NextBigFuture.com

Nextbigfuture has tried to simplify the reason why global population decline is not something to be ignored. While the world was fine when we had 4 billion people in 1974, we will be deep into disaster if the world population declines to 4 billion in 2080-2120. Fertile women would drop to 5% of the population ... Read more

RocketStar, a US based startup, has successfully demonstrated an electric propulsion unit for spacecraft that uses nuclear fusion-enhanced pulsed plasma. During ground tests the process did create ionizing radiation and improved the base propulsion unit's thrust by 50%. FireStar Drive markedly improves performance, utilizing high-speed protons from ionized water vapor. When protons interact with boron ... Read more

Tesla indicated in August, 2023 they were activating 10,000 Nvidia H100 cluster and over 200 Petabytes of hot cache (NVMe) storage. This memory is used to train the FSD AI on the massive amount of video driving data. Elon Musk posted yesterday that Tesla FSD training is no longer compute constrained. Tesla has likely activated ... Read more

Here is an example of a better system for talking with humans and having a real memory. They are showing used in text chat mode but adding a voice system is just a matter of system cost. NOTE: I have seen the AIGO hyperfast language parsing and hyperfast knowledge graph in action in DEBUG mode. ... Read more

AI is quickly changing everything. Sam Altman , CEO of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT, just told us what to expect with AI and AGI. Here we look at the most important things that Sam Altman says in his own words during his second two hour interview with Lex Fridman. Sam defines his goals for ... Read more

Get ready for major progress. Tesla FSD and Teslabot will accelerate. Tesla is no long AI compute constrained. Now we will see what unrestricted progress looks like. Yeah, 99% of people have no idea. And improvement will accelerate dramatically now that we are no longer AI training compute constrained. - Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 22, ... Read more

Millions of drones are being used in the Russian and Ukraine war. How is this changing the fighting? What will be the counter-measures? There are also millions of artillery shells being used. However, drones and artillery shells are expended every day. It is tens of thousands of each that are being used each day.

Many SpaceX Starship heat tiles fell off during the last orbital launch. The number of heat tiles that fell off were so high that one group of people have found some that washed up from the ocean after a storm. The heat tiles are light and fragile. SpaceX must determine improved ways to prevent the ... Read more

Hinrichs Zanegler, Tesla Semi advocate, predicts Tesla will produce and deliver between 500 and 1,000 semi's before the high-volume line begins ramping up. He has investigated the supply chain of the Tesla Semi. Tesla is mostly getting supplier parts for the Tesla Semi. Tesla makes the battery packs, plaid motors, invertors and some other mainly ... Read more

Last August, former Tesla AI engineer Tim Zaman posted on X that a Tesla AI cluster, built using 10,000 of Nvidia's H100 chips, was ready to go live. Musk said a post on X in January that while a Dojo supercomputer cost $500 million to build, Tesla will spend more than that on Nvidia hardware ... Read more

Tesla has started rolling out a new FSD software update which is version 2024.2.11. Tesla releases Tap to Park' in update 2024.2.11: Uses FSD Beta v12 Currently employee-only Public rollout expected soon Teslas have had Autopark capability for several years. However, autopark would only work on Tesla with ultrasonic sensors (USS). Tesla ... Read more

There is a difference a world population that is 4 billion and strongly growing versus 4 billion and shrinking. When I write about global population collapse there are many people who will say that they lived in a world with 4 billion people and it was fine. This like saying they were in an airplane ... Read more

The first human Neuralink patient controlling a computer and playing chess just by thinking. He is paralyzed.

Meta is working on adding latent space planning/search to large language model AI. 1H-GAP (https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02682) 2Diffusion World Model (https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03570) 3TAP (https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.10291) 4LaMCTS (https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00708) 5LaP3 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10544) 6LaSynth (https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00101) 7LaMOO (https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03173) Rumored OpenAI Q* Is Optimization in Abstract Representation Space The innovation in Q* lies in its optimization process, conducted not within the space of possible text ... Read more

Here are the key points of a Lancet study on global fertility. Global Fertility rates will continue to collapse even if all countries adopt the current best pro-baby policies (childcare subsidies, extended parental leave, insurance coverage expansion for infertility treatment). Future fertility rates were would drop to a global TFR (total fertility rate) of 183 ... Read more

Optimus Teslabot is ready for field trials in multiple factories according a job posting. New Job Posting: To drive the deployment of robots for trial applications ... execute pilot applications of humanoid robots in various manufacturing environments ... cover multiple job sites and may require frequent travel. Optimus is ready for field trials in the ... Read more

Tesla is adding smart summon to the Tesla FSD. You will use an app and position an X on a map to tell the car where to drive by itself.

Caresoft is doing the first teardown analysis of the Tesla Cybertruck. The things they are looking at are: 1. The gigacastings also form supports for the front and rear seats. 2. All of the 48 volt wiring attachments are blue. 3. High voltage connections are orange 4. They are analyzing the steer by wire and ... Read more

Two weeks ago the Korean group presented new room temperature superconductivity research and this week the Chinese research group published new research on LK99 type superconductors. Are we at a breakthrough? What has been done in this new research? China has published new research on improved copper and sulfur codoped material with a stronger meissner ... Read more

Nvidia has increased compute power faster than Moore's law for the past 8 years. Nvidia plans to launch new chips every 6 months for several years. The pace of their innovation is increasing. The Nvidia Blackwell GPU is not just a chip it is an entire system weighing 1.5 tons. A 32000 GPU data center ... Read more

Stephen Wolfram's conclusions: 00:49 Won't AI Eventually Be Able to Do Everything? AI cannot solve science but it can contribute to speeding up science Science was transformed by math centuries ago. What can we expect AI to be able or unable to do for science? 5:01 The Hard Limit of Computational Irreducibility This constrains what ... Read more

SpaceX COO Gwynn Shotwell said We'll figure out what happened on both stages as well and get back to flight, hopefully in about six weeks, flight four hopefully, beginning part of May. SpaceX's President and COO Gwynne Shotwell gave the opening keynote at the Satellite 2024's opening session today. Shotwell also said 1. SpaceX's immediate ... Read more

Tesla FSD 12.3 is getting very strong reviews as much better than version 11 and being a huge upgrade over version 12.2. It seems to be safer than FSD version 11 with many major improvements like smoother humanlike driving and the ability to perform U-turns. Teslascope indicates at least 3% of FSD drivers have it ... Read more

Elon Musk tweeted that SpaceX Starship will travel across the solar system and to the cloud of objects around us. The cloud of objects around us are either referring to the Kuiper Belt (35-80AU and possibly larger) and the Oort Comet Cloud (0.03 to 3.2 light-years). Nextbigfuture has covered recent research findings that the Kuiper ... Read more

Chinese researchers are making variations of LK99 room temperature superconductor materials with more sulfur and copper in the chemistry. They are publishing results with stronger magnetic indications of a Meissner effect. The chinese researchers have been online discussing their room temperature superconducting research and the challenges of the materials. Here are the issues discussed. * ... Read more

Chinese researchers have published a new non-peer reviewed paper on their sulfur copper doped led apatite room temperature superconductor. They have increased the Meissner effect signal. Supplemental material from the China researchers. This describes the precise work done show they did not make measurement errors. Background Context In mid-2023, the Original Korean researchers discovered the ... Read more

The NVIDIA Blackwell platform was announced today. It will run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than the H100. The Blackwell GPU architecture has six transformative technologies for accelerated computing, which will help unlock breakthroughs in data processing, engineering simulation, electronic design automation, computer-aided ... Read more

Nvidia has made a software, AI and hardware platform to make developing humanoid robots far faster and easier. They have software to help with the testing, learning and development.

Lex Fridman had another interview of Sam Altman of OpenAI. The highlights: Coding will go away. We will just talk to AI to describe what we want and AI will create it in code. Sam still will not talk about OpenAI Q-Star. Therefore, we know it is still real and big breakthrough. We just do ... Read more

x-Tesla AI lead, Andrej Karpathy gave a one hour general-audience introduction to Large Language Models. The core technical component behind systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard. What they are, where they are headed, comparisons and analogies to present-day operating systems, and some of the security-related challenges of this new computing paradigm. Context: This video is ... Read more

SpaceX had the huge success on March 14, 2024 with the successful launch of Starship to orbit. The Super Heavy booster returned most of the way but lost control before a soft landing attempt. The Starship was lost after about 49 minutes when it tried to re-enter but burned up with some lost heat shield. ... Read more

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla AI lead, said efforts over the past several months went into making this new approach beat the previous v11 stack (developed over many years). We believe v12 has net surpassed it now, and hence the next set of 12.x releases should bring unprecedented progress. This is the first version of FSD that ... Read more

Astronomer used to think that the Kuiper Belt was a few hundred times larger than the Asteroid belt. They thought it was a donut shaped structure that started at Neptune and extended out 2 billion miles. Recent observation suggests it extends out at least 5 billion miles. This is based upon finding about 2000 objects, ... Read more

China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation's (CASIC) plans to build a giant magnetic launcher to propel airplanes up to speeds where they can start hypersonic scramjet engines. CASIC has built a 2000 meter long low-vacuum track high-speed maglev test facility in the industrial heartland of Datong, Shanxi province. This is able to accelerate heavy object ... Read more

Elon Musk says Tesla FSD V12.4 is another big jump in capabilities and the training compute limitations are almost gone. AI expert James Douma had said that with additional training and data, he expected FSD V12.X to reach 0.1-1% of the interventions for Tesla FSD v11.X. If the level of improvement expected by James Douma ... Read more

Chuck Cook is a supertester of Tesla FSD software. He has declared Tesla FSD V12.3 a gamechanging build. Chuck Cook on a 40 minute drive had no problems with areas that have always caused issues for other versions. It handled double lights, his unprotected left turns etc... It handled the unprotected left turn but there ... Read more

Cerebras Systems has doubled its existing world record of fastest AI chip with the introduction of the Wafer Scale Engine 3. The WSE-3 delivers twice the performance of the previous record-holder, the Cerebras WSE-2, at the same power draw and for the same price. Purpose built for training the industry's largest AI models, the 5nm-based, ... Read more

Spacex reports that this is the second test of Starship where all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy Booster started up successfully and completed a full-duration burn during ascent. Starship has a second successful hot-stage separation. It powering down all but three of Super Heavy's Raptor engines and successfully igniting the six second ... Read more

John Barnett, 62, from Louisiana was found dead in his vehicle outside a Charleston hotel on Saturday morning. Barnett, who worked for Boeing for 32 years, filed a whistleblower complaint alleging safety concerns. The United States Department of Labor was working through the discovery phase of its investigation and is set to begin hearings on ... Read more

SpaceX has shown us the inside of the Starship while it was in orbit and opening the Pez bay door. Gases in the bay were shown escaping the door. This would be the real life venting into space shown in many science fiction movies. They also provide the first footage of re-entry plasma heating. This ... Read more

Boeing whistleblower was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head and separately video evidence has been destroyed. This comes just a FEW DAYS after ex-Boeing employee John Barnett began handing over key pieces of evidence in a lawsuit alleging the airplane manufacturer covered up safety concerns such as : One-in-four oxygen masks ... Read more

Launch - Successful. Separation - Successful. Boost back - Successful . Booster engine re-light for landing failed Super Heavy hover - Not successful. Achieving orbit" - Huge success. Door open / close - Successful. Prop transfer - Big success. Re-entry upper stage - Partial success. Upper stage hover - Unsuccessful I believe.

Here is a summary of what seems to have happened. Launch - Successful. Separation - Successful. Boost back - Successful I think. Super Heavy hover - Not successful. Achieving orbit" - Huge success. Door open / close - Successful. Prop transfer - Big success. Re-entry upper stage - Partial success. Upper stage hover - Unsuccessful ... Read more

The SpaceX Starship launching tomorrow will enable a new generation of larger Gen 3 Starlink satellites. They will weigh over 2 tons and will unfold to a wingspan of 60 meters for larger antennas and solar panels. The space station is about 75 meters wide while the SpaceX Gen 3 will have a 60 meters ... Read more

The FCC has authorized SpaceX to conduct communications in the 71.0-76.0 GHz (spaceto-Earth) and 81.0-86.0 GHz (Earth-to-space) frequency bands (collectively, E-band), with the 7,500 Gen2 Starlink satellites. Last year, SpaceX said using E-band radio waves for backhaul would enable Starlink Gen 2 to provide about four times more capacity per satellite than earlier iterations. There ... Read more

Lordstown Motors has completed a bankruptcy deal. GM invested $75 million in the EV startup Lordstown Motors in 2019, and then sold in late 2021. GM invested as part of the sale of an Ohio plant to the electric vehicle startup as well as a $675 million SPAC deal that took Lordstown public. Lordstown Motor ... Read more

Charge Enterprises built electric charging for dealers, hotels and other business customers. They made as much as $750 million per year in revenue but almost always had losses. GM and Stellantis were among the funders and customers of Charge Enterprises. In August 2023, GM, Honda, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Kia, and Stellantis announced a $1 billion ... Read more

Figure AI humanoid bot responds to questions about what it sees and correctly identifies an apple on plate, dishes and the person. The humanoid bot then acts to use those objects to perform a request. This showed basic reasoning capability. Figure AI was recently funded with $675 million by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, ... Read more

Stealth Startup, Cognition, backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and former-Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu, announced a fully autonomous AI software engineer called Devin. Devin can handle entire development projects end-to-end. It can write the code, fix bugs associated with it until final execution. This is the first offering of this ... Read more