🟠 Dune: Space Game of Thrones

As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, HBO's new series "Dune: Prophecy" is drawing comparisons to "Game of Thrones" and "House of the Dragon" for its focus on political intrigue and power struggles in a fantastical setting. While set in the expansive sci-fi universe of Frank Herbert's "Dune," the show's emphasis on scheming noble houses and organizational control over civilization has led some critics to dub it "'Game of Thrones' in space."

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🟠 Chinese Mars Rover Finds Signs of Ancient Ocean Shoreline

China's Mars rover, Zhurong, has made an exciting discovery: evidence that suggests an ancient ocean shoreline once existed on Mars. This finding comes from the planet's northern hemisphere. Reports from the Tianwen-1 mission indicate that about 3.5 billion years ago, there may have been a coastline on Mars. This discovery could change how we understand Mars's history and its potential to have once supported life.

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✍️ AI Poetry Outperforms Humans

A recent study published in Nature Scientific Reports reveals that readers not only struggle to differentiate between AI-generated poems and those written by renowned poets but often prefer the AI-created verses. This challenges long-held assumptions about human creativity and the role of AI in poetry.

Researchers identified a phenomenon they call the "more human than human" effect in AI-generated poetry. Participants consistently rated AI poems higher in qualities like rhythm, beauty, and emotional clarity compared to human-authored work.

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💻 OpenAI's Musk Control Fears

According to newly revealed emails from OpenAI's early days, co-founders Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman expressed serious concerns about Elon Musk's desire for control over artificial general intelligence (AGI), highlighting the tensions that shaped the company's tumultuous beginnings.

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🖤 Starship’s Key Engine Test

SpaceX’s Starship rocket hit an important milestone during its sixth test flight, as reported by Space.com. About 38 minutes after launch, one of its six Raptor engines was successfully re-lit for a brief moment. This test was a major goal of the mission, designed to prove that Starship can handle the engine restarts needed for safe re-entry to Earth during future orbital flights.

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📣 Hello everyone! Here's the most exciting AI news from Week 47 of 2024 in our Sunday digest.

NEW RELEASES

🎵 Release of Suno V4: A new version of the best text-to-music AI model. The developers pumped up the sound and added a feature for remastering your old tracks.

💻 The updated GPT-4o model now handles text even better than o1. Available on @GPT4Telegrambot.

🎨 Black Forest Labs has launched FLUX.1 Tools — AI-powered tools for image editing.

🇫🇷 Le Chat, a ChatGPT alternative from France's Mistral, now includes image generation via FLUX 1.1 [pro] and web search functionality.

TO READ

✉️ OpenAI Email Archives. Some emails between OpenAI founders during the company's early days have been published — more insightful than any business book.

🛰 Astronomers are calling for a halt to all Starlink launches: Why scientists oppose Musk's project.

🎓 AI models get smarter by teaching other models. The Learning by Teaching method has been adopted for training LLMs.

📱 Chief AI scientist at Meta, Yann LeCun, explains why AI models won't soon rival humans.

😶‍🌫️ AI has been trained to identify sources of nitrogen dioxide leaks — a highly toxic poison.

🦋 Users are migrating from X to Bluesky, the new social network by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

TO WATCH

🟠 Dune: Prophecy — HBO's new series draws comparisons to "Game of Thrones" in space for its focus on political intrigue and power struggles in a fantastical setting.

🇻🇦 St. Peter's Basilica now has a 3D replica: one of the world's most iconic cathedrals can be visited virtually from home.

TO PLAY

🏍 The top 5 VR games of 2024: Batman's adventures, mech combats, and blood-chilling horror.

Enjoy your Sunday 👍

✨ Photon Shape Discovered

According to a groundbreaking study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a new theory to define the precise shape of a single photon — the smallest unit of light. This discovery could transform our understanding of how light interacts with matter at the quantum level.

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🔴 Olympus Mons, which means "Mount Olympus" in Latin, is a giant volcano on Mars. It stands at approximately 22 km above the Martian surface, which is about 2.5 times the height of Mount Everest. It is the tallest known mountain in the Solar System.

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🌌 TON 618 is the largest black hole ever discovered, with an estimated mass of 40 billion times that of our Sun.

To give you an idea of its size, its event horizon—the boundary where nothing can escape—is about 390 billion kilometers wide. That’s over 40 times the distance from Neptune to the Sun! In fact, TON 618’s diameter is roughly 30 to 40 times larger than our entire Solar System.

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The Biggest Simulation of The Universe

Scientists have just created the largest-ever simulation of the Universe using the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. By modeling over 31 billion cubic megaparsecs of space, this project, called ExaSky, helps us understand how the Universe evolves, including the role of dark matter and galaxy formation.

A video released by the team shows a massive cluster of galaxies coming together. This volume represents just 0.001% of the entire volume of the simulation ⤴️

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📣 Hello everyone! Here's the most exciting AI news from Week 48 of 2024 in our Sunday digest.

▎TWO YEARS WITH CHATGPT

🎂 ChatGPT just turned two! Launched on November 30, 2022, it’s now used by 250 million people every week.

▎TOOLS YOU SHOULD TRY

🎭 Learn how to use Act-One by Runway to create an animated character that perfectly mimics your facial expressions and voice.

▎TO READ

🪐 Scientists created the largest Universe simulation. The ExaSky project models over 31 billion cubic megaparsecs of space to help us understand how the Universe evolves.

✝️ Chat with AI-powered Jesus Christ at St. Peter’s Chapel in Lucerne. This AI model is trained on the New Testament and hundreds of theological texts.

🍽 Meet Zak Yadegari, a 17-year-old student running Cal AI, a startup generating over $12M in revenue.

👗 GlamBots: AI-generated models are starting to replace humans in the fashion industry.

👩‍🎤 Brain-Neural Implants: Discover how neural implants connect to the brain using living neurons.

🤩 AI for Infant Health: AI identifies neurological dysfunctions in newborns based on their behavior in intensive care units.

▎INTERVIEWS

💻 Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes that all scientific discoveries and engineering breakthroughs will soon be based on generative AI.

🖥 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that strong artificial intelligence (AGI) could emerge within 2-3 years.

Enjoy your Sunday 👍

📱 Meta Plans World-Spanning Internet Cables

According to TechCrunch, Meta is embarking on an ambitious $10 billion project to construct a 40,000-kilometer subsea fiber-optic cable network, named "W," which will connect multiple continents and mark the company's first exclusively owned undersea cable infrastructure, aimed at enhancing global connectivity and supporting its platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

➡️ Here is an interactive map with all such cables on the planet (this is what the "World Wide Web" actually looks like).

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☀️ The color of a star is determined by its surface temperature, with hotter stars appearing blue or blue-white and cooler stars appearing red.

🖼️ DeepMind's Genie 2

DeepMind's Genie 2 is a cutting-edge foundation world model that transforms diverse inputs—ranging from text prompts to sketches—into interactive 3D environments with realistic physics and spatial coherence. This technology not only revolutionizes rapid prototyping in game development and AI training but also highlights potential applications in virtual reality, education, and robotics, despite current limitations in interactivity duration and input dependency.

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