This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around The Web (Through July 15)

My New Turing Test Would See if AI Can Make $1 Million
Mustafa Suleyman | MIT Technology Review
“We need something better [than the Turing Test]. Something adapted to this new phase of AI. …What an AI can say or generate is one thing. But what it can achieve in the world, what kinds of concrete actions it can take—that is quite another. In my test, we don’t want to know whether the machine is intelligent as such; we want to know if it is capable of making a meaningful impact in the world. We want to know what it can do.”

Record-Breaking Number of Qubits Entangled in a Quantum Computer
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan | New Scientist
“A group of 51 superconducting qubits have been entangled inside a quantum computer, not just in pairs but in a complex system that entangles each qubit to every other one. There have been previous attempts to achieve this with a relatively large number of qubits, but none have been able to verify the entanglement.”

GR-1 General-Purpose Humanoid Robot Will Carry Nearly Its Own Weight
Loz Blain | New Atlas
“Chinese company Fourier Intelligence says it plans to manufacture 100 of its GR-1 general-purpose humanoid robots by the end of 2023, making the remarkable promise that they’ll be able to carry nearly their own weight. They also have a unique focus. …Fourier is treating this as a general-purpose robot, similar to the kinds of things Tesla, Figure and others are working on—but it’s also clearly looking to caregiving and physical therapy assistance as some of its early use cases.”

Open Your Mind to Unicorn Meat
Annie Lowrey | The Atlantic
“Is it chicken? It is chicken more than it is anything else. To be specific, it is what happens when you take a chicken’s cells, place them in a vat filled with a slurry of nutrients and amino acids, let them multiply, wash them, chill them, shape them, and cook them. This kind of meat is the future, or at least part of the future. Within the past decade, cultivated meat has gone from science-fictional to hyper-expensive to market-ready, fueled by billions of dollars of start-up spending.”

Mosquitoes Made Immune to Malaria Could Help Stamp Out the Disease
Clare Wilson | New Scientist
“Mosquitoes have been gene edited so they are immune to the parasites that cause malaria. If released into the wild, the genetic modification should spread through a population of mosquitoes because it contains a sequence known as a ‘gene drive,’ which means all the modified insects’ offspring would inherit the immunity. This approach could slash the numbers of malaria cases in people.”

Chipotle’s New Kitchen Robot Can Peel and Core 25lbs of Avocados in Half the Time It Takes a Human
Andrew Liszewski | Gizmodo
“According to Chipotle, on average it takes about 50 minutes for kitchen staff at its restaurants to turn avocados into a batch of guacamole, including the peeling and coring steps. With Autocado, the process could potentially take half the amount of time, freeing up kitchen staff for other food prep tasks while still ensuring that customers are served freshly made guac.”

ChatGPT Can Turn Bad Writers Into Better Ones
Rhiannon Williams | MIT Technology Review
“A new study by two MIT economics graduate students, published [this week] in Science, suggests [ChatGPT] could help reduce gaps in writing ability between employees. They found that it could enable less experienced workers who lack writing skills to produce work similar in quality to that of more skilled colleagues.”

Why AI Detectors Think the US Constitution Was Written by AI
Benj Edwards | Ars Technica
“If you feed America’s most important legal document—the US Constitution—into a tool designed to detect text written by AI models like ChatGPT, it will tell you that the document was almost certainly written by AI. But unless James Madison was a time traveler, that can’t be the case. Why do AI writing detection tools give false positives? We spoke to several experts—and the creator of AI writing detector GPTZero—to find out.”

Google’s Medical AI Chatbot Is Already Being Tested in Hospitals
Wes Davis | The Verge
“In [a study Google made public in May], physicians found more inaccuracies and irrelevant information in answers provided by Google’s Med-PaLM and Med-PalM 2 than those of other doctors. Still, in almost every other metric, such as showing evidence of reasoning, consensus-supported answers, or showing no sign of incorrect comprehension, Med-PaLM 2 performed more or less as well as the actual doctors.”

Image Credit: Anca Gabriela Zosin / Unsplash