For most of modern history, trains, planes, automobiles, and boats have been humanity’s four main modes of transportation. However, while these vehicles help get us from point A to point B, they’re also costly, harmful to the environment, and generally don’t move quite as fast we’d like. Just recently California moved forward on a $67 billion high-speed rail system in hopes of creating an innovative new way to move large groups of people in significantly less time. Though the project has moved forward, engineer, inventor and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has shared his disapproval alongside his own concept, the Hyperloop, which he claims will be faster and more efficient.
In this episode of Explained, Joshua Smith breaks down what exactly the Hyperloop is, what it means for the future of transportation, and more. Could Hyperloop end up changing the way we get around forever? Check out the video to find out!
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.