Tag: gates
Bill Gates Visits Planned Site of ‘Most Advanced Nuclear Facility in the World’
The new plant will employ “between 200 and 250 people,” Gates writes in a blog post, “and those with experience in the coal plant will be able to do many of the jobs — such as operating a turbine and maintaining connections to the power grid — without much retraining.”
It’s called the Natrium plant, and it was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. When it opens (potentially in 2030), it will be the most advanced nuclear facility in the world, and it will be much safer and produce far less waste than conventional reactors.
All of this matters because the world needs to make a big bet on nuclear. As I wrote in my book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster , we need nuclear power if we’re going to meet the world’s growing need for energy while also eliminating carbon emissions. None of the other clean sources are as reliable, and none of the other reliable sources are as clean…
Another thing that sets TerraPower apart is its digital design process. Using supercomputers, they’ve digitally tested the Natrium design countless times, simulating every imaginable disaster, and it keeps holding up. TerraPower’s sophisticated work has drawn interest from around the globe, including an agreement to collaborate on nuclear power technology in Japan and investments from the South Korean conglomerate SK and the multinational steel company ArcelorMittal…
I’m excited about this project because of what it means for the future. It’s the kind of effort that will help America maintain its energy independence. And it will help our country remain a leader in energy innovation worldwide. The people of Kemmerer are at the forefront of the equitable transition to a clean, safe energy future, and it’s great to be partnering with them.
Gates writes that for safety the plant uses liquid sodium (instead of water) to absorb excess heat, and it even has an energy storage system “to control how much electricity it produces at any given time…”
“I’m convinced that the facility will be a win for the local economy, America’s energy independence, and the fight against climate change.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bill Gates Predicts Within 18 Months, AI Will Be Teaching Kids to Read
Historically, teaching writing skills has proven to be an incredibly difficult task for a computer, Gates noted. When teachers give feedback on essays, they look for traits like narrative structure and clarity of prose — a “high-cognitive exercise” that’s “tough” for developers to replicate in code, he said. But AI chatbots’ ability to recognize and recreate human-like language changes that dynamic, proponents say…
AI technology must improve at reading and recreating human language to better motivate students before it can become a viable tutor, Gates said… It may take some time, but Gates is confident the technology will improve, likely within two years, he said. Then, it could help make private tutoring available to a wide swath of students who might otherwise be unable to afford it…
“This should be a leveler,” he said. “Because having access to a tutor is too expensive for most students — especially having that tutor adapt and remember everything that you’ve done and look across your entire body of work.”
Gates isn’t the only billionaire thinking about how AI will affect education. Mark Cuban recently retweeted a prediction that GPT-4 “will revolutionize homeschooling.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Star Trek Icon Gates McFadden Joined Star Trek Online
Bill Gates Predicts ‘The Age of AI Has Begun’
In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary. The first time was in 1980, when I was introduced to a graphical user interface — the forerunner of every modern operating system, including Windows…. The second big surprise came just last year. I’d been meeting with the team from OpenAI since 2016 and was impressed by their steady progress. In mid-2022, I was so excited about their work that I gave them a challenge: train an artificial intelligence to pass an Advanced Placement biology exam. Make it capable of answering questions that it hasn’t been specifically trained for. (I picked AP Bio because the test is more than a simple regurgitation of scientific facts — it asks you to think critically about biology.) If you can do that, I said, then you’ll have made a true breakthrough.
I thought the challenge would keep them busy for two or three years. They finished it in just a few months. In September, when I met with them again, I watched in awe as they asked GPT, their AI model, 60 multiple-choice questions from the AP Bio exam — and it got 59 of them right. Then it wrote outstanding answers to six open-ended questions from the exam. We had an outside expert score the test, and GPT got a 5 — the highest possible score, and the equivalent to getting an A or A+ in a college-level biology course. Once it had aced the test, we asked it a non-scientific question: “What do you say to a father with a sick child?” It wrote a thoughtful answer that was probably better than most of us in the room would have given. The whole experience was stunning.
I knew I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface.
Some predictions from Gates:
“Eventually your main way of controlling a computer will no longer be pointing and clicking or tapping on menus and dialogue boxes. Instead, you’ll be able to write a request in plain English….”
“Advances in AI will enable the creation of a personal agent… It will see your latest emails, know about the meetings you attend, read what you read, and read the things you don’t want to bother with.”
“I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-driven software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn. It will know your interests and your learning style so it can tailor content that will keep you engaged. It will measure your understanding, notice when you’re losing interest, and understand what kind of motivation you respond to. It will give immediate feedback.”
“AIs will dramatically accelerate the rate of medical breakthroughs. The amount of data in biology is very large, and it’s hard for humans to keep track of all the ways that complex biological systems work. There is already software that can look at this data, infer what the pathways are, search for targets on pathogens, and design drugs accordingly. Some companies are working on cancer drugs that were developed this way.”
AI will “help health-care workers make the most of their time by taking care of certain tasks for them — things like filing insurance claims, dealing with paperwork, and drafting notes from a doctor’s visit. I expect that there will be a lot of innovation in this area…. AIs will even give patients the ability to do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bill Gates: AI is most important tech advance in decades
New Kickstarter Will Add 3D Printed Elden Ring-Style Fog Gates To Your D&D Campaign
Tabletop RPGs are a time-intensive hobby, with some gamemasters spending hours setting up the perfect virtual or physical map for the climax of the D&D session. If you’re looking to add a little more pizzaz to your sessions, one Kickstarter will sell you a 3D-printed portal that lets you make your own fog gates, and the effect is pretty impressive.
Black Scrolls Games is one of many companies that sells 3D-printed terrain pieces for D&D campaigns, which are intended for use with grid-based combat, or to simply give your players an idea of the battlefield. However, this Kickstarter also includes portal pieces that hold your phone, which allows you to make a swirling gate effect, or even the fog gates made famous by FromSoftware’s Souls series. They can even be used horizontally for a witch’s cauldron effect. However, you’ll need a 3D printer to make these, so make sure you know that before you back it.
“Act 1” of the Kickstarter includes almost a dozen portals that can be used in various configurations, including one with a pond effect that drains to reveal a dungeon entrance beneath. Very nifty. Act 2 includes at least 4 more, including a particularly impressive tree portal called Summoned Souls. While these pieces aren’t necessary for a great D&D campaign, they’ll definitely have an effect on your party if you’re a GM who pays particular attention to presentation. Backers who commit $45 or more will receive the full set in 3D printer format.
Bill Gates Urges High-Voltage, Long-Distance Power Lines for Clean Energy Future
[M]any of the best places to generate lots of electricity are far away from urban centers… so to maximize clean energy’s potential, we’re going to need much longer lines to move that power from where it’s made to where it’s needed…. Beyond being old and outdated, there’s another big problem making everything worse: Our grid is fragmented. Most people (including me a lot of the time) talk about the “electric grid” as if it’s one single grid covering the whole nation from coast to coast, but it’s actually a complicated patchwork of systems with different levels of connection to one another.
Our convoluted network prevents communities from importing energy when challenges like extreme weather shut off their power. It also prevents power from new clean energy projects from making it to people’s homes. Right now, over 1,000 gigawatts worth of potential clean energy projects are waiting for approval — about the current size of the entire U.S. grid — and the primary reason for the bottleneck is the lack of transmission. Complicating things further is the fact that new infrastructure projects are typically planned and executed by hundreds of individual utility companies that aren’t required to coordinate.
Gates calls for new federal funding and policies , but also faults the permitting processes at the state level as “long, convoluted, and often outdated.”
As a result, we don’t build lines fast enough, and we’re slower than other countries. Some states — like New Mexico and Colorado — are doing innovative work to speed up the process. But there is a lot more room for policymakers to work together and make the permit process easier.
Although transmission is primarily a policy problem, innovation will help too. For example, grid-enhancing technologies like dynamic line ratings, power flow controls, and topology optimization could increase the capacity of the existing system. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is part of the climate initiative I helped start, has invested in new technologies like advanced conductors and superconductors — wires that use cutting-edge materials to get more energy out of smaller lines. But these technologies aren’t a substitute for real systemic improvements and building lines in places where they don’t already exist.
“By the 2030s, we need to build so many new lines that they would reach to the moon if they were strung together,” Gates says in a video accompanying the article. “And by 2050, we’ll need to more than double the size of the grid, while replacing most of the existing wires.” But noting today’s power grid problems, Gates writes optimistically that “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
And he ultimately believes that modernized power grids “will lead to lower emissions, cleaner air, more jobs, fewer blackouts, more energy and economic security, and healthier communities across the country.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.