Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailThe world’s biggest AI chip just doubled its specs—without adding an inch.The Cerebras Systems Wafer Scale Engine is about the size of a big dinner plate. All that surface area enables a lot more of everything, from processors to memory. The first WSE chip, , had an incredible 1.2 trillion transistors and 400,000 processing cores. Its successor , except its physical size.The WSE-2 crams in 2.6 trillion transistors and 850,000 cores on the same dinner plate. Its on-chip memory has increased from 18 gigabytes to 40 gigabytes, and the rate...…Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailThe world’s biggest AI chip just doubled its specs—without adding an inch.The Cerebras Systems Wafer Scale Engine is about the size of a big dinner plate. All that surface area enables a lot more of everything, from processors to memory. The first WSE chip, , had an incredible 1.2 trillion transistors and 400,000 processing cores. Its successor , except its physical size.The WSE-2 crams in 2.6 trillion transistors and 850,000 cores on the same dinner plate. Its on-chip memory has increased from 18 gigabytes to 40 gigabytes, and the rate...WW…

Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailRecently, in a Berkeley lab, , a little like a toddler might. Through trial and error, it learned to move in a simulated world. Then its handlers sent it strolling through a minefield of real-world tests to see how it’d fare.And, as it turns out, it fared pretty damn well. With no further fine-tuning, the robot—which is basically just a pair of legs—was able to walk in all directions, squat down while walking, right itself when pushed off balance, and adjust to different kinds of surfaces.It’s the first time a machine learning approach...…Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailRecently, in a Berkeley lab, , a little like a toddler might. Through trial and error, it learned to move in a simulated world. Then its handlers sent it strolling through a minefield of real-world tests to see how it’d fare.And, as it turns out, it fared pretty damn well. With no further fine-tuning, the robot—which is basically just a pair of legs—was able to walk in all directions, squat down while walking, right itself when pushed off balance, and adjust to different kinds of surfaces.It’s the first time a machine learning approach...WW…

Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailWhen OpenAI released its huge natural-language algorithm GPT-3 last summer, jaws dropped. Coders and developers with special access to an early API rapidly discovered new (and unexpected) things GPT-3 could do with naught but a prompt. It wrote passable poetry, produced decent code, calculated simple sums, and with some edits, penned news articles.All this, it turns out, was just the beginning. In a , OpenAI said that tens of thousands of developers are now making apps on the GPT-3 platform.Over 300 apps (and counting) use GPT-3, and...…Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailWhen OpenAI released its huge natural-language algorithm GPT-3 last summer, jaws dropped. Coders and developers with special access to an early API rapidly discovered new (and unexpected) things GPT-3 could do with naught but a prompt. It wrote passable poetry, produced decent code, calculated simple sums, and with some edits, penned news articles.All this, it turns out, was just the beginning. In a , OpenAI said that tens of thousands of developers are now making apps on the GPT-3 platform.Over 300 apps (and counting) use GPT-3, and...WW…

Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailRelativity Space has the audacious goal of and sending it to orbit. Getting to is hard. But completely reinventing how rockets are manufactured at the same time? Harder. Six-year-old upstart Relativity may nail both by the end of this year.After several years designing, building, and testing their Terran 1 rocket, they’re nearly ready to roll. This week the company gave Ars Technica a —and included a pretty visual.The second stage of the Terran 1 they hope to launch later this year is now complete. And in a video showing its printing,...…Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailRelativity Space has the audacious goal of and sending it to orbit. Getting to is hard. But completely reinventing how rockets are manufactured at the same time? Harder. Six-year-old upstart Relativity may nail both by the end of this year.After several years designing, building, and testing their Terran 1 rocket, they’re nearly ready to roll. This week the company gave Ars Technica a —and included a pretty visual.The second stage of the Terran 1 they hope to launch later this year is now complete. And in a video showing its printing,...WW…

Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailThe universe is brimming with light that’s invisible to us humans.The electromagnetic spectrum extends far beyond visible light in both directions. Longer wavelengths include radio waves and shorter wavelengths reach into X-rays and gamma rays.To study the universe in full, then, we need to extend our eyes. Some telescopes reach into the radio part of the spectrum to penetrate the occluding clouds of dust between us and the center of the galaxy, while others study X-rays from high-energy black holes and supernova remnants.But the...…Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailThe universe is brimming with light that’s invisible to us humans.The electromagnetic spectrum extends far beyond visible light in both directions. Longer wavelengths include radio waves and shorter wavelengths reach into X-rays and gamma rays.To study the universe in full, then, we need to extend our eyes. Some telescopes reach into the radio part of the spectrum to penetrate the occluding clouds of dust between us and the center of the galaxy, while others study X-rays from high-energy black holes and supernova remnants.But the...WW…

Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailIn the search for extraterrestrial life, liquid water is crucial. Life as we know it can’t exist without water. This fact has led scientists to look for twins of our planet around other stars in humanity’s ongoing quest for company in the universe. Twin-Earths would be rocky planets about the size of ours that orbit their stars in the habitable zone—a band of temperatures within which liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface, like it does here.The latest estimate of the number of Earth-like planets in the galaxy is suitably...…Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailIn the search for extraterrestrial life, liquid water is crucial. Life as we know it can’t exist without water. This fact has led scientists to look for twins of our planet around other stars in humanity’s ongoing quest for company in the universe. Twin-Earths would be rocky planets about the size of ours that orbit their stars in the habitable zone—a band of temperatures within which liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface, like it does here.The latest estimate of the number of Earth-like planets in the galaxy is suitably...WW…

Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailOur planet’s history is written in its rocks. You can traverse eons by brushing your fingers over the layers of a cliff wall. But beyond a certain point, the record goes blank. Though the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, the oldest-known rocks date back to only around 4 billion years ago. The relentless have recycled its surface.Still, chemical clues can take us further back in time to when young Earth was a lava planet. Scientists believe a series of mammoth impacts—the last of which —liquified the surface and formed planet-wide...…Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailOur planet’s history is written in its rocks. You can traverse eons by brushing your fingers over the layers of a cliff wall. But beyond a certain point, the record goes blank. Though the Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, the oldest-known rocks date back to only around 4 billion years ago. The relentless have recycled its surface.Still, chemical clues can take us further back in time to when young Earth was a lava planet. Scientists believe a series of mammoth impacts—the last of which —liquified the surface and formed planet-wide...WW…

Sign inWelcome! Log into your accountyour usernameyour passwordPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailA password will be e-mailed to you.In the early days of digital computing, the machines were monolithic and isolated. They didn’t communicate. In fact, they couldn’t communicate. There was no lingua franca.This problem was no secret. Computer scientists had been working on ways to network computers as early as 1962. Then on —only a few months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon—grad student, Charley Kline, sent a message from his computer at UCLA to a computer some 350 miles north...…Sign inWelcome! Log into your accountyour usernameyour passwordPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailA password will be e-mailed to you.In the early days of digital computing, the machines were monolithic and isolated. They didn’t communicate. In fact, they couldn’t communicate. There was no lingua franca.This problem was no secret. Computer scientists had been working on ways to network computers as early as 1962. Then on —only a few months after Apollo 11 landed on the moon—grad student, Charley Kline, sent a message from his computer at UCLA to a computer some 350 miles north...WW…

Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailModern life can feel dizzying, like everything is motion and change. But there are some constants we set our lives against: the relative position of the stars wheeling above, the mountaintops below, and the continents on which we walk. These things feel immutable.Of course, they aren’t.The beauty of science is how far it extends our view into space and time. We now know the sun and stars whip around the center of our galaxy just as the Earth orbits the sun. The universe’s are likewise in ceaseless motion, colliding and coalescing in...…Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailModern life can feel dizzying, like everything is motion and change. But there are some constants we set our lives against: the relative position of the stars wheeling above, the mountaintops below, and the continents on which we walk. These things feel immutable.Of course, they aren’t.The beauty of science is how far it extends our view into space and time. We now know the sun and stars whip around the center of our galaxy just as the Earth orbits the sun. The universe’s are likewise in ceaseless motion, colliding and coalescing in...WW…

Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailWar, disease, division—things aren’t looking too rosy for humanity at the moment. But thanks to Microsoft, at least we’ll be listening to Stevie Wonder after the apocalypse. The tech giant is to etch the world’s music onto glass plates, and bury them in a remote arctic mountainside to ride out the end of the world.The will share space with the Global Seed Vault (better known as the ) in Svalbard, Norway. The Doomsday Vault houses the largest collection of agricultural seeds on the planet. The Global Music Vault aims to match its...…Sign inPassword recoveryRecover your passwordyour emailWar, disease, division—things aren’t looking too rosy for humanity at the moment. But thanks to Microsoft, at least we’ll be listening to Stevie Wonder after the apocalypse. The tech giant is to etch the world’s music onto glass plates, and bury them in a remote arctic mountainside to ride out the end of the world.The will share space with the Global Seed Vault (better known as the ) in Svalbard, Norway. The Doomsday Vault houses the largest collection of agricultural seeds on the planet. The Global Music Vault aims to match its...WW…