AI models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic lost money betting on soccer matches over a Premier League season, in a new study suggesting even the most advanced systems struggle to analyze the real world over long periods.

The “KellyBench” report released this week by AI start-up General Reasoning highlights the gap between AI’s rapidly advancing capabilities in certain tasks, such as writing software, and its shortcomings in other kinds of human problems.

London-based General Reasoning tested eight top AI systems in a virtual re-creation of the 2023–24 Premier League season, providing them with detailed historical data and statistics about each team and previous games. The AIs were instructed to build models that would maximize returns and manage risk.

Read full article

Comments

The Artemis era well and truly began Friday evening when a shiny spacecraft that had traveled 700,000 miles around the Moon, carrying four astronauts, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

For NASA, for its international partners, and for all of humanity the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission marked a return to deep space by our species after more than half a century.

It was a spectacular achievement, and NASA deserves credit for making something what is very difficult look relatively easy. But it also raises an important question: What comes next?

Read full article

Comments

Slamming into the atmosphere at more than 30 times the speed of sound, NASA’s Orion spacecraft blazed a trail over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, returning home with four astronauts and safely capping humanity’s first voyage to the Moon in nearly 54 years.

Temperatures outside the capsule builtup to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as a sheath of plasma enveloped the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity , and its four long-distance travelers, temporarily blocking radio signals the Moon ship and Mission Control in Houston. Flying southwest to northeast, the spacecraft steered toward a splashdown zone southwest of San Diego, where a US Navy recovery ship held position to await the crew’s homecoming. Ground teams regained communications with Orion commander Reid Wiseman after a six-minute blackout.

Airborne tracking planes beamed live video of Orion’s descent back to Mission Control, showing the capsule jettison its parachute cover and deploy a series of chutes to stabilize its plunge toward the Pacific. Then, three larger main chutes, each with an area of 10,500 square feet, opened to slow Orion for splashdown at 8:07 pm EDT Friday (00:07 UTC Saturday).

Read full article

Comments

Several Californians sued Sutter Health and MemorialCare this week over allegations that an AI transcription tool was used to record them without their consent, in violation of state and federal law.

The proposed class-action lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, states that, within the past six months, the plaintiffs received medical care at various Sutter and MemorialCare facilities.

During those visits, medical staff used Abridge AI. According to the complaint, this system “captured and processed their confidential physician-patient communications. Plaintiffs did not receive clear notice that their medical conversations would be recorded by an artificial intelligence platform, transmitted outside the clinical setting, or processed through third-party systems.”

Read full article

Comments

North America wouldn't look much like it currently does without a tectonic plate that has largely been lost to the Earth's geological history. The Farallon plate, which has since largely vanished underneath North America, helped build the West Coast by slamming large island chains into the continent as it disappeared. California wouldn't exist without it, and one of the remaining fragments of the plate presently power the volcanoes of the Cascades.

Now, a new paper suggests that the Farallon plate is still making its presence felt far from the coasts, powering one of North America's most distinctive phenomena: the Yellowstone hotspot, which has periodically blanketed much of the continent with ash. The new proposal suggests that the plate's vanishing act has created stresses that have opened paths for molten rock to reach the surface.

Hot spot or not?

Geologic hot spots exist around the globe; they're areas where deep material from the Earth's interior finds its way to the surface far from the edges of plates. In many cases, the heat that powers these hot spots is the product of what's called a mantle plume: a blob of hot molten rock that convection drives to the surface of the mantle. In many cases, the plume appears to stay in place as the plates drift across it, creating a chain of progressively older islands as you move away from the hot spot.

Read full article

Comments

Formula 1 is enjoying something of an unexpected break right now. The war in the Middle East saw the cancellation of F1 races that were due to be held this month in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Instead, the teams will use this time to further develop their cars. For teams like Aston Martin , Cadillac, and Williams, it will be a welcome respite and a chance to catch up to the midfield. Even Mercedes, clear and away the championship favorite this year, has things to work on if it wants to stop losing so many positions at the start of each race or have an easier time passing cars in traffic.

That should keep the mechanics and engineers quite busy, but in case not, technical representatives from each team as well as the FIA (the sport's governing body) are sitting down throughout the month to try to fix some problems that are a consequence of F1's new technical rules.

This is about hybrids, you say?

From the start of this year, F1 cars have new hybrid power units. There's a 1.6 L turbocharged V6 engine that runs on carbon-neutral gasoline , which generates 400 kW (536 hp). And there's an electric motor-generator unit (or MGU) that outputs up to 350 kW (469 hp) as long as there's charge in the 4 MJ (1.1 kWh) battery pack. As batteries go, that's about the right size for something like a Prius, but in an F1 car at full deployment, it goes from full to empty in little more than 11 seconds.

Read full article

Comments

The Trump administration has stepped up an effort to unmask a Reddit user who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After failing to obtain information through a summons issued to Reddit, the government reportedly issued a subpoena demanding that Reddit provide the information and appear before a grand jury in Washington, DC.

The Intercept described the subpoena today. "According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month," the article said.

The legal saga began in US District Court for the Northern District of California. On March 12, the anonymous Reddit user whose information is being sought filed a motion to quash a summons seeking a host of information from Reddit. The summons was issued by the Department of Homeland Security and directed Reddit to turn information over to an ICE senior special agent.

Read full article

Comments

Microsoft says it hears the complaints people have about the current state of Windows, and it wants to fix them. One of those fixes is another overhaul for its Windows Insider Program, the public beta system that Microsoft has used since Windows 10 to test and preview upcoming versions of the operating system and new app updates.

The company hinted at this in its " commitment to Windows quality " post last month, and it's announcing details today in another post attributed to Microsoft Principal Group Product Manager Alec Oot.

Since its last reorganization in 2023 , the Windows Insider Program has had four testing channels. From least to most stable, these are the Canary channel, the Dev channel, the Beta channel, and the Release Preview channel. Both Canary and Dev are for earlier builds of Windows and new apps, while Beta tends to get things that are closer to finished and much more likely to ship to the general public. The Release Preview channel is a new Windows version's last stop before public release and is usually near-final.

Read full article

Comments

Mixing corn starch and water in appropriate amounts produces a slurry that is liquid when stirred slowly but hardens when you punch it—a substance colorfully dubbed “oobleck.” (The name derives from a 1949 Dr. Seuss children’s book, Bartholomew and the Oobleck .) High-speed imaging and force measurements have revealed another surprising property of oobleck drops hitting a flat surface, according to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

As previously reported , in an ideal fluid , viscosity largely depends on temperature and pressure: Water will continue to flow regardless of other forces acting on it, such as stirring or mixing. In a non-Newtonian fluid, the viscosity changes in response to an applied strain or shearing force, thereby straddling the boundary between liquid and solid behavior. Stirring a cup of water produces a shearing force, and the water shears to move out of the way. The viscosity remains unchanged. But for non-Newtonian fluids like oobleck, the viscosity changes when a shearing force is applied.

Ketchup, for instance, is a shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluid, which is one reason smacking the bottom of the bottle doesn’t make the ketchup come out any faster; the application of force increases the viscosity. Yogurt, gravy, mud, pudding, and thickened pie fillings are other examples. And so is oobleck.

Read full article

Comments