Re-Visiting 25 Posts from 2023

Saturday - December 30 2023, 23:42 UTC - 10 months ago

Looking back at 2023, it has been a very eventful year with advances in AI, robotics, medicine, and even cultured meat. These 25 stories provide awe, admiration, and inspiration for humanity's potential, and can give us faith in future challenges we may have to tackle.

Every Saturday we post a selection of articles from the week. With 2023 nearing its end, we dug through all those posts again to surface 25 stories worth revisiting. Here you’ll find a deep dive on OpenAI, a look at the coming golden age in medicine, a surprising explanation of Nvidia’s AI success, a stunning snapshot of SpaceX’s orbital dominance, an ode to physical encyclopedias, and some back-of-the-napkin math on Dyson spheres.

Happy reading. See you in 2023.

Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating? .

Ross Andersen | The Atlantic .

"We could have gone off and just built this in our building here for five more years,’ [Altman] said, ‘and we would have had something jaw-dropping.’ But the public wouldn’t have been able to prepare for the shock waves that followed, an outcome that he finds ‘deeply unpleasant to imagine.’ Altman believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships. ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.

Suddenly, It Looks Like We’re in a Golden Age for Medicine .

David Wallace-Wells | The New York Times .

"Hype springs eternal in medicine, but lately the horizon of new possibility seems almost blindingly bright. …’It’s stunning,’ says the immunologist Barney Graham, the former deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center and a central figure in the development of mRNA vaccines, who has lately been writing about a ‘new era for vaccinology.’ ‘You cannot imagine what you’re going to see over the next 30 years. The pace of advancement is in an exponential phase right now.’" .

Humanoid Robots Are Coming of Age .

Will Knight | Wired .

"Eight years ago, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency organized a painful-to-watch contest that involved robots slowly struggling (and often failing) to perform a series of human tasks, including opening doors, operating power tools, and driving golf carts. …Today the descendants of those hapless robots are a lot more capable and graceful. Several startups are developing humanoids that they claim could, in just a few years, find employment in warehouses and factories." .

The Secret to Nvidia’s AI Success .

Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum .

"[Nvidia] has managed to increase the performance of its chips on AI tasks a thousandfold over the past 10 years, it’s raking in money, and it’s reportedly very hard to get your hands on its newest AI-accelerating GPU, the H100. How did Nvidia get here? …Moore’s Law was a surprisingly small part of Nvidia’s magic and new number formats a very large part. Put it all together and you get what Dally called Huang’s Law (for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang)." .

Open Your Mind to Unicorn Meat .

Annie Lowrey | The Atlantic .

"Is it chicken? It is chicken more than it is anything else. To be specific, it is what happens when you take a chicken’s cells, place them in a vat filled with a slurry of nutrients and amino acids, let them multiply, wash them, chill them, shape them, and cook them. This kind of meat is the future, or at least part of the future. Within the past decade, cultivated meat has been produced in labs, and some companies claim it’s just months away from supermarkets." .

Looking back at 2023, it has been a very eventful year. It can be seen as a year of breakthroughs in technology from AI, to robotics, to medicine, and even cultured meat. These 25 stories are able to evoke the feelings of awe, admiration, and inspiration that these advances bring, so we can have faith in humanity that may tackle any challenge in the future.