The Download: OpenAI’s top scientist on AGI, and gene therapy to restore hearing

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s cofounder and chief scientist, is not specializing in constructing the following era of his firm’s flagship generative AI fashions. As an alternative his new precedence is to determine easy methods to cease a man-made superintelligence (a hypothetical future expertise he sees coming with the foresight of a real believer) from going rogue.

A number of what Sutskever says is wild. However not almost as wild as it will have sounded only one or two years in the past. He thinks ChatGPT simply could be acutely aware (should you squint). He thinks the world must get up to the true energy of the expertise his firm and others are racing to create.

He’s sure that machines will in the future be as good as people. This might, in his opinion, automate well being care, make it a thousand instances cheaper and a thousand instances higher, treatment ailments, or truly resolve international warming. However the issue with a expertise that doesn’t exist is which you could say no matter you need about it. Read our exclusive interview.

—Will Douglas Heaven

Some deaf kids in China can hear after gene remedy

Earlier this 12 months, Qin Lixue enrolled her six-year outdated daughter Li Xincheng, in a examine of a brand new kind of gene remedy. The little lady, nicknamed Yiyi, was born completely deaf. Through the process, docs used a virus so as to add substitute DNA to the cells in Yiyi’s internal ear that choose up vibrations, permitting them to transmit sound to her mind.

Yiyi is one in all a number of deaf kids who scientists in China say are the primary individuals ever to have their pure listening to pathway restored in a dramatic new demonstration of the probabilities of gene remedy. The feat is much more outstanding as a result of till now, no drug of any type has ever been in a position to enhance listening to.