Technology

Blogs about technologies: hardware, software, wetware or others.

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The leaked news regarding the intentions of Baidu, the most important Chinese search engine, to adopt a system similar to ChatGPT is only the latest concerning the world of search engines after the OpenAI machine learning system was launched. Earlier this month, Microsoft revealed it invested $10 billion in OpenAI and plans to add ChatGPT to its Bing search engine. Google answered with Google Sparrow, another machine learning system. The launch of ChatGPT immediately rekindled discussions about the nature of this alleged artificial intelligence, its possibilities, and its limits, and the competitors’ new systems will further increase them.

The target chamber of NIF (Photo courtesy LLNL. All rights reserved)

The US Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have announced a success in a nuclear fusion experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF). A system of 192 lasers emitted 2.05 megajoules of energy by focusing it on a tiny gold cylinder containing a pellet of deuterium and tritium. The energy from the lasers created conditions similar to those in a stellar core by triggering nuclear fusion and generating about 3.15 megajoules of energy. Obtaining more energy than emitted is an important step in using nuclear fusion as an energy source but a lot remains to be done to build fusion nuclear power plants.

Scheme of the IBM Osprey quantum processor (Image courtesy IBM. All rights reserved)

At the IBM Quantum Summit 2022, IBM unveiled its new quantum processor. Called the IBM Osprey, it features 433 qubits, more than triple the IBM Eagle processor unveiled just last year. This great step forward in the field of quantum computers aims to make computers capable of performing complex calculations that are far beyond the capabilities of any classical computer. Software is as critical as hardware to performance, and IBM is working on the Qiskit Runtime, a service and programming model that aims to optimize workloads and run them efficiently on quantum computers.

Elon Musk with the sink (Image courtesy Elon Musk)

In the end, Elon Musk managed to buy Twitter! After what had become a clash with the social network’s executives that led Musk to blow the deal last July, the deal was completed. The first act as owner was to fire several executives, starting with CEO Parag Agrawal. Last Wednesday, Musk walked into the San Francisco office with a sink joking about the pun between the English word sink and his statement “Let that sink in!”.

The letter sent to the SEC

Elon Musk announced that he terminated the deal to buy Twitter he signed at the end of April 2022 for a value of approximately $44 billion. The billionaire claims that the social network executives didn’t provide the data required by the agreement, in particular those relating to the fake profiles used by spammers. His position was explained in a letter sent on his behalf by a lawyer to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the authority that oversees the American stock exchange. Twitter executives have announced plans to sue Elon Musk, so the story is far from over.