Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Baidu Granted Permits To Operate Humanless Robotaxis In Beijing BY TYLER DURDEN SATURDAY, MAR 18, 2023 - 11:30 AM It looks like those robotaxis that were promised years ago are finally making their way onto the roads. The only problem is they aren't Teslas - instead, they are products of Beijing's internet search giant, Baidu. The company, akin to Google in the U.S., received "the first permits to provide fully driverless ride-hailing services in a suburb of Beijing", according to a Bloomberg wrap-up Friday morning. Baidu says it has plans of putting 10 robotaxis on the road to start in the Beijing Yizhuang Economic Development Zone, which Bloomberg notes is "roughly the size of Manhattan". The vehicles will have no human driver in the car. As a condition of the new permits, the company won't be able to charge fees for rides yet. "Baidu won China’s first commercial licenses for fully humanless taxis in Wuhan and Chongqing" back in August,

Microsoft Cuts AI Ethics Team As It Invests Billions More Into AI Technology, Report Says Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), March 17, 2023 The last remaining members of an ethics and society team within Microsoft’s artificial intelligence (AI) department didn’t survive a recent round of mass layoffs, according to a report. The change comes as Microsoft signs a “multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment” deal with OpenAI, the startup behind AI-powered image and text generators like DALL-E and ChatGPT, and upgrades its Bing search engine and Edge internet browser to incorporate a “new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT.” The team, as reported by tech news site Platformer, was tasked to make sure Microsoft’s ethical standards regarding AI were actually reflected in product designs. The team was also reportedly working to identify potential risks posed by integrating OpenAI’s technology into a range of Microsoft pro

Microsoft's Stunning Copilot AI Demo Could Change Office Work Forever Story by Victor Tangermann • March 16, 2023 2:18 PM Microsoft has announced its GPT-4-powered Copilot is coming to its suite of Office 365 apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams.© Provided by Futurism Clippy on Steroids You can run, but you can't hide — AI is coming for your office work. All of it. Still riding high on the success of integrating ChatGPT in Bing, Microsoft just announced that its GPT-4-powered Copilot is coming to Office 365 apps. With it, users will be able to generate entire Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Outlook emails, and PowerPoint presentations with a click of a button, horizontally integrating all those apps (along with Microsoft Teams). In other words, it's Clippy, our paperclip companion of yore, but on steroids. A lot. Think, maybe, Bruce Banner to Incredible Hulk. Or as Microsoft 365 head Jared Spataro gushed during an announcement today: "

Scientists discover superconducting material that could bring total revolution in energy and electronics Story by Andrew Griffin • March 9, 2023 8:20 PM Scientists have discovered a new material that could be set to change the entire world. Researchers say they have created a superconducting material that works at both a temperature and a pressure low enough to actually use it in practical situations. It reaches a breakthrough that scientists have been chasing for more than a century, in making a material that is able to transmit electricity without resistance, and pass magnetic fields around the material. Its discovery could lead to power grids that are able to seamlessly transmit energy, saving up to 200 million megawatt hours that is currently lost to resistance. It could also contribute to nuclear fusion, a long-awaited process that could create unlimited power. Other applications include high speed, hovering trains and new kinds of medical equipment, they suggest. A team

Scientists Believe 'Organoid Intelligence' Is the Future of Computing Money Talks News March 6, 2023 at 8:21 AM Scientists Believe , 'Organoid Intelligence' , Is the Future of Computing. CNN reports that as part of a new field called "organoid intelligence," a computer powered by human brain cells could shape the future. Organoids are lab-grown tissues capable of brain-like functions, such as forming a network of connections. Brain organoids were first grown in 2012 by Dr. Thomas Hartung, a professor of environmental health and engineering, by altering human skin samples. Brain organoids were first grown in 2012 by Dr. Thomas Hartung, a professor of environmental health and engineering, by altering human skin samples. Computing and artificial intelligence have been driving the technology revolution but they are reaching a ceiling. , Dr. Thomas Hartung, professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Heal

Ford Files For Patent That Can "Remotely Shut Down" Parts Of Your Car When Your Bill Isn't Paid BY TYLER DURDEN SATURDAY, MAR 04, 2023 - 05:35 AM Remember when getting in your car and flying down the highway with the top down used to be the perfect escape from the mire and muck of everyday life, like bills and e-mail? Now, thanks to the implementation of technology in the auto industry, that once-freeing joyride is literally becoming bills and e-mail. That's because a new patent from Ford now allows the manufacturer to "remotely shut down your radio or air conditioning, lock you out of your vehicle, or prompt it to ceaselessly beep if you miss car payments", according to a new report from Bloomberg. While the official company line is that Ford has "no plans" to use the technology, we're certain that'll be proven to be incorrect over time. “We submit patents on new inventions as a normal course of business, but they aren’t necessarily a

Forget lithium ion — world’s first silicon-carbon battery blows that tech away Story by Richard Priday • February 28, 2023 Phone maker Honor showed off a world-first battery that's made using silicon and carbon to give upcoming handsets a distinct capacity advantage over those using currently available battery tech. During the on-stage announcement at MWC 2023, Honor CEO George Zhao claimed the battery features a 12.8% higher energy density compared to regular graphite batteries. That means either the same capacity as a typical battery in a smaller space, or more capacity in the same space, depending on how you wish to take advantage of the new technology. Zhao put this announcement in context by saying that if the newly released Honor Magic5 Pro used this technology, its 5,100 mAh battery would instead have a capacity of 5,450 mAh. Honor drew attention to the "low voltage aggregation technology" that makes this capacity increase possible. Capacity at 3.5V is 240% b

'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True' by Blake Lemoine • February 27, 2023 I joined Google in 2015 as a software engineer. Part of my job involved working on LaMDA: an engine used to create different dialogue applications, including chatbots. The most recent technology built on top of LaMDA is an alternative of Google Search called Google Bard, which is not yet available to the public. Bard is not a chatbot; it's a completely different kind of system, but it's run by the same engine as chatbots. In my role, I tested LaMDA through a chatbot we created, to see if it contained bias with respect to sexual orientation, gender, religion, political stance, and ethnicity. But while testing for bias, I branched out and followed my own interests. During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wa

How This Hydrogen-Powered America’s Cup Chase Cat Could Change the Future of Boating Dubbed Chase Zero, the foiling-power catamaran spans 10 meters in length and can carry up to 550 pounds. By MICHAEL VERDON The America’s Cup, yachting’s most storied race, is not where you’d expect to find the next source of emissions-free propulsion for “stinkpots,” sailor-speak for motorboats. Yet Emirates Team New Zealand, which won the regatta in 2021 for the fourth time, launched a foiling-power catamaran named Chase Zero last year that could change the future of boating. As Cup defenders, the Kiwis were in charge of creating the new protocol for the 2024 event, for which they sought out areas desperate for new technology. “We realized our chase boats were years behind our foiling race boats,” says Nick Burridge, ETNZ’s operations and reliability manager. “To keep up, the tenders needed big horsepower, so were burning huge amounts of fossil fuel.” ETNZ decided to bypass battery-powered boa

7 things you didn’t know that ChatGPT can do By Malcolm McMillan February 15, 2023 From writing a novel to creating a logo, there’s a lot that ChatGPT can do (Image credit: Shutterstock) Make a brand logo Create a 3D animation   Compose music   Create content in multiple languages   Write a book — or at least a chapter   Work as a Linux virtual machine   Play a text-based role-playing game   ChatGPT  is a potentially revolutionary AI-based tool that it taking the tech world by storm. Microsoft has even  added ChatGPT to its Bing search engine . Despite what some people may tell you, ChatGPT can’t do everything, and what it can do ChatGPT doesn’t always get right. That’s not a problem unique to ChatGPT —  Google Bard  made a costly mistake during its debut.   But what ChatGPT can do is still very impressive. It can generate news articles, summarize documents and even code basic websites. However, there are even further depths to what the chatbot AI can