NextBigFuture.com

DARPA and Northrop Grumman have made a new drone with X-plane designation XRQ-73. The Series Hybrid Electric Propulsion AiRcraft Demonstration program is known as SHEPARD. SHEPARD is an X-prime program, leveraging the series hybrid electric architecture and some of the component technologies from the earlier AFRL/IARPA Great Horned Owl (GHO) project. The idea behind a ... Read more

The Supreme Court SEC decision took away the major method of penalizing those found to have committed fraud in the securities industry. Congress strengthened law in 2010 by authorizing the SEC to use independent administrative law judges to conduct hearings, to make factual findings, and to impose fines on those accused of securities fraud. Congress ... Read more

The Supreme Court overruled the Chevron Deference. This ruling has existed for 40 years. It was the courts letting regulatory agencies of the US government decide about ambiguous situations. The courts would decide about facts but let the agencies interpret many things. The Agencies are not allowed to make things up as they go along. ... Read more

Using the AIs will be way more valuable than AI training. AI training - feed large amounts of data into a learning algorithm to produce a model that can make predictions. AI Training is how we make the AI that is useful. AI inference is where we do useful and valuable things with the trained ... Read more

The biggest concern for the US Air Force is if takes over 15 years to build its full order of even just 100 B-21 Raiders then the new stealth bomber could be outdated before the last get made. Technology is increasing at a rapid rate. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, quantum computers, autonomous systems, etc. ... Read more

China had 65% of global wind production in 2023. China wind power domination goes along with domination of solar power production. China has about 80-85% of solar power manufacturing capacity. Four Chinese wind turbine original equipment manufacturers (OEM) are in the top five global companies in wind. 16.3 gigawatts (GW) wind was installed. Goldwind maintained ... Read more

In the first seven months of Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, spending on net interest has reached $514 billion, surpassing spending on both national defense ($498 billion) and Medicare ($465 billion). Overall spending has totaled $3.9 trillion thus far. Spending on interest is also more than all the money spent this year on veterans, education, and ... Read more

SpaceX has launched over 1,000th Starlink satellites in 2024 alone. SpaceX now has over 6,600, providing high-speed internet to 79 countries worldwide. Most of the satellites are Version 2 Mini Starlinks with increased bandwidth. SpaceX has been deploying Direct-to-Cellphone Starlinks since January 2024. This will enable enabling global texting, calling, and browsing with existing unmodified ... Read more

Ilya Sutskever, X-Chief Scientist at OpenAI has created a new startup Safe Superintelligence. Ilya was the Chief Scientist at OpenAI and enabled OpenAI to become the leader in Artificial Intelligence. Sutskever has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. He is notably the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, of AlexNet, ... Read more

Waltham, Massachusetts, 27th June 2024, CyberNewsWire

Last weekend Tesla FSD 12.4.1 was expected to go to wide release but it did not. This weekend if there is no safety regression there should be a push of FSD 12.4.2. It is reported that 12.4.2 is much smoother. The challenge is keeping safety high, while increasing ride comfort. The 12.4.2 build moved into ... Read more

NASA has selected SpaceX to develop and deliver the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle that will provide the capability to deorbit the International space station and ensure avoidance of risk to populated areas. The single-award contract has a total potential value of $843 million. The launch service for the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle will be a future procurement. ... Read more

Sour Grapes is when you disparage something that has proven unattainable. Coping is a slang that refers to a mechanism or a self-delusion that an individual clings to in order deal with a situation. European Space Agency Director of Space Transportation Toni Tolker-Nielsen says he does not think Starship will be a game-changer or a ... Read more

SpaceX launched Falcon Heavy again and again we had the beautiful double rocket booster landing. SpaceX Falcon Heavy is the rocket that is lifting the biggest and most important missions for NASA. There have been 10 out of 10 Successful Falcon Heavy double booster recoveries. Three of the next 6 Falcon Heavy launches over two ... Read more

Electric hypercar maker Rimac today unveiled their robotaxi prototype, called Verne. Begin operation in 2026 Two seater Uses Mobileye technology Vehicle is Level 4 fully autonomous 43'' display, 17 speakers Rimac has already signed agreements to launch it in 11 cities in the EU, UK, and the Middle East ... Read more

McLean, United States of America, 26th June 2024, CyberNewsWire

Volkswagen plans to invest up to $5 billion in electric vehicle startup Rivian, starting with an initial investment of $1 billion. The additional $4 billion is expected to be invested following the establishment of a joint venture. Rivian is up about 50% afterhours. The Rivian and Volkswagen Group joint venture will create vehicle software. Volkswagen ... Read more

Several hundred pounds of weight savings from less EMI (electromagnetic interference shielding) materials would reduce EV (electric vehicle) weight which will reduce batteries needed for EVs. This will reduce EV cost by $2200. This will be the impact of 99.7% efficient inverters.

Pasqal, French Quantum Computer Company, has successfully loaded over 1,000 atoms in a single shot within their quantum computing setup, a significant leap towards scalable quantum processors. This milestone demonstrates the feasibility of large-scale neutral atom quantum computing and enhances the potential to solve complex optimization problems and quantum simulations. Key highlights include: Successful trapping ... Read more

CATL is using condensed battery (500 Watt hours per kg) is developing electric aircraft started with smaller planes, ranging from 1-ton to 8.8-ton, Zeng said at the BEYOND International Science and Technology Innovation Expo on May 22 in Macau. CATL was already test-flying 4-ton aircraft, but reaching a commercial level will require success with aircraft ... Read more

The SpaceX Super Heavy Starship is the largest and heaviest object ever flown it will be caught with the launch tower. Elon Musk talked about the flaps and heat shield. SpaceX will over-compensate for the flap and heat shield issues for the next flight. SpaceX will redesign the forward flaps. The front section flaps will ... Read more

Thirteen passengers onboard a Korea Airlines flight to Taiwan have been taken to hospital, after their Boeing aircraft dropped more than 25,000 feet following a fault in the cabin pressurization system. The plane subsequently dropped from an altitude of 35,000 feet to under 10,000 feet within the span of ten minutes, according to airplane tracking ... Read more

Boeing Starliner has experienced problems with five of its 28 reaction control system (RCS) thrusters and there have been five helium leaks in Starliner's propulsion system. Starliner was initially scheduled to spend about a week at the ISS on this shakeout cruise. But on June 9, NASA and Boeing announced that its departure had been ... Read more

Elon Musk showed Everyday Astronaut the SpaceX Starbase and rocket factories. SpaceX has a new Raptor engine that will be a couple hundred pounds lighter without a heat shield. It will have built in cooling channels. This is the version of the Raptor engine which wil be produced by the thousands. The Texas Starbase will ... Read more

Tesla FSD is changing radically with version 12.3 having three times the miles between interventions vs version 11. FSD 12.4.X could have 5-10 times the miles between interventions. New teen human drivers are three times more likely to have accidents than average human drivers. Removing the human driver completely to achieve robotaxi will involve government ... Read more

TSMC (Taiwan semiconductor) has a major multi-year plan to create rectangular substrate (510 millimeters by 515 millimeters) with over triple the usable area of current round wafers. The rectangular shape means there would also be less unused area left over at the edges. this means less waste because of the rectangular shape and lower costs ... Read more

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have successfully demonstrated the first 270-kW wireless power transfer to a light-duty electric vehicle. The demonstration used a Porsche Taycan and was conducted in collaboration with Volkswagen Group of America using the ORNL-developed polyphase wireless charging system. As a light-duty passenger vehicle, the Porsche Taycan ... Read more

Tesla 4680s have had slower ramping because of problems with the Cathode needing a wet process and cathodes made by other companies. Auto experts Munro Associates have taken apart a cybertruck and they think a dry process was used for both the cathode and the anode. This may not be for all 4680 batteries and ... Read more

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the best performing AI model according to the advanced Google Proof Q&A test. The concept of a Google-proof" Q&A AI test and other benchmarks for evaluating higher-performing AI models are critical in measuring the capabilities and progress of artificial intelligence. These tests aim to assess AI's ability to understand, reason, and ... Read more

The Chinchilla compute optimal point for an 8B (8 billion parameter) model would be train it for ~200B (billion) tokens. (if you were only interested to get the most bang-for-the-buck" w.r.t. model performance at that size). So this is training ~75X beyond that point, which is unusual but personally, [Karpathy] thinks this is extremely welcome. ... Read more

Dr Alan Thompson reports that OpenAI says 92% of Fortune 500 companies are subscribed to GPT, and the average spend by each organization has now hit US$18,000,000 per year. In 2023, the average spend across foundation model APIs, self-hosting, and fine-tuning models was $7M across the dozens of companies that megaVC Andressen Horowitz spoke to. ... Read more

Elon Musk announced Tesla's plans to expand its AI hardware capabilities, aiming to increase power and cooling capacity from 130MW to over 500MW within the next 18 months. The expansion will support a mix of Tesla's own AI hardware and Nvidia/other chips, with a goal to have half of the AI compute building dedicated to ... Read more

Miami, United States, 20th June 2024, CyberNewsWire

Dubai, UAE, 20th June 2024, CyberNewsWire

Cary, United States, 20th June 2024, CyberNewsWire

Ilya Sutskever is recognized as a leader and genius who has delivered breakthrough Artificial Intelligence. Ilya was the Chief Scientist at OpenAI and enabled OpenAI to become the leader in Artificial Intelligence. Sutskever has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. He is notably the co-inventor, with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, ... Read more

Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, says humanoid robots will become as common as cars and there will be significant breakthroughs in robotics in the next 2-3 years. This would be about 2 billion humanoid robots. Elon Musk said he thinks there will be ten times as many humanoid robots in the future. This would be 20 ... Read more

The Milestone June 8, 1974 agreement between the USA and Saudi Arabia was not about exclusively pricing oil in US dollars. It was about enabling Saudi Arabia to use its windfall of oil money into the US economy. The petrodollar system does and did become dominant but it was for mutual economic benefit. The non-renewal ... Read more

Preparations are underway for a late July launch of the fifth SpaceX orbital starship but the eighth heavy booster is already partially built. The eighth heavy booster has redesigned block 2 features. The block 2 Starship and booster will be 10-20% longer and will be lighter for more payload. Felix Schlang at the What About ... Read more

Elon Musk says SpaceX is targeting a Starship launch with a Mechazilla tower booster catch in about 4-6 weeks. The fourth (previous) launch had a simulated booster tower catch where the booster hovered over water. The Mechazilla tower arms are about the size of the drone ship used to land and recover Falcon 9 boosters. ... Read more

Whole Mars had his third zero intervention drive in a row with Tesla FSD 12.4.1. The destination is given with verbal instruction. FSD 12.4.2 should get fairly widely distributed this weekend. Tesla FSD drivers will not need to touch the steering wheel and could have about 1-3 weeks of zero intervention drives in a cleaned ... Read more

Nvidia has surpassed the valuation of Microsoft and Apple to become the most valuable company in the world. Nvidia is worth 3.34 trillion. Microsoft is worth 3.32 trillion. Apple is worth 3.29 trillion. Nvidia has a PEG ratio of 1.66 Microsoft has a PEG (Price earnings growth) ratio of 2.23. Apple has a PEG ratio ... Read more

Paris, France, 18th June 2024, CyberNewsWire

Some recently manufactured Boeing and Airbus jets have components made from titanium that was sold using fake documentation. The falsified documents are being investigated by Spirit AeroSystems, which supplies fuselages for Boeing and wings for Airbus, as well as the Federal Aviation Administration. The investigation comes after a parts supplier found small holes in the ... Read more

AI large language models have been especially weak on math. There are now several papers from Google Deep Mind, Alibaba and other universities where AI large language models are at Math Olympiad levels and multiple step reasoning even with small models. It's finally here. Q* rings true. Tiny LLMs are as good at math as ... Read more

The Boeing Starliner, is set to undock from the ISS on June 22. This is a several day delay. During its current mission, the spacecraft has encountered a fifth helium leak and a stuck oxidizer valve. Teams currently are assessing what impacts, if any, five small leaks in the service module helium manifolds would have ... Read more

Elon Musk confirms that the new Tesla Roadster can fly. Spaceviews made an analysis of cold gas thrusters. Elon has previously said the roadster will use a SpaceX cold gas thruster system with ultra-high-pressure air in a composite over-wrapped pressure vessel in place of the 2 rear seats. The SpaceX option package for new Tesla ... Read more