radioactive isotopes directly to tumours, has completely cleared metastatic cancers in trial patients - an unprecedented result. And, US researchers found that blocking an immune protein (IL-23) makes HPV vaccines effective against existing tumours, raising hopes for therapeutic vaccines."

Quote from Fixthenews newsletter

How Novartis got ahead on ‘incredible’ cancer breakthrough

Preventive HPV vaccines work. Now a new discovery could also help eliminate existing cancers too

Scaling hasn’t gotten us to AGI, or 'superintelligence”, let alone AI we could trust. The field is overdue for a rethink. What do we next?

India has a pretty good track record on following through on space commitments, so this all seems achievable to me. It's already landed on the Moon with Chandrayaan-3. I wonder by 2040 will there be anyone in permanent habitation at the International Lunar Research Station? Who knows how many space stations there will be in ten year's time (2035). China will have one, the ISS will have de-orbited, but presumably there will be Western commercial ones too.

India unveils its space vision to 2040

This is a paper which argues that the true path to a safe, dependable AI system is to take what we've learned from meditation and Buddhism and apply it to AI systems: "Robust alignment strategies need to focus on developing an intrinsic, self-reflective adaptability that is constitutively embedded within the system’s world model, rather than using brittle top-down rules", the authors write.

Contemplative Artificial Intelligence - PDF 37 pages

"The trade-off is profound: by socializing the infrastructure of abundance, we eliminate the need for centralized economic control and bureaucracy. "

This is an interesting essay, though I don't agree with it all. For a start, bureaucracies are not all bad. The countries with the highest standards of living all have well-oiled bureaucracies. But it's interesting to see how other people think.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/27557483

Rocket launches may dominate headlines, but the true bottleneck in space exploration lies not in reaching low Earth orbit (LEO), but in venturing beyond it. From LEO to the Moon or Mars, spacecraft still require costly kick stages or oversized boosters. A decades-old idea known as the skyhook could change that equation.

A skyhook is a rotating orbital tether: essentially, a long, strong cable that swings a spacecraft from one orbit to another, much like a sling. Unlike the space elevator concept, a skyhook looks much more buildable with current technology. By lowering the cost of Earth/Moon & interplanetary transport, skyhooks and related tether technologies could help make space travel beyond LEO economically feasible. The linked interview with Marcus Landgraf, from ESA, connects this to breaking resource limitations and enabling prosperity through space expansion.

How Close Are We To Building A Practical Skyhook? Youtube Interview with Dr. Marcus Landgraf, ESA Human and Robotic Exploration Programme)

"Between 2015 and 2024, humanity recorded one of the fastest expansions of basic welfare of all time: 961 million people gained safe drinking water, 1.2 billion gained safe sanitation, and 1.5 billion gained access to basic hygiene services, while the number of unserved fell by nearly 900 million. Coverage has risen to 74%, 58% and 80% respectively, while open defecation has dropped by 429 million people."

One of the most depressing of human biases is to hyperfocus on bad news, to the exclusion of positive things. 'If it bleeds, it leads, ' as the TV news shows say. Even in the social media age, where TV news is fading in importance, the same instincts predominate.

The results? People think the state of the world is much worse than it is. Not just that, they think they are powerless to change things for the better.

Meanwhile, groups of people like UNICEF and WHO, often dismissed as irrelevant do-gooders, go about making the world a better place. If the numbers given access to basic water and sanitation can jump this much in 9 years, then giving it to nearly 100% of people is in our future, and maybe sooner than we think.

1 in 4 people globally still lack access to safe drinking water – WHO, UNICEF