Wind turbines make money when they spin. But when they shake, it can cost billions. Siemens Energy AG

SINGAPORE Cyrptocurrency bitcoin leapt as much as 14% to a 2-1/2 year high of $34,283 in early Asia

Vietnam-based internet startup VNG Ltd. has decided to postpone its plans for a US initial public offering, according

Scientists think they have discovered a previously unknown hidden structure inside the Earth’s core that could change our understanding of our planet. In school, most of us were taught there are four main layers to the Earth’s structure: the crust, the mantle, the outer core and the inner core. What we know about the Earth’s insides has mostly derived from geologists’ knowledge and observations of volcanoes and seismic waves. But now, scientists believe that there may also be a whole extra layer hidden inside the inner core that no one knew about. Earth’s molten inner core is predicted to be around 5,000 degrees Celsius in temperature and scientists have calculated that it takes up around just 1 per cent of the planet’s total volume. The discovery of a potential fifth layer to the planet’s core came a few years ago when scientists used an algorithm to model thousands of scenarios of the inner core to observe the length of time it takes seismic waves to travel through Earth based on data by the International Seismological Centre. Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter Scientists were able to analyse how different material properties within the inner core would affect seismic waves differently and found that some scenarios were certainly more likely than others. The algorithm showed how different materials altered the angle of seismic waves, leading them to hypothesise that there was a change of material somewhere in the inner core. Joanne Stephenson, an Australian National University geophysicist, explained: “We found evidence that may indicate a change in the structure of iron, which suggests perhaps two separate cooling events in Earth's history.” She continued: “The details of this big event are still a bit of a mystery, but we've added another piece of the puzzle when it comes to our knowledge of the Earth's inner core.” While their data isn’t conclusive, it does correlate with other similar studies that have looked into the anisotropy of the Earth’s inner core. Stephenson said: “It's very exciting - and might mean we have to re-write the textbooks!” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Elon Musk promised that creators on Twitter would start getting paid for their tweets...back in

Google has announced that its apps and services will now be “passwordless by default” in an effort to make all users switch to passkeys. The move is part of a broader consensus among the tech industry to ditch passwords, which have been around since the 1960s, and switch to a safer and more efficient format to verify a person’s identity. Passkeys combine a code with biometric information like a fingerprint or facial recognition, making them easier to remember and harder to be stolen. Google apps like YouTube, Search and Maps all support the new format after it was first introduced earlier this year, though take up has been slower than expected. The tech giant said the push to get users to adopt passkeys coincided with Cybersecurity Awareness Month, claiming that the new technology is faster and more secure. “They are 40 per cent faster than passwords – and rely on a type of cryptography that makes them more secure,” Google product managers Sriram Karra and Christiaan Brand wrote in a blog post explaining the move. “We’ll continue encouraging the industry to make the pivot to passkeys – making passwords a rarity, and eventually obsolete.” Google users who do not already use passkeys will receive a prompt to set one up the next time they sign into their account. Passkeys have already been enabled by other online platforms, including eBay and Uber, as the tech industry looks to completely transition away from traditional passwords. “We’ve seen great results from launching passkeys across our apps and encourage all users to adopt passkeys,” said Ramsin Betyyousef, a senior director of engineering at Uber. “Ultimately this is a win-win for Uber and Uber’s customers.” Google, which counts billions of users across all of its platforms, acknowledged that “new technologies take time to catch on”, and have therefore given people the option to temporarily opt out of passkeys and use passwords wherever possible. The company did not set a date for when passwords will be phased out entirely, but some security experts contend that their death is inevitable while hackers continue to exploit their vulnerability. Helping implement the transition is the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance, which has been working with Apple, Google, Microsoft and hundreds of tech companies to develop the new login standard. “The complete shift to a passwordless world will begin with consumers making it a natural part of their lives,” said Alex Simons, who heads Microsof’s Identity Program Management team. “By working together as a community across platforms, we can at last achieve this vision and make significant progress toward eliminating passwords.” Read More Pixel 8: Google unveils ‘AI-centred’ iPhone rival Google to trial AI in UK traffic light systems to reduce stop-and-go emissions Pixel 8: Google unveils DeepMind-powered iPhone rival China’s discovery of never-before-seen ore could propel battery technology

TL;DR: As of September 8, get this 30W Slim Wall Charger 2-pack for just $36.99

Amazon’s cloud computing unit Amazon Web Services experienced an outage on Tuesday, affecting publishers that suddenly found themselves unable to operate their sites

Microsoft will take a non-voting, observer position on OpenAI's board, OpenAI said on Wednesday, adding that Sam Altman

Twitch has launched it's new feature where users can turn landscape clips into vertical videos

ChatGPT’s creators have attempted to get the system to explain itself. They found that while they had some success, they ran into some issues – including the fact that artificial intelligence may be using concepts that humans do not have named for, or understanding of. Researchers at OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, used the most recent version of its model known as GPT-4 to try and explain the behaviour of GPT-2, an earlier version. It is an attempt to overcome the so-called black box problem with large language models such as GPT. While we have a relatively good understanding of what goes into and comes out of such systems, the actual work that goes on inside remains largely mysterious. That is not only a problem because it makes things difficult for researchers. It also means that there is little way of knowing what biases might be involved in the system, or if it is providing false information to people using it, since there is no way of knowing how it came to the conclusions it did. Engineers and scientists have aimed to resolve this problem with “interpretability research”, which seeks find ways to look inside the model itself and better understand what is going on. That has often required looking at the “neutrons” that make up such a model: just like in the human brain, an AI system is made up of a host of so-called neutrons that represent parts of the data it uses. Finding those is difficult, however, since humans have had to pick through the neurons and manually inspect them to find out what they represent. But some systems have hundreds of billions of parameters and so actually getting through them all with people is impossible. Now, researchers at OpenAI have looked to use GPT-4 to automate that process, in an attempt to more quickly pick through the behaviour. They did so by attempting to create an automated process that would allow the system to provide natural language explanations of the neuron’s behaviour – and apply that to another, earlier language model. That worked in three steps: looking at the neuron in GPT-2 and having GPT-4 try and explain it, then simulating what that neuron would, and finally scoring that explanation by comparing how the simulated activation worked with the real one. Most of those explanations went badly, and GPT-4 scored itself poorly. But researchers said that they hoped the experiment showed that it would be possible to use the AI technology to explain itself, with further work. The creators came up against a range of “limitations”, however, that mean the system as it exists now is not as good as humans at explaining the behaviour. Part of the problem may be that explaining how the system is working in normal language is impossible – because the system may be using individual concepts that humans cannot name. “We focused on short natural language explanations, but neurons may have very complex behavior that is impossible to describe succinctly,” the authors write. “For example, neurons could be highly polysemantic (representing many distinct concepts) or could represent single concepts that humans don’t understand or have words for.” It also runs into problems because it is focused on specifically what each neuron does individually, and not how that might affect things later on in the text. Similarly, it can explain specific behaviour but not what mechanism is producing that behaviour, and so might spot The system also uses a lot of computing power, the researchers note. Read More Google to unveil major new AI AI robots figure out how to play football in shambolic footage White House asks hackers to break ChatGPT White House reveals plan to ‘protect’ citizens from danger of AI DeepMind boss says human-level AI is just a few years away Regulator to probe use of artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT

By Anna Tong Alphabet Inc's Google on Wednesday demonstrated an updated core search product that embeds more AI