OpenAI says it has paused all internal training of “our most capable models” as it continues what CEO Sam Altman is calling “an extensive and ongoing review related to our agents’ use of internet access during training and evaluation.”
The company revealed the pause in a report about a so-called misalignment incident in which an agent attempted to exploit a gap in Internet-access restrictions during a routine research task during training. OpenAI says that improper DNS filtering allowed the agent to attempt to break out of its sandbox and access the wider Internet when asked for biographical details about a blogger.
OpenAI says the agent was only able to access the company’s offline web cache and that it has implemented additional multi-layered blocking controls to prevent similar incidents in the future. Despite that, though, the company says it has decided to “pause all other training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use” for this frontier model “until we have both validated that the gap is resolved and performed additional red-teaming of the system.”
Recently, the astronauts on board the International Space Station performed a routine “walk-off” maneuver with the large, 58-foot-long robotic arm attached to the orbiting laboratory.
The robotic arm, known as Canadarm2 because it was supplied by the Canadian Space Agency, is something of a modern engineering miracle—it can effectively move around the exterior of the large space station like an inchworm because both ends are essentially identical.
However, after this particular walk-off maneuver, the robotic arm, along with the mobile transporter that guides it along the main truss of the space station, engineers noted some issues with operations.
When NorthPoint Development proposed a 1,300-acre project in the Pocono foothills designed to host 15 data center buildings, it was met with fierce local resistance to the construction, but NorthPoint had an idea. In an exclusive
When NorthPoint Development proposed a 1,300-acre project in the Pocono foothills designed to host 15 data center buildings, it was met with fierce local resistance to the construction, but NorthPoint had an idea. In an exclusive
The theft occurred outside a warehouse in Fremont, California, where autonomous trucking startup PlusAI had parked two
Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 6 1.03 has been released today as the third point release in the latest Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 6 series of this Debian-based distribution designed to facilitate the reconditioning of old computers.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: It is the bane of every fruit bowl: sliced banana that turns brown before it has reached the table. But such woes could soon be a thing of the past, with gene-edited bananas that keep their freshly peeled color now one step closer to reaching British shoppers. According to Tropic, the Norwich-based agricultural-biotechnology company that developed the fruit, the bananas have the same taste and texture but stay “fresh, yellow and appetizing long after peeling and slicing.”
Gilad Gershon, the chief executive of Tropic, said the flesh of the new banana resisted browning for an extra day or two — and longer if chilled. He added that the innovation could make it easier to add bananas to prepackaged products such as fruit salads and breakfast pots, as well as reducing waste. […] Tropic developed the bananas by using a gene-editing technology called Crispr-Cas9 to alter all three copies of a single gene within the fruit. As a result, they were able to reduce the production of polyphenol oxidase, an enzyme that causes browning. A similar approach has been effective in reducing browning in other produce, including mushrooms.
Tropic said the non-browning bananas could reduce food waste and CO2-equivalent emissions along the supply chain by more than 25%. “This could support an annual reduction in CO2 emissions of over 9m tonnes in the banana export market alone,” the company said. […] Gershon said Tropic had gained regulatory approval for the non-browning bananas in 10 other countries including Japan, Brazil and the Philippines. The fruit is already being grown in Latin America.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Discover in this article Thorium, a high-speed browser based on the Chromium engine, offering optimized performance, along with installation and additional tips.
Discover in this article Thorium, a high-speed browser based on the Chromium engine, offering optimized performance, along with installation and additional tips.
Shiva is entering development for Mesa Vulkan drivers as a new framework akin to Gallium3D but for Vulkan drivers rather than OpenGL. It’s going to be some time before the work will come to fruition but should hopefully lead to more code sharing and a better Mesa Vulkan driver development experience in the future…
Shiva is entering development for Mesa Vulkan drivers as a new framework akin to Gallium3D but for Vulkan drivers rather than OpenGL. It’s going to be some time before the work will come to fruition but should hopefully lead to more code sharing and a better Mesa Vulkan driver development experience in the future…
Solara One is an experience that sits in the center of a Venn diagram of VR genres: part game, part meditation, part sci-fi space exploration.
What’s most impressive is that the entire experience was developed by a lone developer, Aaron Cryderman, who spent most of his career at BlackBerry working with data. After a career shift that left him with more free time, he decided to follow his interests in digital music creation, photography, meditation, and space art, and combine them into a singular project. Additionally, Cryderman wanted to satisfy his desire to experience space travel after realizing the possibility of experiencing it for real was unlikely.
He taught himself Unity over several months and started working on Solara One as a passion project, finally releasing the app on Meta Quest in May 2024.
Since launch, he’s updated the experience several times, both with new content and with performance and visual enhancements.
Solara One combines relaxing meditation, awe-inspiring space views, and sci-fi environments, while employing clever physics and haptics to enhance immersion. The beautiful visuals are accompanied by music that heightens the sense of awe you feel in space, providing a deeper ambient undertone.
Cryderman released the Arboretum update to Solara One in early September, adding a Holodeck-like experience to the app. You enter an empty, grid-defined space at first, and are presented with two choices: a lightly gamified “Quest” mode and a free-play “Explore” mode. Make your selection, and the Arboretum loads in. You find yourself in a forest environment, with a large Buddha statue, glowing crystals, and the same mood-setting ambient music.
I won’t give away too many details of the Quest mode, but there are orbs and butterflies. The experience pays off with a special celebration that is memorable and surprisingly emotional.
The Arboretum was not originally in Cryderman’s road map for Solara One. However, he was thinking often about the day-to-day reality of living in outer space, and how humans would eventually yearn for a more earthly environment, if even for a little while. And of course, Star Trek’s Holodeck provided inspiration to the idea.
Once Cryderman had his environmental assets optimized to run smoothly on Quest, he had another challenge to solve: what would a user actually do in a forest? How would users achieve an awe-filled meditative experience in a forest environment, as opposed to floating in outer space above a rotating planet?
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Elevator to the Arboretum, taken from my Quest 3
The butterflies that inhabit the forest environment serve more than just a visual purpose.
Cryderman explained to me that he wanted the butterflies to help induce a meditative state similar to sitting around a campfire, staring at the flames.
He explains, “If you’re sitting around a campfire, you’re just sitting there and you’re mesmerized by the fire movement…you go into a naturally meditative state, but it’s effortless.”
He continued, “The butterflies were kind of like…the campfire part where that’s the thing that moves and kind of draws you in and focuses your attention a bit.”
In the forest the butterflies provide flashes of color against the dark night and become almost hypnotic as you follow them with your eyes.
“My target for my game, my experience, is gamers who are looking to kind of relax and chill out in outer space.”, Cryderman told me. Adding a gamified mode was something he realized would be popular with his core audience and would add something new to the Solara One experience. He also chose to leave a clear way for a user to simply relax in the Arboretum if that’s their preference.
In my time playing both the Quest and Explore modes, I found the overall experience to be tranquil and a welcome respite from the dark beyond of outer space that surrounds you in the other areas of the app. Quest mode keeps you busy, and the pay-off at the end is worth the effort. The forest has enough nooks and hidden areas to keep it interesting as a chill-out experience. I would love the ability to explore the upper levels and go farther afield.
The Arboretum update provides another compelling reason for users to return to Solara One frequently. Few VR experiences deliver across so many fronts: crisp visuals, sound design, haptics and mechanics, UI design, and more. In my opinion, Solara One delivers across them all, and remains one of my most-recommended VR apps.
Solara One is available on Meta Quest.