Post Scientist

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said Thursday it raised $65 billion in private funding that will push its valuation to $965 billion, a whopping number that makes the five-year-old maker of the Claude chatbot one of the world's most valuable startups as it careens toward a likely Wall Street debut. The announcement vaults Anthropic ahead of its chief rival, ChatGPT maker OpenAI, both in market value and in reported revenue. Anthropic said it's now making annualized revenue of $47 billion from selling its technology to people and organizations using Claude to write code and do other work and personal tasks on their behalf. Anthropic was formed in 2021 by ex-OpenAI leaders and now both AI firms, along with Elon Musk's rocket and AI company SpaceX, are all expected to become publicly traded. All three are also still losing more money than they make, fueling concerns of an AI bubble. San Francisco-based Anthropic said the new round of funding was led by in...

  Elon Musk insists that his artificial intelligence venture xAI remains a serious competitor, pushing back against mounting doubts after revelations that the supercomputing facilities built to power his own AI models are being rented out to a rival. "Whether it is the best remains to be seen, but I will never give up. Never," Musk wrote on his X social media platform this week. The pledge came after SpaceX's newly filed stock market prospectus disclosed that Anthropic—the AI company behind the Claude chatbot—will pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for access to the Colossus data centers, the vast computing facilities built to train Musk's Grok AI models. Musk said the arrangement is a short-term deal and that SpaceX, which owns xAI, could reclaim the capacity if needed. "We might need it back at some point," he wrote. XAI's main product is the Grok chatbot, now in its fourth generation, which is built into the X platform and competes with Cha...

  Every second, the data behind billions of emails, TikTok videos and AI queries travels around the world as pulses of light through fiber-optic networks. Along the way, these signals pass through tiny components that act as channels for light: photonic chips. These devices don't just carry signals—they direct and combine them, ensuring information moves efficiently across complex networks. But photonic chips still have limits. They struggle to perform certain key light-processing operations. Tasks such as signal conversion and amplification still rely on additional components—components that are bulky, consume energy and generate heat. AI is creat...

  As artificial intelligence systems become increasingly sophisticated, questions once confined to philosophy are rapidly entering mainstream scientific and public debate: Can AI possess consciousness? Could animals, organoids, or even fetuses have subjective experiences? Study questions how we measure consciousness A research team led by Director Hakwan LAU of the Center for Neuroscience Imaging Research within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), together with collaborators from the Université de Montréal and New York University, has published a new analysis in the journal Neuron arguing that current scientific methods may not yet be capable of reliably answering such questions. The paper critically examines how consciousness is currently studied in neuroscience and argues that many widely used experimental approaches fail to clearly distinguish subjective experience from general information processing. The researchers emphasize that the study does not attempt to...

  New research from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, has significant implications for understanding both human language development and the behavior of large-scale artificial intelligence language models. Culture is key, as well as an understanding of "iterated learning," which posits that language evolves over generations (in humans and computers) to become more structured. "We built a computer brain with similar characteristics to a child's, and compared it to behaviors we see in children's brains. We then fed it data with similar properties found in human language and watched how the generations (versions) of the computer brain learn." "It turns out, computer brains find the structure in the data in the same way that children favor certain properties of language in learning. It also showed that the dataset (language) becomes more structured over generations because it makes learning easier," says lead author Dr. Dev...

  The United Nations estimates that 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water, and communities from California to the Middle East rely on desalination plants to convert ocean water to fresh water. Common desalination techniques such as reverse osmosis and thermal distillation are energy-intensive, require pre- and post-water treatment, and leave behind a concentrated saltwater byproduct called brine that wreaks havoc on sea life when it's deposited back into the ocean by raising the salt level and lowering oxygen in the water. But a novel approach developed at the University of Rochester offers a way to overcome these drawbacks. Researchers at URochester's Institute of Optics developed a new solar-thermal desalination process to produce fresh water in an energy-efficient way that does not leave behind brine and requires no chemical additives to pre-treat the water. A team led by Chunlei Guo, a professor of optics and of physics and a senior scientist a...

  When people watch a scene in the film "Jurassic Park" where a giant dinosaur walks toward them, they naturally imagine a heavy, rumbling sound, as if the ground were shaking. This is because humans predict sound by considering not only the shape of an object, but also physical properties such as its size, weight, and speed of movement. However, existing video-to-audio generation AI mainly generates sound based on the category of objects or scene information in the video, and has not sufficiently reflected physical properties that vary depending on weight or speed. New physics-aware sound technology A collaborative research team involving Pr...