An AI system has reached human level on a test for ‘general intelligence’. Here’s what that means

OLaLa Merkel / Shutterstock Michael Timothy Bennett, Australian National University and Elija Perrier, Stanford UniversityA new artificial intelligence (AI) model has just achieved human-level results on a test designed to measure “general intelligence”. On December 20, OpenAI’s o3 system scored 85% on the ARC-AGI benchmark, well above the previous AI best score of 55% and on par with the average human score. It also scored well on a very difficult mathematics test. Creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is the stated goal of all the major AI research labs. At first glance, OpenAI appears to have at least made a significant step towards this goal. While scepticism remains, many AI researchers and developers feel something just changed. For many, the prospect of AGI now seems more real, urgent and closer than anticipated. Are they right? Generalisation and intelligence To understand what the o3 result means, you need to understand what the ARC-AGI test is all about. In technical terms, it’s a test of an AI system’s “sample efficiency” in adapting to something new – how many examples of a novel situation the system needs to see to figure out how it works. An AI system like ChatGPT (GPT-4) is not very sample efficient. It was “trained” on millions of examples of human text, constructing probabilistic “rules”...

Read More........→February 19, 2025

Is the bird flu virus inching closer to humans?

New Delhi, April 29 (IANS) While there is no record to date of sustained human-to-human bird flu transmission, the recent virus mutations show it may be inching closer to humans, according to health experts on Monday.The bird flu or avian influenza A (H5N1) virus outbreak in poultry farms is not a new occurrence. It has periodically been reported all around the world, including poultry farms in parts of India.Migrating wild birds bring the virus to poultry farms. However, in recent years, this bird flu virus H5N1 has jumped to mammals.In 2023, the H5N1 virus killed a record number of birds and also spread to otters, sea lions, foxes, dolphins, and seals, among others. More recently it also affected numerous cattle farms across the US. Health officials in the US found fragments of bird virus in pasteurised milk sold in stores, including in about 20 per cent of samples in initial testing across the country."This shows that the H5N1 bird flu virus has now adapted for circulating among mammals. It is now able to easily spread from mammal to mammal, rather than having to jump each time from bird to mammal. This shows the virus has made suitable adaptations already. And bird flu virus has moved one step closer to humans," Dr Rajeev Jayadevan, co-chairman of the Indian Medical Association’s National Covid-19 Task Force, told IANS.Importantly,...

Read More........→May 15, 2024

The first pig kidney has been transplanted into a living person. But we’re still a long way from solving organ shortages

Massachusetts General Hospital Christopher Rudge, University of SydneyIn a world first, we heard last week that US surgeons had transplanted a kidney from a gene-edited pig into a living human. News reports said the procedure was a breakthrough in xenotransplantation – when an organ, cells or tissues are transplanted from one species to another. The world’s first transplant of a gene-edited pig kidney into a live human was announced last week. Champions of xenotransplantation regard it as the solution to organ shortages across the world. In December 2023, 1,445 people in Australia were on the waiting list for donor kidneys. In the United States, more than 89,000 are waiting for kidneys. One biotech CEO says gene-edited pigs promise “an unlimited supply of transplantable organs”. Not, everyone, though, is convinced transplanting animal organs into humans is really the answer to organ shortages, or even if it’s right to use organs from other animals this way. There are two critical barriers to the procedure’s success: organ rejection and the transmission of animal viruses to recipients. But in the past decade, a new platform and technique known as CRISPR/Cas9 – often shortened to CRISPR – has promised to mitigate these issues. What is CRISPR? CRISPR gene editing takes advantage of...

Read More........→March 29, 2024

What is a sonar pulse and how can it injure humans under water?

An echo sounder on a boat uses sound waves to help gauge the depth of the water. mark_vyz/Shutterstock Christine Erbe, Curtin UniversityOver the weekend, the Australian government revealed that last Tuesday its navy divers had sustained “minor injuries”, likely due to sonar pulses from a Chinese navy vessel. The divers had been clearing fishing nets from the propellers of HMAS Toowoomba while in international waters off the coast of Japan. According to a statement from deputy prime minister Richard Marles, despite HMAS Toowoomba communicating with internationally recognised signals, the Chinese vessel approached the Australian ship and turned on its sonar, forcing the Australian divers to exit the water. The incident prompted a response from the Australian government, who labelled the incident “unsafe and unprofessional”. But what exactly is a sonar pulse, and what kinds of injuries can sonar cause to divers? What is sonar? Light doesn’t travel well under water – even in clear waters, you can see perhaps some tens of metres. Sound, however, travels very well and far under water. This is because water is much denser than air, and so can respond faster and better to acoustic pressure waves – sound waves. Because of these properties, ships use sonar to navigate through the ocean and to “see” under water. The word “sonar”...

Read More........→November 22, 2023

How consciousness may rely on brain cells acting collectively – new psychedelics research on rats

Psychedelics can help uncover consciousness. agsandrew/Shutterstock Pär Halje, Lund UniversityPsychedelics are known for inducing altered states of consciousness in humans by fundamentally changing our normal pattern of sensory perception, thought and emotion. Research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics has increased significantly in the last decade. While this research is important, I have always been more intrigued by the idea that psychedelics can be used as a tool to study the neural basis of human consciousness in laboratory animals. We ultimately share the same basic neural hardware with other mammals, and possibly some basic aspects of consciousness, too. So by examining what happens in the brain when there’s a psychedelically induced change in conscious experience, we can perhaps glean insights into what consciousness is in the first place.We still don’t know a lot about how the networks of cells in the brain enable conscious experience. The dominating view is that consciousness somehow emerges as a collective phenomenon when the dispersed information processing of individual neurons (brain cells) is integrated as the cells interact.But the mechanism by which this is supposed to happen remains unclear. Now our study on rats, published in Communications Biology, suggests that psychedelics radically change the...

Read More........→August 23, 2023

UFO, Humanity & time travel are the signage of positive index

Concerning about Unidentified flying objects (UFO’S) are only relate to the calculation of their positive ability index. As Positive means development and negative means demolishment, and time is the biggest terms move along with population and its exploration with respect to various field of doing. Productivity is the goal to achieve to move along with time or beyond time. It’s called moving in time frame or doing a rate of time travel. With Respect to earth as model humanity is a very big term of time as it's being with pure value of development with coordination.As Human has a brain of vision and program with feel and curiosity which are the nucleus of human so we can say so as human we are on earth for managing the earth resources along with its proper utilization and distributions among each as with nature.So legality is the biggest term of humanity. As it’s manage human in right direction and reduce the rate of resistance among the various field of exploration and their proper integration.As its being with a rate of positive ability index which is defined the rate of development and human movements on earth as well all across the planetary system.As it’s a simple formulation of humanity on earth which moves with positive frame of time with the enhancement of its population which is bounded by legal frame work for the positive...

Read More........→September 16, 2022

This human footprints found in Tabuk is 85,000-year-old

Tokyo: Human footprints dating back to about 85,000 years have been discovered on the banks of an ancient lake in the Nefud Desert in Tabuk region, Prince Sultan bin Salman, president of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTH), announced in Tokyo on Thursday. This amazing and rare discovery points to a new understanding of how our species came out of Africa en route to colonizing the world. Prince Sultan’s announcement came on the sidelines of his visit on Thursday to the exhibition entitled “Trade routes in the Arabian Peninsula – the magnificent antiquities of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia throughout the ages.” The exhibition, organized by the SCTH in the Japanese National Museum in Tokyo, is scheduled to end on Sunday. A joint Saudi international team discovered traces of several adults who were scattered on a muddy land in an old lake — each heading to a different destination — in the northwest of Saudi Arabia, Prince Sultan said, according to a Saudi Press Agency (SPA) report on Friday. The research team included the Saudi Geological Survey, the SCTH, King Saud University, the Max Planck Foundation for Human History, Oxford University, Cambridge University, Australia National, and the University of New South Wales in Australia. Prince Sultan said the age of the footprints coincides...

Read More........→May 28, 2018

Humans doomed if they don't find another liveable planet: Hawking

Humanity will not survive another 1,000 years on Earth alone and the human race must find another planet to live on, one of the world's best-known physicists, Stephen Hawking has warned. ''I don't think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet,'' the celebrated theoretical physicist and cosmologist said. He painted a grave picture of the future while delivering a lecture on the universe and the origins of human beings at the Oxford Union debating society. Professor Hawking, 74, reflected on the understanding of the universe garnered from breakthroughs over the past five decades, describing 2016 as a ''glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical physics''. ''Our picture of the universe has changed a great deal in the last 50 years and I am happy if I have made a small contribution,'' he was quoted as saying by The Independent. ''The fact that we humans, who are ourselves mere fundamental particles of nature, have been able to come this close to understanding the laws that govern us and the universe is certainly a triumph,'' Hawking said on Monday. Highlighting ''ambitious'' experiments that will give an even more precise picture of the universe, he said, ''We will map the position of millions of galaxies with the help of (super) computers like Cosmos. We...

Read More........→November 21, 2016

The five biggest threats to human existence

Other ways humanity could end are more subtle. United States Department of Energy, CC BY Anders Sandberg, University of Oxford: In the daily hubbub of current “crises” facing humanity, we forget about the many generations we hope are yet to come. Not those who will live 200 years from now, but 1,000 or 10,000 years from now. I use the word “hope” because we face risks, called existential risks, that threaten to wipe out humanity. These risks are not just for big disasters, but for the disasters that could end history. Not everyone has ignored the long future though. Mystics like Nostradamus have regularly tried to calculate the end of the world. HG Wells tried to develop a science of forecasting and famously depicted the far future of humanity in his book The Time Machine. Other writers built other long-term futures to warn, amuse or speculate.  But had these pioneers or futurologists not thought about humanity’s future, it would not have changed the outcome. There wasn’t much that human beings in their place could have done to save us from an existential crisis or even cause one. We are in a more privileged position today. Human activity has been steadily shaping the future of our planet. And even though we are far from controlling natural disasters, we are developing technologies that may help mitigate,...

Read More........→November 08, 2016

Finding the Seat of Human Consciousness

Credit: Wikimedia Commons Philosophers have long struggled to define human consciousness. Now, a team of researchers led by neurologists at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has pinpointed the regions of the brain that may play a role maintaining it. Their findings, which have already garnered multiple awards from the American Academy of Neurology, were published today in that society's journal, Neurology. "For the first time, we have found a connection between the brainstem region involved in arousal and regions involved in awareness, two prerequisites for consciousness," said Michael D. Fox, MD, PhD, Director of the Laboratory for Brain Network Imaging and Modulation and the Associate Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at BIDMC. "A lot of pieces of evidence all came together to point to this network playing a role in human consciousness."  Classical neurology holds that arousal and awareness are two critical components of consciousness. Arousal is likely regulated by the brainstem - the portion of the brain, contiguous with the spinal cord, that is responsible for the sleep/wake cycle and cardiac and respiratory rates. Awareness, another critical component of consciousness, has long been thought to reside somewhere in the cortex, the outer layer of the brain...

Read More........→November 05, 2016

Birds behave like human musicians

New York: The tuneful behaviour of some songbirds is similar to that of human musicians, who play around with their tunes, balancing repetition and variation just like jazz artists, a new study has found. Researchers studied the pied butcherbird, a very musical species, which provided a wealth of intriguing data for analysis. "Since pied butcherbird songs share so many commonalities with human music, this species could possibly revolutionise the way we think about the core values of music," said Hollis Taylor of Macquarie University in Australia. In the past, claims that musical principles are integral to birdsong were largely met with scepticism and dismissed as wishful thinking. However, the extensive statistical and objective analysis of the new research shows that the more complex a bird's repertoire, the better they are at singing in time, rhythmically interacting with other birds much more skillfully than those who know fewer songs. The butcherbirds "balance their performance to keep it in a sweet spot between boredom and confusion," said Ofer Tchernichovski, professor at City University of New York (CUNY). "Pied butcherbirds, not unlike jazz musicians, play around with their tunes, balancing repetition and variation," said Constance Scharff, who directs the animal behaviour laboratory at the Free...

Read More........→October 15, 2016

Computer program learns to replicate human handwriting

Researchers at University College London have devised a software algorithm able to scan and replicate almost anyone's handwriting In a world increasingly dominated by the QWERTY keyboard, computer scientists at University College London (UCL) have developed software which may spark the comeback of the handwritten word, by analysing the handwriting of any individual and accurately replicating it. The scientists have created "My Text in Your Handwriting" – a programme which semi-automatically examines a sample of a person's handwriting that can be as little as one paragraph, and generates new text saying whatever the user wishes, as if the author had handwritten it themselves. "Our software has lots of valuable applications," says lead author, Dr Tom Haines. "Stroke victims, for example, may be able to formulate letters without the concern of illegibility, or someone sending flowers as a gift could include a handwritten note without even going into the florist. It could also be used in comic books where a piece of handwritten text can be translated into different languages without losing the author's original style." Published in ACM Transactions on Graphics, the machine learning algorithm is built around glyphs – a specific instance of a character. Authors produce different glyphs to represent the same element of writing – the...

Read More........→August 24, 2016

A New Reality Materializing: Humans Can Be the New Supercomputer

Illustration: Colourbox Today, people of all backgrounds can contribute to solving serious scientific problems by playing computer games. A Danish research group has extended the limits of quantum physics calculations and simultaneously blurred the boundaries between man and mac. The Danish research team, CODER, has found out, that the human brain can beat the calculating powers of a computer, when it comes to solving quantum-problems. The saying of philosopher René Descartes of what makes humans unique is beginning to sound hollow. 'I think -- therefore soon I am obsolete' seems more appropriate. When a computer routinely beats us at chess and we can barely navigate without the help of a GPS, have we outlived our place in the world? Not quite. Welcome to the front line of research in cognitive skills, quantum computers and gaming. Today there is an on-going battle between man and machine. While genuine machine consciousness is still years into the future, we are beginning to see computers make choices that previously demanded a human's input. Recently, the world held its breath as Google's algorithm AlphaGo beat a professional player in the game Go--an achievement demonstrating the explosive speed of development in machine capabilities. A screenshot of one of the many games that are available. In this case the task is to...

Read More........→April 14, 2016