According to a recent story from The Information, OpenAI’s next-generation Orion model of ChatGPT, which is both rumored and denied to be arriving before the end of the year, might not be everything that has been hailed when it does.

According to the report, which quotes unnamed OpenAI staff, the Orion model has shown a “far smaller” improvement over its predecessor, GPT-4, than GPT-4 did over GPT-3. According to the same individuals, Orion “isn’t reliably better than its predecessor [GPT-4] in handling certain tasks,” particularly coding applications, even though the new model is noticeably better at general language functions like creating emails or summarizing documents.

According to the Information report, one of the main reasons for the new model’s negligible improvements is the “dwindling supply of high-quality text and other data” that may train new models. Simply put, the AI sector is rapidly approaching a training data bottleneck after removing the simple sources of social media data from websites like X, Facebook, and YouTube (the latter twice). Pre-release training is being slowed significantly because of these organizations’ growing inability to identify the kinds of complex coding problems that will help them push their models beyond their existing limits.

This decreased training effectiveness has significant business and environmental ramifications. The amount of energy, water, and other resources is predicted to increase sixfold over the next ten years as frontier-class LLMs expand and continue to push their parameter counts into the high trillions. Because of this, the country’s current power infrastructure cannot supply the power required for their expanding networks of artificial intelligence data centers. For this reason, Google is purchasing the output of seven nuclear reactors, AWS is purchasing a 960 MW plant, and Microsoft is attempting to restart Three Mile Island.

To get around the shortage of suitable training data, OpenAI has established a “foundations team.” These methods might entail the use of artificial training data, like that produced by Nvidia’s Nemotron family of models. The group is also investigating ways to enhance the model’s performance after training.
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Initially believed to be the code name for OpenAI’s GPT-5, Orion is now expected to arrive in 2025. It’s unclear if we’ll have enough electricity to see it through to completion without causing our municipal electrical grids to brown out.

Austrian aviation company CycloTech has revealed it's building a demonstrator version of an eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) vehicle to showcase its propulsion system for electric flight. The firm is hoping to take the wraps off its BlackBird flying car by the end of this year, and commence test flights in early 2025.

CycloTech has been shaping its 360-degree thrust vectoring propulsion barrels, which it calls CycloRotors, over the last few years. It's keen to test the seventh generation of this propulsion system in this demonstrator. The company also says this is especially well suited to flying cars, because it's the only one that can control the thrust vector in strength and direction in a full 360-degree path.

The BlackBird will feature six CycloRotors to enable vertical take-off and landing, parallel parking, and braking and deceleration in mid-air. 

It'll end up being about three quarters of the size of CycloTech’s last concept model: 16 ft long, 7.5 ft wide, and 6.5 ft tall. With a maximum take-off weight of 750 lb., it'll manage a top speed of 75 mph.

The six CycloRotor configuration includes two rotors along the length of the vehicle; that enables precise sideways and backward flight, as well as mid-air braking – all without tilting or banking. That should give passengers a smooth ride regardless of the conditions in the air. 
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If cyclotech can get this newest version ‘off the ground,’ the future of aviation could look a lot like what was promised all those years ago in The Jetsons.

A novel AI model known as CHIEF (Clinical Histopathology Imaging Evaluation Foundation), developed by researchers at Harvard Medical School, has been very accurate in diagnosing and forecasting the course of certain cancer types.

The study claims that CHIEF works better than current AI systems, reaching up to “96% accuracy” in the diagnosis of 19 distinct cancer kinds. The researchers compare CHIEF’s adaptability to that of ChatGPT, a language model that has drawn a lot of interest because of its capacity to handle a variety of jobs.

Instead of taking the generalist approach found in more conventional models like GPT-4V or LlaVA, CHIEF is essentially a highly specialized AI vision model—one that can comprehend visual inputs—trained to be extremely detailed in images of cancer cells.

Therefore, CHIEF was trained on a large multimodal dataset that included 15 million unlabeled photos and 60,000 whole-slide images of tissues from 19 different anatomical sites, rather than being trained to recognize generic elements like “cats” or “oranges.”

According to the study, “CHIEF extracted microscopic representations useful for cancer cell detection, tumor origin identification, molecular profile characterization, and prognostic prediction through pretraining on 44 terabytes of high-resolution pathology imaging datasets.”

The strategy appears to be more effective than expected. According to research senior author Kun-Hsing Yu, “our goal was to develop a quick, flexible AI platform that can carry out a variety of cancer evaluation tasks, similar to ChatGPT.” “Our model proved to be very helpful in a variety of tasks pertaining to the detection, prognosis, and response to treatment of various cancers.”

CHIEF surpassed state-of-the-art AI techniques by up to 36.1% on all tasks when tested on over 19,400 photos from 32 separate datasets gathered worldwide. It also was better at distinguishing between patients with high and low survival rates and could accurately offer information about various tissue samples that were tested.

To increase CHIEF’s accuracy, the researchers intend to train it on pictures of non-cancerous illnesses, rare disorders, and pre-malignant tissues. To improve the model’s ability to detect cancer aggressiveness and forecast the results of innovative treatments, they also expect feeding it additional data.

An Expanding Role in Cancer Detection and Beyond. For some time now, scientists have been using AI to improve cancer and other disease detection, diagnosis, and therapy.

For instance, Cambridge researchers unveiled EMethylNET, an AI model that has a 98% success rate in identifying 13 different forms of cancer using DNA information from tissue samples. Trained on over 6,000 tissue samples, EMethylNET demonstrates how AI may detect cancer early by detecting DNA methylation, which is a key factor in the development of cancer.

An earlier model called CancerGPT (I’m not making that word up) predicted how drug combinations could affect cancer patients’ unusual tissues using a huge language model. It proved that when structured data and samples are limited, pre-trained models can be quite helpful. CancerGPT can provide important insights by generalizing predictions and using previous medical research, but researchers were still worried about possible AI hallucinations.

Google and iCAD collaborated to improve cancer screening with AI. Their AI-powered approach improved accessibility to life-saving breast cancer screenings and exceeded professional radiologists in accuracy, providing a workable solution in the face of a global radiology deficit.

Lastly, brain surgeons are using another AI tool called Sturgeon to help them diagnose malignancies in the central nervous system in real time with 90% accuracy.
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CHIEF is open-source and may be downloaded from the project’s Github page, allowing researchers or anybody else to use it locally and add their own photos.

Fans will soon have a new option to follow player statistics from their seats during the game at the Los Angeles Rams’ state-of-the-art SoFi Stadium.

In a recent news release, the Rams announced a relationship with Genius Sports, a data, technology, and broadcast business that serves the media, sports, and betting industries.

Fans may now use Genius Sports’ data processing and artificial intelligence platform GeniusIQ to track various player metrics, like a player’s running speed and quarterback pass time, at every Rams home game.
The immersive highlights and data will be shown on SoFi Stadium’s Infinity Screen following their real-time analysis by AI.

The Rams stated in their press statement that “GeniusIQ applies powerful machine learning and AI to translate enormous volumes of Next Gen Stats data into a semantic understanding of football.” When the on-field action is at its most captivating, “it then powers real-time insights and brand activations, creating meaningful connections with the fans.”

 “Since opening SoFi Stadium in 2020, we continuously look to team up with best-in-class companies to set the gameday standard at the Rams House,” said Kathryn Kai-ling Frederick, Chief Marketing Officer, Los Angeles Rams. “We are thrilled to work with Genius Sports to deliver this unprecedented experience to our fans and grateful to our partner Verizon for elevating this content.”
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To integrate their technology, Genius Sports has partnered with many other sports leagues worldwide, including NCAA, Liga MX, NASCAR, and the English Premier League.

Wimbledon, the oldest Grand Slam tennis tournament, is bringing itself into the 21st century by implementing electronic line-calling in place of human line judges.

The All England Club recently stated that starting in 2025, technology will be used to make the “out” and “fault” calls at the championships, doing away with the necessity for human officials to do so.

The 2024 Wimbledon organizers announced that after much testing, they decided to implement live electronic line calling, which “builds on the existing ball-tracking and line-calling technology that has been in place for many years.”

The All England Club’s chief executive, Sally Bolton, stated, “We consider the technology to be sufficiently robust, and the time is right to take this important step in seeking maximum accuracy in our officiating.” “It will provide the players with the same environment they have played in at several other events throughout the tour.”

With this change, the French Open is now the only Grand Slam competition devoid of electronic line-calling. There are now only chair umpires on the court at the Australian Open and U.S. Open after line judges were removed.

For the purists, line judges at Wimbledon were fixtures in the All England Club, donning their renownedly exquisite uniforms.

Bolton stated Wimbledon needed to strike a “balance between tradition and innovation.”

For many years, she said, “line umpires have been an integral part of our officiating setup at the championships. We acknowledge their invaluable contribution and are grateful for their dedication and service.”

Wimbledon and other tennis events have long employed line-calling technology to determine whether serves are in or out.
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Since 2021, all courts at the U.S. Open have used Hawk-Eye Live electronic line-calling, with chair umpires serving in their place.

A new report reveals the exciting trajectory of clean energy investments. According to a recent articlepublished in CleanTechnica, investments in clean energy have nearly doubled compared to dirty energy investments in 2024.

The report also notes that as more businesses and homes move to renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, investments in dirty energy appear to have peaked.

“What is perhaps most notable and jumped out to me is how much was being invested in energy efficiency (which typically offers the best return on investment) and power grids and storage,” commented CleanTechnica’s Zachary Shahan. “At the same time … we really shouldn’t be investing in fossil fuels at all at this point!”

The new analysis emphasizes how important solar energy is compared to other renewable energy sources. According to CleanTechnica, solar power investments are outpacing investments in all other generation technologies put together since solar panel costs have decreased by 30%.

Countries all across the world may contribute to reducing atmospheric pollution as they move toward renewable energy sources. Clean energy sources, including solar and wind power, don’t produce any hazardous pollutants when they are installed.

Large-scale installations of renewable energy also help lower local populations’ energy costs.

For instance, large solar projects can, in accordance with EnergySage’s predictions, cut local communities’ energy expenses by 5-20%. According to Forbes, households can save anywhere between $25,500 and $33,000 on electricity costs after solar panels are paid for.
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“Clean energy is winning and will keep on winning, led by solar energy,” Shahan said. “The future appears promising. (However, unless we speed up this shift considerably, it’s also hot.)”

August saw the Gates Foundation and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom grant a $2.83 million grant to the British biotech business Legume Technology. AgFunderNews reports that the company intends to provide farmers in Africa with a cost-effective and safe way to enhance crop health and soil fertility with the additional cash.

Africa’s total soil fertility has declined over time, mostly because of excessive chemical fertilizer use that has sped up acidification.

Legume Technology has spent the last 20 years building bacterial and fungal microbial biofertilizerskeeping to fight that issue. These biofertilizers essentially create natural alternatives to chemical fertilizers by capturing nitrogen from the air and keeping it in the soil for the crops to absorb.

Redesigning the packaging as part of the company’s new strategy will enable more small-scale farmers to use biofertilizers in smaller containers.

Bruce Knight, a trained microbiologist who co-founded Legume Technology and serves as its managing director, said, “Within that small bag will be a microbe that has the power to transform the lives of millions of African smallholders by making their crops grow bigger and better, with more productive harvests, with no environmental side effects.”

Farmers have found it more and more difficult to sustain crop production in recent years. This is mostly because burning fossil fuels is causing air pollution, which is overheating our planet.

Certain places are no longer suitable for crops that are typically grown there because of the combination of changing climate conditions brought on by the overheating and unexpected extreme weather events.

Consequently, the development of innovative technologies that facilitate crop growth and food supply assurance for farmers while reducing their dependency on chemical fertilizers has become increasingly crucial. It has been shown that fertilizers have several downstream negative effects that eventually deteriorate ecosystem health.
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“Biologicals are the future of agricultural productivity,” Knight stated.

Microsoft Copilot is a competitive alternative to ChatGPT since its inception, sometimes even surpassing OpenAI’s product. But Copilot trailed behind ChatGPT’s advancements—until now.

In a live event last week called “Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2,” Microsoft revealed all the next improvements to its AI assistant, catering to both business and individual users.

The enhancements were striking, including cooperative methods to use AI as a team, group, or family, as well as further interaction with Microsoft 365 apps.

Copilot Pages. You should see a tab option to switch from Work to Web if you log into Copilot using your work or organization’s account. What Microsoft calls the “Work” tab is actually BizChat, a Copilot workflow that retrieves responses from your work data in Microsoft 365 apps. A new feature called Pages has been added to BizChat in an update.

Using Pages, you may update and add insights that Copilot generated for you based on your business data, then share them with your team so that you can work together. Pages are accessible via a shareable, editable link, much like any other type of editable document.

This section highlights multiplayer AI, a trend observed in recent releases from various AI businesses, including Salesforce’s Agentforce, a suite of collaborative and autonomous AI agents, and You.com’s collaborative AI assistants.

Customers of Microsoft 365 Copilot will be able to access the pages starting today, and in the upcoming weeks, free Microsoft Copilot users who are logged in with their Microsoft Entra account will access them as well.

Copilot in the Microsoft 365 apps. The ability of Microsoft Copilot to assist users within the Microsoft 365 apps—which have grown to be a reliable mainstay of many people’s workflows—is one of its greatest benefits. Microsoft is leveraging user feedback in Wave 2 to enhance user accessibility and expand its Copilot support within the applications.

To begin with, Copilot in Excel is widely accessible to all users and offers support for conditional formatting, data visualization, calculations, and more.

Microsoft also revealed the public preview of Copilot in Excel with Python, which enables users to interact with Python in Excel only through natural language. This implies that users don’t need to know how to write code to perform sophisticated analysis in Excel using Python, such as risk and forecasting analysis.

Microsoft released Narrative Builder for PowerPoint to all users. With the help of this function, you can quickly create an outline for your presentation by simply typing in a topic.

Now, Copilot in Teams can combine the information shared in the chat window with the contents of a real meeting to produce a summary of the entire meeting. For instance, everything from the chat will be included in the response if a user asks Copilot what they missed during the meeting. Next month, this feature will be made available to everyone.

Copilot in Outlook was too important to ignore: The tool that allows you to “Prioritize my inbox” now includes an analysis of your inbox and a flag for the most critical emails, along with a synopsis and the rationale for the flag. According to Microsoft, users will “soon” direct Copilot on what subjects or phrases to prioritize.

Microsoft states these capabilities will be made accessible to all users in late 2024, although they are not currently available.

Microsoft is releasing a new feature later this month that will enable users to reference web and work material quickly, including emails, PDFs, PowerPoints, and more, since users frequently accessed external resources when working in Microsoft Word. Another update for Copilot in Word is the “on-canvas start experience,” which lets users work together in real time while editing different areas of the text. These two Word features are currently accessible to most users.

Finally, Microsoft introduced Copilot in OneDrive, enabling users to search for items in their OneDrive repository, get summaries, and even perform file comparisons. OneDrive’s Copilot feature began trickling out to users last week and will soon be available to the public.

Copilot Agents. Microsoft unveiled Copilot agents, artificial intelligence (AI) assistants that can complete activities with as little or as much help from a user as needed. Microsoft, for instance, reports that while some agents are more basic “prompt-and-response” agents, others can operate entirely on their own.
Using the new agent builder, which is powered by Copilot Studio and enables users to create agents in Sharepoint or BizChat, users may create Copilot agents. Then, just like any other teammate, these agents can be called upon via the “@” symbol in the 365 applications.
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The agent builder in BizChat and Copilot agents are accessible right now and will be made available to all clients in the upcoming weeks. Microsoft has announced that the public preview of Copilot agents and the agent builder in SharePoint will begin in early October.

Thomson Reuters, a global content and technology company focused on the public accounting profession, announced last week the launch of Thomson Reuters Audit Intelligence. This suite of Al-powered data-driven audit solutions is designed to transform audit practices by reducing errors and enhancing confidence, while enabling auditors to realize efficiency gains.

The first tool to debut in the suite, named Audit Intelligence Analyze, employs Al and machine learning to simultaneously enhance both audit quality and efficiency. The solution focuses on high-risk areas by efficiently segmenting audit testing populations based on risk level and reducing the overall number of items to be tested. With advanced anomaly detection, Analyze integrates directly within existing workflows, identifying unusual items often overlooked by humans and automatically generating all necessary audit documentation.

Dave Wyle, general manager of Audit at Thomson Reuters, emphasized the importance of using technology to modernize audit practices to stay competitive. "Today's announcement underscores our commitment to investing in and developing products that enable data-driven, Al-powered audits. We aim to provide these solutions swiftly to our customers, maximizing the benefits of Al in their audits, while supporting firms to implement solutions at a pace that works for their businesses," he said. "Our new solution, Analyze, can cut sample sizes by half, saving valuable time for auditors and their clients. This makes audits more efficient and allows auditors to focus on higher-risk areas, improving overall audit quality."

The Audit Intelligence suite will integrate CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters professional-grade GenAl assistant, from next year, as part of the company's broader vision to provide a GenAl assistant to every professional it serves. Auditors will be able to leverage CoCounsel alongside Thomson Reuters Guided Assurance to automate the completion of audit program steps and checklists.

Future additions to the suite will include Audit Intelligence Test, which automates substantive testing and verification by dynamically tracing accounting transactions to banking activity and supporting documentation, and Audit Intelligence Plan, which merges full data populations with technology-driven analytics to empower auditors' planning and risk assessment processes.

Key benefits of Thomson Reuters Audit Intelligence Analyze
• Increased efficiency: Automation of manual processes allows for smaller, risk-focused samples. This enables auditors to concentrate on high-risk areas, enhancing efficiency and reducing overall firm risk while improving audit quality. Time savings of 30 minutes to two hours are achieved in both client data provision and auditor sample selection and documentation.

• Enhanced accuracy: Automated analysis using Al and machine learning increases confidence in audit results, integrating seamlessly into existing audit processes without requiring new methodologies.

• Improved transparency: The solution is fully configurable, providing a clear and transparent process for selecting and understanding advanced risk identification techniques.
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Available now as part of an early adopter program, Audit Intelligence Analyze is expected to debut in the United States in the fall of 2024, followed by the UK in 2025. The solution is integrated into both Thomson Reuters Cloud Audit Suite and directly into audit methodologies and workflows. It can also be used as a standalone by firms with their own methodologies.

Most of the time, less is more , especially for maintaining connectivity without adding clutter. Presenting the NanoPhone, a fully working smartphone the size of a credit card that’s ideal for situations in which you need access and to keep in touch but don’t want to carry around your larger device.

The NanoPhone keeps you connected without the inconvenience of having something bulky with you, whether you’re hitting the gym, going on a hike, lounging on the beach with a new book, or attending a formal event. At just $100 (reg. $200), the NanoPhone is also a reasonably priced backup smartphone, so you can leave your pricey one at home and take on a little more risk.

Even though it is small, the NanoPhone has a powerful battery. With all the smooth connectivity you would expect from a larger smartphone, you can make calls, surf the web, stream videos, and download your favorite apps, like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
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It also offers front and rear cameras to record memorable events and record family video chats. It weighs less than three ounces and boasts a three-inch HD touch screen along with a long battery life.