Tag Archives: science

CTO Mira Murati is the latest leader to leave OpenAI

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Mira Murati has departed OpenAI, where she had been the chief technology officer since 2018. In a note shared with the company and then posted publicly on X, Murati said that she is exiting "because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration."

Murati gained additional visibility as a face for the AI company when she briefly assumed CEO duties in November 2023 when the board of directors fired Sam Altman. Altman returned to the helm and Murati resumed work as CTO. However, her departure follows on two other notable exits. Last month, president and co–founder Greg Brockman and co-founder John Schulman both announced that they would be stepping away from OpenAI. Brockman is taking a sabbatical and Schulman is moving to rival AI firm Anthropic.

Here is the full text of Murati's statement:

Hi all,

I have something to share with you. After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAl.

My six-and-a-half years with the OpenAl team have been an extraordinary privilege. While I’ll express my gratitude to many individuals in the coming days, I want to start by thanking Sam and Greg for their trust in me to lead the technical organization and for their support throughout the years.

There’s never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right. Our recent releases of speech-to-speech and OpenAl o1 mark the beginning of a new era in interaction and intelligence - achievements made possible by your ingenuity and craftsmanship. We didn’t merely build smarter models, we fundamentally changed how Al systems learn and reason through complex problems.

We brought safety research from the theoretical realm into practical applications, creating models that are more robust, aligned, and steerable than ever before. Our work has made cutting-edge Al research intuitive and accessible, developing technology that adapts and evolves based on everyone’s input. This success is a testament to our outstanding teamwork, and it is because of your brilliance, your dedication, and your commitment that OpenAl stands at the pinnacle of Al innovation.

I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration. For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we’ve built.

I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to build and work alongside this remarkable team. Together, we’ve pushed the boundaries of scientific understanding in our quest to improve human well-being. While I may no longer be in the trenches with you, I will still be rooting for you all.

With deep gratitude for the friendships forged, the triumphs achieved, and most importantly, the challenges overcome together.

Mira

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/cto-mira-murati-is-the-latest-leader-to-leave-openai-200230104.html?src=rss

The Polaris Dawn crew is back on Earth after a historic mission

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The Polaris Dawn crew safely returned to Earth early Sunday morning, bringing the historic privately funded mission to a close. The Dragon capsule carrying the mission’s four astronauts — Jared Isaacman, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon — splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico around 3:30AM ET.

On Thursday, Isaacman and Gillis completed the first commercial spacewalk, each taking a turn to exit the craft and perform a series of spacesuit mobility tests. And with this mission, Gillis and Menon have now traveled farther from Earth than any women before. Polaris reached a peak altitude of about 870 miles, which is also the farthest any humans have ventured since the Apollo program. 

The crew also performed a number of science experiments, and was able to complete a 40-minute video call to Earth and send files in a major test for Starlink’s space communications capabilities. That included a video recorded during the mission of Gillis, an engineer and violinist, playing the violin in space. “A new era of commercial spaceflight dawns, with much more to come,” Polaris posted on X Sunday morning.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/the-polaris-dawn-crew-is-back-on-earth-after-a-historic-mission-142028997.html?src=rss

What to read this weekend: Cosmic horror sci-fi, and the quest to understand how life began

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New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.

The book cover for the novel The Night Guest. It has a bubblegum pink background, and a wine glass is pictured in the foreground, with a small amount of a red liquid dripping into it

Anyone who lives with a difficult-to-diagnose chronic illness and has endured the demoralizing process of trying to get proper treatment can tell you it is, at times, a living nightmare. Advocating for yourself, fighting to be taken seriously; it’s something I’ve dealt with most of my life as a person with autoimmune diseases. So when I read the description of Hildur Knútsdóttir’s psychological horror novel, The Night Guest, it resonated with me immediately:

Iðunn is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven't revealed any cause. When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same ― have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps. Until one night Iðunn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she’s walked over 40,000 steps in the night . . . What is happening when she’s asleep?

The Night Guest is a short, compelling read that puts an unsettling spin on an issue that a lot of people — especially women — can relate to. I pretty much inhaled it.

The cover for Is Earth Exceptional? Spherical green structures are pictured arranged like dense planets against a backdrop of stars

The origin of life and the question of whether it exists elsewhere is a topic I find to be endlessly interesting (as evidenced by how regularly books about it land among these recommendations). In their new book Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life, astrophysicist Mario Livio and Nobel Prize winning biologist Jack Szostak examine what we know about the things that make life possible — the building blocks of life — and explore how they could have emerged on Earth and, hypothetically, elsewhere. At the heart of the mystery is the as yet unanswered question of whether or not life came to be as the result of a freak accident.

As the authors write in their introduction, “Even with the enormous scientific progress we have witnessed in the past few decades, we still don’t know whether life is an extremely rare chemical accident, in which case we may be alone in our galaxy, or a chemical inevitability, which would potentially make us part of a huge galactic ensemble.”

An illustration of a huge, grotesque gray head with red tube-like sludge pouring out of its eyes and mouth onto a path, where a person is standing

In 2034 as imagined by Into the Unbeing, Earth is well past the tipping point of climate change. The planet has been devastated by natural disasters and species have died off in the masses. Looking for anything that can help improve the world’s situation, a team of climate scientists with the Scientific Institute for Nascent Ecology and Worlds (SINEW) ventures out to explore what appears to be an entirely new environment that has popped up out of nowhere near their camp in the Australian outback. But they’re not prepared for what they find.

Into the Unbeing is a new gripping science-fiction series that weaves in cosmic horror. The first issue came out at the beginning of the summer, and Part One just wrapped up this week with issue number four. If you were into Scavengers Reign or The Southern Reach Trilogy, you’ll probably enjoy Into the Unbeing. The art alone will suck you right in.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-this-weekend-the-night-guest-is-earth-exceptional-and-into-the-unbeing-194524310.html?src=rss

NASA confirms it’s developing the Moon’s new time zone

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NASA confirmed on Friday that it’s developing a new lunar time system for the Moon. The White House published a policy memo in April, directing NASA to create the new standard by 2026. Over five months later (government time, y’all), the space agency’s confirmation states it will work with “U.S. government stakeholders, partners, and international standards organizations” to establish a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC).

To understand why the Moon needs its own time zone, look no further than Einstein. His theories of relativity say that because time changes relative to speed and gravity, time moves slightly faster on our celestial neighbor (because of its weaker gravity). So, an Earth clock on the Moon would gain about 56 microseconds a day — enough to throw off calculations that could put future missions requiring precision in danger.

“For something traveling at the speed of light, 56 microseconds is enough time to travel the distance of approximately 168 football fields,” said Cheryl Gramling, NASA timing and standards leader, in a press release. “If someone is orbiting the Moon, an observer on Earth who isn’t compensating for the effects of relativity over a day would think that the orbiting astronaut is approximately 168 football fields away from where the astronaut really is.”

Classic image of Buzz Aldrin in astronaut suit on the Moon's surface.
NASA

April’s White House memo directed NASA to work with the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State and Transportation to plot the course for LTC’s introduction by the end of 2026. Global stakeholders, particularly Artemis Accords signees, will play a role. Established in 2020, the agreements include a growing collection of 43 countries committed to norms expected to be honored in space. Notably, China and Russia have refused to join.

NASA’s Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program will lead the initiative. One of LTC’s goals is to be scalable to other celestial bodies in the future, including Mars. The time standard will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks on the Moon, although their locations are still up for debate. Such a weighted average is similar to how scientists calculate Earth’s Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

NASA plans to send crewed missions back to the Moon through its Artemis program. Artemis 2, scheduled for September 2025, plans to send four people on a pass around the Moon. A year later, Artemis 3 aims to land astronauts near the Moon’s South Pole.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasa-confirms-its-developing-the-moons-new-time-zone-165345568.html?src=rss

OpenAI’s new o1 model is slower, on purpose

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OpenAI has unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model called o1, which, the company claims, can perform complex reasoning tasks more effectively than its predecessors. The release comes as OpenAI faces increasing competition in the race to develop more sophisticated AI systems. 

O1 was trained to "spend more time thinking through problems before they respond, much like a person would," OpenAI said on its website. "Through training, [the models] learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes." OpenAI envisions the new model being used by healthcare researchers to annotate cell sequencing data, by physicists to generate mathematical formulas and software developers.  

Current AI systems are essentially fancier versions of autocomplete, generating responses through statistics instead of actually "thinking" through a question, which means that they are less "intelligent" than they appear to be. When Engadget tried to get ChatGPT and other AI chatbots to solve the New York Times Spelling Bee, for instance, they fumbled and produced nonsensical results.

With o1, the company claims that it is "resetting the counter back to 1" with a new kind of AI model designed to actually engage in complex problem-solving and logical thinking. In a blog post detailing the new model, OpenAI said that it performs similarly to PhD students on challenging benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry and biology, and excels in math and coding. For example, its current flagship model, GPT-4o, correctly solved only 13 percent of problems in a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad compared to o1, which solved 83 percent.  

The new model, however, doesn't include capabilities like web browsing or the ability to upload files and images. And, according to The Verge, it's significantly slower at processing prompts compared to GPT-4o. Despite having longer to consider its outputs, o1 hasn't solved the problem of "hallucinations" — a term for AI models making up information. "We can't say we solved hallucinations," the company's chief research officer Bob McGrew told The Verge. 

O1 is still at a nascent stage. OpenAI calls it a "preview" and is making it available only to paying ChatGPT customers starting today with restrictions on how many questions they can ask it per week. In addition, OpenAI is also launching o1-mini, a slimmed-down version that the company says is particularly effective for coding. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openais-new-o1-model-is-slower-on-purpose-185711459.html?src=rss

A new report raises concerns about the future of NASA

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A concerning report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) expresses some serious concerns about the future of America’s space exploration agency.

The NASEM report was written by a panel of aerospace experts and lays out what it sees as a possible "hollow future” for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It addresses issues of underfunding due to “declining long-term national emphasis on aeronautics and civil space,” an assertion that NASA itself is aware of and agrees with. The report also notes that NASA’s problems extend far beyond having enough funding to carry out its missions and operations.

Some of the report’s “core findings” suggest areas of concern that could affect the space agency’s future. These include a focus on “short-term measures without adequate consideration for longer-term needs and implications,” reliance on “milestone-based purchase-of-service contracts” and inefficiency due to “slow and cumbersome business operations.” The report also raised concerns about the current generation of talent being siphoned off by private aerospace companies, and the next generation of engineers not receiving an adequate foundation of knowledge due to our underfunded public school systems. Finally the report states bluntly that NASA’s infrastructure “is already well beyond its design life.”

These and other issues could lead to even more serious problems. Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin chief executive and the report’s lead author, told The Washington Post that reliance on the private sector could further erode NASA's workforce, reducing its role to one of oversight instead of problem-solving.

Congress could allocate more funds to NASA to address these concerns but that’s not likely since it’s constantly struggling to prevent government shutdowns. Instead, Augustine says NASA could focus on prioritizing its efforts on more strategic goals and initiatives.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/a-new-report-raises-concerns-about-the-future-of-nasa-184643260.html?src=rss

How to watch Polaris Dawn astronauts attempt the first commercial spacewalk

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Two of Polaris Dawn's four astronauts could make history today by performing the first ever commercial spacewalk at around 700 kilometers (435 miles) above our planet. Jared Isaacman, the mission leader and funder, and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis will leave the confines and safety of the Crew Dragon capsule for 15 and 20 minutes each. The other two crew members, Scott Poteet and Anna Menon, will stay inside the vehicle to monitor the spacewalkers' status and make sure everything's in order. SpaceX will stream the event live on its website and on X starting at 4:50AM Eastern time. In case the spacewalk has to be called off, the astronauts will have another opportunity on September 13 at the same time. 

As The New York Times explains, the Crew Dragon has no airlock like the International Space Station does, so the astronauts will have to let the all the air out of the vehicle before opening one of its hatches. All four will have to wear the company's extravehicular activity (EVA) suits, which are upgraded and tougher versions of its suits for intravehicular activity (IVA). 

SpaceX's EVAs come with new joints that can flex and rotate, thereby providing greater mobility. Their helmets are equipped with a heads-up display (HUD) and camera, and the spacesuits as a whole have a Faraday layer that can protect them from electric fields. The Polaris Dawn crew's spacewalk will put the suit to the test as they subject it to the harsh environment of outer space while conducting mobility tests. "The development of this suit and the execution of the spacewalk will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions as life becomes multiplanetary," the Polaris Dawn's website reads. The whole operation, from the beginning until the astronauts close the hatch to repressurize Crew Dragon, will last for two hours.

The civilian mission launched in the early hours of September 10 after multiple delays. In addition to accomplishing the first commercial spacewalk, the mission has other objectives, including sending a crew farther than any Dragon mission before and farther than anybody has been since the Apollo program, even reaching parts of the Van Allen radiation belt. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/how-to-watch-polaris-dawn-astronauts-attempt-the-first-commercial-spacewalk-074548007.html?src=rss

Polaris Dawn is finally headed to space for its groundbreaking civilian mission

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A SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying the four private astronauts of the Polaris Dawn mission has launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the early hours of September 10 after a few weeks of delays. The mission was scheduled to lift off at the end of August but was postponed first due to technical issues, then because of poor weather conditions forecasted for the crew’s return. On board are Jared Isaacman — the billionaire who funded the mission — retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Scott “Kidd” Poteet, and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. They’ll attempt several firsts during the five-day flight, including the first-ever commercial spacewalk.

That attempt will also mark the first spacewalk from a Dragon capsule. Among Polaris Dawn's other goals is to send its crew farther than anyone has traveled since the Apollo program, targeting an altitude of about 870 miles from Earth. The journey will take the capsule and its crew briefly into the Van Allen radiation belt.

Polaris Dawn is meant to be the first of three human spaceflight missions under Isaacman’s Polaris Program. Its crew will put SpaceX’s new Extravehicular Activity space suit to its most important test yet, as they’ll all wear it for protection against the vacuum of space when the Dragon’s doors open for the spacewalk. The spacewalk will take place at an elliptical orbit roughly 435 miles above Earth’s surface, and two crew members will leave the capsule.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/polaris-dawn-is-finally-headed-to-space-for-its-groundbreaking-civilian-mission-093346616.html?src=rss

Boeing’s Starliner is back without the astronauts it flew to the ISS

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Boeing's Starliner capsule has undocked from the ISS at 6:04PM Eastern time on September 6 and has safely and gently landed at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico at 12:01AM on September 7. Calypso, as the capsule is called, didn't have a crew onboard despite flying to the ISS with astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. NASA decided in late August that the astronauts will come home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in February for safety reasons. Wilmore and Williams merely provided support for the capsule's trip back home and watched the coverage of its re-entry and landing. "You have got this. We have your backs, and you've got this. Bring her back to Earth," Williams told ground control.

The astronauts flew on the Starliner as part of its first crewed flight meant to prove that the spacecraft is ready to regularly ferry humans to the ISS alongside the SpaceX Crew Dragon. They were only supposed to stay on the orbiting laboratory for eight days, but the spacecraft's service module started leaking helium on their way there. Some of the module's thrusters had malfunctioned, as well. The Starliner uses helium to pressurize its fuel tanks and to push propellant to its thrusters that maneuver the spacecraft. Over the past three months, engineers on the ground conducted tests on Starliner with help from the astronauts, but NASA ultimately decided to have the Starliner fly back home uncrewed because it didn't have confidence with the certainty of the thrusters' performance. 

During the Starliner's post-landing press conference, Boeing was noticeably absent, and three NASA officials talked about the landing instead. When asked why Boeing wasn't there and if the relationship between the agency and the company was affected by Starliner's issues, the representatives said that Boeing deferred to NASA to represent the mission. They said that all three of them talked to Boeing's managers and that the company is committed to working with the agency. Steve Stich, the manager for Commercial Crew Program at NASA Kennedy, also added that while all of them were happy with the landing, a part of them still wishes it would've gone the way they'd planned, with the astronauts coming home aboard the Calypso. 

Stitch, Joel Montalbano (NASA's deputy associate administrator for Space Operations Mission Directorate) and Dana Weigel (NASA's manager for the International Space Station) all praised the Starliner for its successful docking and "bullseye landing." They said they learned a lot from the mission, which apparently achieved 85 to 90 percent of its objectives, and stressed that it's important to remember that things don't always go as planned when it comes to test flights. 

It'll take around two weeks to get the Calypso back to NASA grounds and around a week after that to get all the data from the capsule. NASA and Boeing are planning to analyze the data the spacecraft gathered across its systems from its time in orbit until its undocking, reentry and landing. They will then use that information to design improvements for the spacecraft. 

Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to inspect the thrusters that malfunctioned on the flight to the ISS, as well as the "doghouses" that contained the spacecraft's propellant system where the helium had leaked. They had always planned to discard the service module that contained those elements upon re-entry, and it's now at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. NASA previously said that the issues cropped up because the propulsion equipment got hotter that expected while flying, causing container seals to loosen and to leak helium. In case of the thrusters, the heat apparently caused seals to bulge and restrict propellant flow, leading to outages. 

Stitch said he wouldn't call those problems insurmountable — they just need some time to address them. They also can't tell at the moment if Starliner's next flight would have a crew onboard. For now, the agency is preparing for other missions. By the end of September, the SpaceX Crew-8 mission vehicle is scheduled to undock and come back to Earth, while the SpaceX Crew-9 mission is expected to launch. Crew-9 will fly with two astronauts instead of four to make room for Wilmore and Williams for its return flight in February. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/boeings-starliner-is-back-without-the-astronauts-it-flew-to-the-iss-110013469.html?src=rss

A creepy, sonar-like sound coming through Starliner’s speaker posed a brief mystery on the ISS

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Starliner is scheduled to undock from the International Space Station and make its return trip to Earth uncrewed in just a matter of days, but it apparently still has a few new mysteries left in it to throw at the team before it departs. On Saturday, astronaut Butch Wilmore alerted NASA’s Mission Control about an unexplained “strange noise” coming from a speaker in the spacecraft, which you can hear in an audio clip of the conversation shared on a NASASpaceflight forum by meteorologist Rob Dale (spotted by Ars Technica). It starts at around the 45-second mark, ringing out on a steady beat. “I don’t know what’s making it,” Wilmore said.

NASA has since said that the sound has stopped in a statement to SpaceNews’ Jeff Foust on Monday, and attributed it to an audio configuration between the ISS and Starliner. It was just speaker feedback, according to the space agency.

The noise was a bit of a head-scratcher over the weekend. After confirming with Mission Control on Saturday that they could hear the sound too, once Wilmore brought his mic over to the speaker, the flight controller in Houston said, “It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping.” Wilmore then let it play for about 20 seconds more before wrapping up the call. “Just to make sure I’m on the same page, this is emanating from the speaker in Starliner,” Mission Control asked, “you don’t notice anything else, any other noises, any weird configs in there?” The astronaut noted at the time that everything else seemed normal.

“The space station audio system is complex, allowing multiple spacecraft and modules to be interconnected, and it is common to experience noise and feedback,” NASA said in its explanation to Foust on Monday. “The crew is asked to contact mission control when they hear sounds originating in the comm system.” The incident had no impact to the crew or Starliner’s departure schedule, it added.

The Boeing spacecraft has been docked with the ISS since early June, and engineers have since had their hands full trying to get to the bottom of the issues that arose during its first crewed flight. When Starliner finally heads back to Earth on September 6, it’ll be leaving its crew — Wilmore and NASA astronaut Suni Williams — behind on the ISS, where they’ll continue to work for the next few months while they wait for a ride home from SpaceX in February 2025.

Update, September 2 2024, 2:30PM ET: This story has been updated to include a statement and explanation from NASA.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/now-theres-a-creepy-sonar-like-sound-coming-through-one-of-starliners-speakers-184751210.html?src=rss