In other news, a marketing team claims it can listen to consumers through their phones, raising privacy concerns. The race to dominate wearable AI is intensifying, with big tech companies investing heavily in AR glasses and goggles. Robotaxi firm Cruise is laying off a quarter of its staff following a serious accident. The newsletter also mentions the thriving market for reselling returned items, Europe's lack of interest in American defense tech, and the challenges of cultivating lab-grown chicken. The newsletter concludes with a feature on the development of impossible musical instruments that could change the future of music.
Key takeaways:
- Vertex Pharmaceuticals is developing a pill to replace its CRISPR gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell disease, aiming to overcome the treatment's limitations such as high cost and patient discomfort.
- OpenAI's superalignment team has released its first results, outlining a technique that allows a less powerful language model to supervise a more powerful one, potentially paving the way for human supervision of superhuman machines.
- Google DeepMind has used a large language model to solve a long-standing unsolved problem in pure mathematics, demonstrating the potential of such models to make new discoveries.
- Researchers are working on needle-free Covid vaccines that can be inhaled or sprayed into the nose, aiming to boost immunity in the respiratory tract and potentially reduce virus transmission.