Lifeboat Foundation

ARMONK, N.Y., April 30, 2024 — Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced an agreement with RIKEN, a Japanese national research laboratory, to deploy IBM’s next-generation quantum computer architecture and best-performing quantum processor at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. It will be the only instance of a quantum computer co-located with the supercomputer Fugaku.

This agreement was executed as part of RIKEN’s existing project, supported by funding from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), an organization under Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI)’s “Development of Integrated Utilization Technology for Quantum and Supercomputers” as part of the “Project for Research and Development of Enhanced Infrastructures for Post 5G Information and Communications Systems.” RIKEN has dedicated use of an IBM Quantum System Two architecture for the purpose of implementation of its project. Under the project RIKEN and its co-PI SoftBank Corp., with its collaborators, University of Tokyo, and Osaka University, aim to demonstrate the advantages of such hybrid computational platforms for deployment as services in the future post-5G era, based on the vision of advancing science and business in Japan.

In addition to the project, IBM will work to develop the software stack dedicated to generating and executing integrated quantum-classical workflows in a heterogeneous quantum-HPC hybrid computing environment. These new capabilities will be geared towards delivering improvements in algorithm quality and execution times.

A study that could help revolutionize wireless communication introduces a novel method to curve terahertz signals around an obstacle.

While cellular networks and Wi-Fi systems are more advanced than ever, they are also quickly reaching their bandwidth limits. Scientists know that in the near future they’ll need to transition to much higher communication frequencies than what current systems rely on, but before that can happen there are a number of — quite literal — obstacles standing in the way.

Researchers from Brown University and Rice University say they’ve advanced one step closer to getting around these solid obstacles, like walls, furniture and even people — and they do it by curving light.

Varying the parameters of weight distribution did not account for the observed amount of HD information conveyed by PoSub-FS cells (Fig. 2a). Rather, we found that the number of inputs received by each output unit was a key factor influencing the amount of HD information (Extended Data Fig. 5e). Varying both weight distribution and the number of input units, we obtained a distribution of HD information in output tuning curves that matched the real data (Extended Data Fig. 5f), revealing that the tuning of PoSub-FS cells can be used to estimate both the distribution of weights and the number of input neurons. Notably, under optimal network conditions, Isomap projection of output tuning curve auto-correlograms has a similar geometry to that of real PoSub-FS cells (Extended Data Fig. 5g), confirming similar distribution of tuning shapes.

To further quantify the relative contributions of ADN and local PoSub inputs to PoSub-FS cell tuning, we expanded the simulation to include the following two inputs: one with tuning curve widths corresponding to ADN-HD cells and one with tuning curve widths corresponding to PoSub-HD cells (Fig. 4h, left). We then trained the model using gradient descent to find the variances and means of input weights that result in the best fit between the simulated output and real data. The combination of parameters that best described the real data resulted in ADN inputs distributed in a near Gaussian-like manner but a heavy-tailed distribution of PoSub-HD inputs (Fig. 4h, middle). Using these distribution parameters, we performed simulations to determine the contribution of ADN-HD and PoSub-HD inputs to the output tuning curves and established that PoSub-FS cell-like outputs are best explained by flat, high firing rate inputs from ADN-HD cells and low firing rate, HD-modulated inputs from PoSub-HD cells (Fig. 4h, right).

Our simulations, complemented by direct analytical derivation (detailed in the Supplementary Methods), not only support the hypothesis that the symmetries observed in PoSub-FS cell tuning curves originate from local cortical circuits but also demonstrate that these symmetries emerge from strongly skewed distributions of synaptic weights.

How can we guarantee that data sent over the internet is only accessible to its intended recipient? Currently, our data is secured using encryption methods based on the premise that factoring large numbers is a complex task. However, as quantum computing advances, these encryption techniques may become vulnerable and potentially ineffective in the future.

Encryption by means of physical laws

Tobias Vogl, a professor of Quantum Communication Systems Engineering, is working on an encryption process that relies on principles of physics. “Security will be based on the information being encoded into individual light particles and then transmitted. The laws of physics do not permit this information to be extracted or copied. When the information is intercepted, the light particles change their characteristics. Because we can measure these state changes, any attempt to intercept the transmitted data will be recognized immediately, regardless of future advances in technology,” says Tobias Vogl.

Jason Matheny is a delight to speak with, provided you’re up for a lengthy conversation about potential technological and biomedical catastrophe.

Now CEO and president of Rand Corporation, Matheny has built a career out of thinking about such gloomy scenarios. An economist by training with a focus on public health, he dived into the worlds of pharmaceutical development and cultivated meat before turning his attention to national security.

As director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the US intelligence community’s research agency, he pushed for more attention to the dangers of biological weapons and badly designed artificial intelligence. In 2021, Matheny was tapped to be President Biden’s senior adviser on technology and national security issues. And then, in July of last year, he became CEO and president of Rand, the oldest nonprofit think tank in the US, which has shaped government policy on nuclear strategy, the Vietnam War, and the development of the internet.

FineWeb: 15 trillion tokens of high quality web data the web has to offer.

The 🍷 dataset consists of more than 15T tokens of cleaned and deduplicated english web data from CommonCrawl.

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

Researchers have produced, stored, and retrieved quantum information for the first time, a critical step in quantum networking.

The ability to share quantum information is crucial for developing quantum networks for distributed computing and secure communication. Quantum computing will be useful for solving some important types of problems, such as optimizing financial risk, decrypting data, designing molecules, and studying the properties of materials.

“Interfacing two key devices together is a crucial step forward in allowing quantum networking, and we are really excited to be the first team to have been able to demonstrate this.” —

A diss track featuring the apparent vocals of rapper Kendrick Lamar made its rounds on social media earlier this week, escalating the beef between him and Aubrey “Drake” Graham.

Now a 23-year-old musician who goes by the moniker Sly the Rapper has come forward, alleging he’s behind the viral track, which was titled simply “Freestyle.” And guess what? He says it was AI-generated.

Continue reading “Internet Fooled by AI-Generated Kendrick Lamar Diss Track” »

A collaboration of scientists from various universities in the UK and Europe have stored and retrieved data from quantum computers, marking a “crucial connection for ‘quantum internet,’” in a global first.

This is an essential step in quantum networking as the world gears up for the next generation of computing.

With its ultrafast computational speeds, quantum computing is touted to solve the world’s problems in designing new drugs, understanding the properties of materials, and optimizing financial risk.