Andy Jones, a London-based machine learning researcher, writes: An overhang is when you have had the ability to build transformative AI for quite some time, but you haven't because no-one's realised it's possible. Then someone does and surprise! It's a lot more capable than everyone expected. I am worried we're in an overhang right now. I think we right now have the ability to build an orders-of-magnitude more powerful system than we already have, and I think GPT-3 is the trigger for 100x-larger projects at Google and Facebook and the like, with timelines measured in months.

GPT-3 is the first AI system that has obvious, immediate, transformative economic value. While much hay has been made about how much more expensive it is than a typical AI research project, in the wider context of megacorp investment it is insignificant. GPT-3 has been estimated to cost $5m in compute to train, and -- looking at the author list and OpenAI's overall size - maybe another $10m in labour, on the outside. Google, Amazon and Microsoft all each spend ~$20bn/year on R&D and another ~$20bn each on capital expenditure. Very roughly it totals to ~$100bn/year. So dropping $1bn or more on scaling GPT up by another factor of 100x is entirely plausible right now. All that's necessary is that tech executives stop thinking of NLP as cutesy blue-sky research and start thinking in terms of quarters-till-profitability.

sciencehabit writes: Microbes buried beneath the sea floor for more than 100 million years are still alive, a new study reveals. When brought back to the lab and fed, they started to multiply. The microbes are oxygen-loving species that somehow exist on what little of the gas diffuses from the ocean surface deep into the seabed. The discovery raises the "insane" possibility, as one of the scientists put it, that the microbes have been sitting in the sediment dormant, or at least slowly growing without dividing, for eons. The new work demonstrates "microbial life is very persistent, and often finds a way to survive," says Virginia Edgcomb, a microbial ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved in the work.

What's more, by showing that life can survive in places biologists once thought uninhabitable, the research speaks to the possibility of life elsewhere in the Solar System, or elsewhere in the universe. "If the surface of a particular planet does not look promising for life, it may be holding out in the subsurface," says Andreas Teske, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who was also not involved with the new study. Researchers have known that life exists "under the floorboards" of the ocean for more than 15 years. But geomicrobiologist Yuki Morono of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology wanted to know the limits of such life. Microbes are known to live in very hot or toxic environments, but can they live where there's little food to eat? To find out, Morono and his colleagues mounted a drilling expedition in the South Pacific Gyre, a site of intersecting ocean currents east of Australia that is considered the deadest part of the world's oceans, almost completely lacking the nutrients needed for survival. When they extracted cores of clay and other sediments from as deep as 5700 meters below sea level, they confirmed the samples did indeed contain some oxygen, a sign that there was very little organic material for bacteria to eat.

Facebook in recent weeks has approached a handful of small venture capital firms to discuss becoming an investor in their funds, The Information reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The VC strategy, which also includes direct investments in startups, aims to give the social network early, valuable insight into a wider swath of companies. From a report: To run the new investing initiative, Facebook recently appointed Sunita Parasuraman, a nine-year veteran of the company who previously ran the treasury for its embattled Libra cryptocurrency project. Former Kleiner Perkins general partner Eric Feng, now a Facebook employee, is helping approach funds, sources say. The moves come as Facebook fends off antitrust scrutiny of its acquisitions and attempts to find new ways to counter growing competitive threats like TikTok. While Microsoft, Intel and others for years have taken stakes in startups through VC subsidiaries, Facebook has shied away from adopting a formal investing program until recently. Instead, it has made one-off investments, such as its recent $5.7 billion investment in Indian tech conglomerate Jio Platforms. Google, in contrast, has multiple, long-running venture arms, including GV, which has backed big-name companies like Slack and Uber.

New submitter rewindustry writes: Google has announced plans to build a new undersea network cable connecting the US, UK and Spain. The tech giant says it is incorporating new technology into the cable, which it claims is a significant upgrade to older existing lines. The project is expected to be completed by 2022. Underwater data cables are vital to global communications infrastructure, carrying some 98% of the world's data, according to Google's estimate. The cables are usually built by communications firms -- typically a group of them pooling resources - which then charge other companies to use them. The latest cable, named "Grace Hopper" after an American computer scientist and naval rear admiral, will hit the UK at Bude, in Cornwall. It is Google's fourth privately owned undersea cable. But Google needs "an ever-increasing amount of transatlantic bandwidth," according to John Delaney from telecoms analyst IDC. "Building its own cables helps them choose cable routes that are most optimal," and near data centres, he said. "It also minimises operational expenditure by reducing the need to pay telcos and other third-party cable owners for the use of their infrastructure."

The world's hardware haven is taking a digital leap for pets. From a report: In May, China's southern city Shenzhen announced that all dogs must be implanted with a chip, joining the rank of the U.K., Japan, Australia and a growing number of countries to make microchips mandatory for dogs. This week, city regulators began to set up injection stations across their partnering pet clinics, according to social media posts from the Shenzhen Urban Management Bureau. The chip, which is said to last for at least 15 years and comes in the size of a grain of rice, is implanted under the skin of a dog's neck. Each chip, when scanned by authorized personnel, reveals a unique 15-digit number matching the dog's name and breed, as well as its owner's identity and contact information -- which will help reduce strays.

For the first time in more than 50 years, the CES technology tradeshow will be a digital-only event in January 2021. The event is the first big event of the year for the Las Vegas events calendar, and a huge cash cow for the Nevada city's economy. From a report: The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which runs the event, today announced CES 2021 which was scheduled for January 6â"9, 202, will be completely online. "Amid the pandemic and growing global health concerns about the spread of COVID-19, it's just not possible to safely convene tens of thousands of people in Las Vegas in early January 2021 to meet and do business in person," said Gary Shapiro, CTA president and CEO. Back in June, the CTA said CES would go ahead in 2021, albeit with some updated protocols. That's the approach IFA in Berlin has gone for, and largely been lambasted over. Some speculate that CES 2020 may have inadvertently aided the early spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. after a number of attendees took to social media to report they got seriously ill after the event.

After Airbnb and ClassPass began selling virtual classes because of the pandemic, Apple tried to collect its commission on the sales. From a report: ClassPass built its business on helping people book exercise classes at local gyms. So when the pandemic forced gyms across the United States to close, the company shifted to virtual classes. Then ClassPass received a concerning message from Apple. Because the classes it sold on its iPhone app were now virtual, Apple said it was entitled to 30 percent of the sales, up from no fee previously, according to a person close to ClassPass who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of upsetting Apple. The iPhone maker said it was merely enforcing a decade-old rule. Airbnb experienced similar demands from Apple after it began an "online experiences" business that offered virtual cooking classes, meditation sessions and drag-queen shows, augmenting the in-person experiences it started selling in 2016, according to two people familiar with the issues.

Both Airbnb and ClassPass have discussed Apple's demands with House lawmakers' offices that are investigating how Apple wields its control over its App Store as part of a yearlong antitrust inquiry into the biggest tech companies, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Those lawmakers are set to grill Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, and the chief executives of Amazon, Facebook and Google in a high-profile hearing on Wednesday. Apple's disputes with the smaller companies point to the control the world's largest tech companies have had over the shift to online life brought on by the pandemic. While much of the rest of the economy is struggling, the pandemic has further entrenched their businesses.

Twitter has limited some functionality on Donald Trump Jr.'s account after he tweeted a video that ran afoul of the company's policies on Covid-19 misinformation, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to CNN Business on Tuesday. Some of the account's functionality will be limited for 12 hours, the spokesperson said. Twitter has asked the President's son to delete the tweet with the video.

In Google's early years, users would type in a query and get back a page of 10 "blue links" that led to different websites. "We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible," co-founder Larry Page said in 2004. Today, Google often considers that "right place" to be Google, an investigation by The Markup has found. From the report: We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls "direct answers," which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent. When we examined the top 15 percent of the page, the equivalent of the first screen on an iPhone X, that figure jumped to 63 percent. For one in five searches in our sample, links to external websites did not appear on the first screen at all. A trending search in our data for "myocardial infarction" shows how Google has piled up its products at the top. It returned:
Google's dictionary definition.
A "people also ask" box that expanded to answer related questions without leaving the search results page.
A "knowledge panel," which is an abridged encyclopedia entry with various links.
And a "related conditions" carousel leading to various new Google searches for other diseases.
All of these appeared before search results by WebMD, Harvard University, and Medscape. In fact, a user would have to scroll nearly halfway down the page -- about 42 percent -- before reaching the first "organic" result in that search.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: President Trump blasted Twitter's "trending" section in a Monday tweet, calling it "really ridiculous, illegal, and, of course, very unfair!" "So disgusting to watch Twitter's so-called 'Trending', where sooo many trends are about me, and never a good one," Trump posted. "They look for anything they can find, make it as bad as possible, and blow it up, trying to make it trend," he added.

The president's relationship with Twitter, where he often turns to speak directly to supporters, has grown more contentious in recent months. The social media platform put warnings and fact checks on two of Trump's posts in May about mail-in voting, saying the tweets contained "potentially misleading information." Twitter also added an advisory to one of Trump's June tweets, which threatened demonstrators who want to create an "autonomous zone" in Washington, D.C. The advisory said the tweet broke Twitter's rules about abusive behavior and threatening violence. The president sought to fight back in May, issuing an executive order intended to strip social media platforms of certain legal protections, though experts say the order is largely toothless and stands on shaky legal ground.

ljw1004 writes: Helmand Province in Afghanistan produces two thirds of the world's opium. Its opium production has more than doubled in the past eight years, due mostly to solar power. "Solar is by far the most significant technological change" in the region for decades, says Dr. Mansfield, author of the report (PDF). The first solar panels were introduced there in 2013. More recently, solar panel installations have doubled every year, and now stand at 67,000. In Lashkargah, the capital of Helmand Province, solar panels are stacked in the market in great piles three stories high. For an up-front cost of $5,000, farmers can buy panels and a pump to irrigate their fields, and then there are virtually no running costs. "All this water is making the desert bloom," says Richard Brittan, a former British soldier whose company, Alcis, specializes in satellite analysis of what he calls "complex environments."

$5,000 is a lot of money -- the average dowry is $7,000 -- but the panels pay for themselves within two years. Farmers used to rely on diesel, which was more costly, unreliable and adulterated, which led to frequent machinery breakdowns. This "is perhaps the purest example of capitalism on the planet. There are no subsidies here. Nobody is thinking about climate change -- or any other ethical consideration, for that matter. This is about small-scale entrepreneurs trying to make a profit. It is the story of how Afghan opium growers have switched to solar power, and significantly increased the world supply of heroin. What does this tell us about solar power? That is simple. The story of the revolution in Afghan heroin production shows us just how transformative solar power can be. Don't imagine this is some kind of benign 'green' technology. "Solar is getting so cheap that it is capable of changing the way we do things in fundamental ways and with consequences that can affect the entire world," reports the BBC. (Those consequences: far more opium in the world; water table dropping by 3m a year; and a major crisis brewing in 10-15 years when the water runs out, the land returns to desert, and 1.5 million people are forced to migrate.)

Airbus just completed its Autonomous Taxi, Take-Off, and Landing project that saw one of its jets perform normally pilot-flown maneuvers entirely on its own. Business Insider reports: The European manufacturer just completed flight testing for its Autonomous Taxi, Take-off, and Landing project in June after its flagship aircraft successfully navigated each phase of flight on its own as pilots simply watched. Over 500 flights were conducted with the new Airbus A350-1000 XWB that successfully utilized "image recognition technology" to essentially give the plane a pair of eyes. The technology, integrated with the A350's exterior cameras, allowed it to perform the phases of flight entirely on its own, Airbus announced. The first milestone of the flight testing campaign occurred in December when Airbus was able to successfully demonstrate autonomous take-offs from Toulouse-Blagnac Airport in France. All pilots had to do in the first test was line up the plane with the runway and then sit back and watch as the plane barreled down the runway, lifting off on its own. With Airbus proving that its jet can also land and taxi on its own, the door is now open to fully autonomous flights.

FallOutBoyTonto shares a report from AnandTech: Coming in the wake of last week's disclosure that their 7nm yields are roughly a full year behind schedule, Intel this afternoon has announced that they are reorganizing the technology side of the company. Key to this change is that Intel is breaking up its monolithic Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group (TSCG) into several smaller groups, all of which will report directly to CEO Bob Swan. Meanwhile Intel's chief engineering officer, Dr. Murthy Renduchintala, who had been leading the TSCG, will be departing the company at the end of next week. The reorganization is effective immediately.

As a result of this reorganization, TSCG is being broken up into five groups focusing on manufacturing and architecture. These are:

- Technology Development: Focused on developing next-generation process nodes. Led by Dr. Ann Kelleher.
- Manufacturing and Operations: Focused on ramping current process nodes and building out new fab capacity. Led by Keyvan Esfarjani.
- Design Engineering: A recently-created group responsible for Intel's technology manufacturing and platform engineering. Led on an interim basis by Josh Walden while Intel searches for a permanent leader.
- Architecture, Software and Graphics: Developing Intel's architectures and associated software stacks. Led by Raja Koduri (continuing).
- Supply Chain: Handling Intel's supply chain and relationships with important suppliers. Led by Dr. Randhir Thakur (continuing).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The American GPS and fitness-tracker company Garmin is dealing with the aftermath of a ransomware attack, the BBC has confirmed. Owners of its products had been unable to use its services since Thursday. However, some of its online tools are now being provided in a "limited" state, according to its online dashboard. Garmin has said it was "the victim of a cyber-attack that encrypted some of our systems." But the statement it released avoided any reference to a ransom demand.

"Many of our online services were interrupted including website functions, customer support, customer-facing applications, and company communications," it said. "We have no indication that any customer data, including payment information from Garmin Pay, was accessed, lost or stolen." The firm added that it expected all its systems to return to normal operation within a few days, but warned that there might be a "backlog" of user data to process. It is not known if the firm paid the blackmailers, but a source told the BBC it was in the "final stage of recovery." Some customers have already reported that Garmin's services appear to be "partially" working again.

The desert locust upsurge is yet another of 2020's horrors. From a report: In June, remote sensing analyst Raj Bhagat noticed a strange signal on India's weather radar. It looked like a small band of rain near Delhi, moving southwest, but Bhagat was convinced it was a locust swarm. "People began to report it," he says, referring to sightings on the ground. Giant locust swarms had spread to northern India earlier in the year, ravaging crops and destroying people's livelihoods. "The timelines were perfectly matching." In mid-July, Bhagat, who works at the World Resources Institute India, identified a similar formation, this time near the city of Lucknow. He posted it to Twitter with the hashtag #LocustsAttack. The desert locust upsurge is yet another of 2020's horrors. In dry years, the insects, which can grow up to four inches long and are shades of green, black, or yellow depending on their life stage, remain localized to the deserts of Africa, the Middle East, and southwest Asia. Lately, however, the weather has been wetter than usual. Desert locusts have bred prolifically and migrated in huge swarms to countries that don't always see them in large numbers, including several nations along the horn of Africa. Other places, such as the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, haven't had a locust invasion in decades.

The locust outbreak is currently classed by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) as an "upsurge." If the insects begin migrating in large bands -- which could happen within a couple years, should things worsen -- they'll be officially considered a plague. A swarm covering one square kilometer eats as much food as 35,000 people every day. The damage done so far is already appalling. The UN says the food supply of 25 million people in East Africa has been threatened by the insects. In Ethiopia alone, they've destroyed around 200,000 hectares of crops. Meanwhile, in India, the insects have chewed up 50,000 hectares. The recent outbreak may be just a hint of what is to come, thanks to the extreme weather expected as a result of climate change. Such conditions, including periods of excessive rainfall, would be adored by the locusts, says Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer at the FAO. The locusts' wanderlust has sparked efforts to develop tools to closely track the insects. The FAO already uses real-time reports from locust survey teams on the ground and satellite imagery of vegetation and weather events to help forecast how many locusts will breed and where they will go.

Countries use data on locust migrations to determine where to send teams in efforts vanquish the insects en masse by dropping pesticide on them from planes. Among the technologies that could improve locust surveillance by pinpointing locations of multiple swarms at a given moment are radar and drones. The idea of using remote sensing technologies like radar to spy on locust swarms is not new. A 1955 letter in the journal Nature reported the first such sighting on British naval radar the previous year. HMS Wild Goose had detected a humongous 48-kilometer-wide swarm of desert locusts flying over the Persian Gulf. Bhagat says he thinks his sightings are the first weather radar detections of locusts in India, though his observations haven't been confirmed yet. Ryan Neely III, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Leeds in the U.K., is building a specialized system to do the same kind of analysis. It is absolutely possible to use weather radar to spot the insects, he says. They are, after all, not that dissimilar from large raindrops.

The New Yorker this week has a story about a Dutchman named Xennt, who lived underground in a vast nuclear bunker in Germany with his family, friends, and an assortment of clever misfits. The story is about the dark web, a server empire used by cybercriminals, an encrypted phone network, a five-year investigation by the German police, and an Irish crime boss nicknamed The Penguin.

Cloudflare today announced the private beta launch of Workers Unbound, the latest step in its efforts to offer a serverless platform that can compete with the likes of AWS Lambda. TechCrunch reports: The company first launched its Workers edge computing platform in late 2017. Today it has "hundreds of thousands of developers" who use it, and in the last quarter alone, more than 20,000 developers built applications based on the service, according to the company. Cloudflare also uses Workers to power many of its own services, but the first iteration of the platform had quite a few limitations. The idea behind Workers Unbound is to do away with most of those and turn it into a platform that can compete with the likes of AWS, Microsoft and Google. Cloudflare aims to expose to third-party developers all of the services it builds for its internal consumption. The original Workers service will continue to operate (but under the Workers Bundled moniker) and essentially become Cloudflare's serverless platform for basic workloads that only run for a very short time. Workers Unbound -- as the name implies -- is meant for more complex and longer-running processes.

When it first launched Workers, the company said that its killer feature was speed. Today, [CEO Matthew Prince] argues that speed obviously remains an important feature -- and Cloudflare Workers Unbound promises that it essentially does away with cold-start latencies. But developers also adopted the platform because of its ability to scale and its price. Indeed, Workers Unbound, Cloudflare argues, is now significantly more affordable than similar offerings. "For the same workload, Cloudflare Workers Unbound can be 75% percent less expensive than AWS Lambda, 24 percent less expensive than Microsoft Azure Functions, and 52 percent less expensive than Google Cloud Functions," the company says in today's press release.

Another feature Prince highlighted is regulatory compliance. "I think the thing we're realizing as we talk to our largest enterprise customers is that for real companies -- not just the individual developer hacking away at home -- but for real businesses in financial services or anyone who has to deal with a regulated industry, the only thing that trumps ease of use is regulatory compliance, which is not sexy or interesting or anything else but like if your GC says you can't use XYZ platform, then you don't use XYZ platform and that's the end of the story," Prince noted. Speed, though, is of course something developers will always care about. Prince stressed that the team was quite happy with the 5ms cold-start times of the original Workers platform. The way the team engineered this is by queuing up the process while the two servers are still negotiating their TLS handshake. Cloudflare also argues that developers can update their code and have it go live globally within 15 seconds. Another area the team worked on was making it easier to use the service in general. Among the key new features here is support for languages like Python and a new SDK that will allow developers to add support for their favorite languages, too.

If you've ever wanted to build a real and working Windows 95 PC inside Minecraft, now is the time. From a report: A new VM Computers mod has been created for Minecraft that allows players to order computer parts from a satellite orbiting around a Minecraft world and build a computer that actually boots Windows 95 and a variety of other operating systems. The mod uses VirtualBox, free and open-source virtual machine software, to run operating systems like Windows 95. Within Minecraft you simply place a PC case block and then use it to create virtual hard drives to install operating systems from ISO files. Naturally, the Minecraft community has been experimenting with the VM Computers mod, and someone has managed to get Doom running within Minecraft as a result.

Waydev, an analytics platform used by software companies, has disclosed a security breach that occurred earlier this month. From a report: The company says that hackers broke into its platform and stole GitHub and GitLab OAuth tokens from its internal database. Waydev, a San Francisco-based company, runs a platform that can be used to track software engineers' work output by analyzing Git-based codebases. To do this, Waydev runs a special app listed on the GitHub and GitLab app stores. When users install the app, Waydev receives an OAuth token that it can use to access its customers' GitHub or GitLab projects. Waydev stores this token in its database and uses it on a daily basis to generate analytical reports for its customers. Waydev CEO and co-founder Alex Circei told ZDNet today in a phone call that hackers used a blind SQL injection vulnerability to gain access to its database, from where they stole GitHub and GitLab OAuth tokens. The hackers then used some of these tokens to pivot to other companies' codebases and gain access to their source code projects.

Qualcomm is giving its Quick Charge technology a sizeable boost, one that the company claims will be able to plug in and get a device with a 4,500mAh battery from 0 to 50% in five minutes and from empty to 100% in 15 minutes. From a report: The new technology -- which will make its first appearance in devices during the third quarter of 2020 on phones that also utilize the company's Snapdragon 865 and 865 Plus processors -- will also be able to take advantage of more than 100 watts of power to speedily refill depleted device batteries. Most flagship phones have battery capacities ranging from 3,000mAh to 5,000mAh depending on the manufacturer, features and the size of the device. Apple's 5.8-inch iPhone 11 Pro has a roughly 3,000mAh battery while Samsung's 6.9-inch Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G has a 5,000mAh battery. While the feature is starting with devices that have its flagship 800-series processors, the company expects it to trickle to down its more affordable 700 and 600-series chipsets over time. In addition to the faster charging, Qualcomm touts that the new format will be "up to 70% more efficient" than its Quick Charge 4 and also runs 10 degrees Celsius cooler (or 50 degrees Fahrenheit) when recharging with a cable.