Reinforcement learning is terrible — but everything else is worse.
Karpathy’s sharpest takes yet on AGI, RL, and the future of learning.
Andrej Karpathy’s vision of AGI isn’t a bang — it’s a gradient descent through human history.
Karpathy on AGI & Superintelligence.
* AGI won’t be a sudden singularity — it will blend into centuries of steady progress (~2% GDP growth).
* Superintelligence is uncertain and likely gradual, not an instant “explosion.”
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have performed infrared observations of a planetary debris disk around a nearby white dwarf known as GD 362. Results of the new observations, presented October 8 on the arXiv preprint server, yield important insights into the chemical composition of this disk.
White dwarfs (WDs) are stellar cores left behind after a star has exhausted its nuclear fuel. Due to their high gravity, they are known to have atmospheres of either pure hydrogen or pure helium.
However, there exists a small fraction of WDs that shows traces of heavier elements, and they are believed to be accreting planetary material. Studies of this material around WDs, which often forms dust disks, is essential to improving our knowledge of how planets form and evolve.
Using ESA’s Gaia satellite and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers from the Ege University in Turkey and elsewhere have observed a galactic open cluster known as NGC 2506. Results of the observational campaign, published October 7 on the arXiv pre-print server, put more constraints on the properties of this cluster.
In general, groups of stars formed from the same giant molecular cloud and loosely gravitationally bound to each other are known as open clusters (OCs). Inspecting galactic OCs in detail could be crucial for improving our understanding of the formation and evolution of our Milky Way galaxy.
NGC 2,506 is a mildly-elongated OC estimated to be located some 12,700 light years away, near the galactic anti-center. It is a well-populated, metal-poor, intermediate-age cluster with a radius of about 18.5 light years.
White dwarfs are the dense, compact remains left behind when stars exhaust their nuclear fuel, a process that will one day occur to our own Sun. These stellar remnants are known as degenerate stars because their internal physics defy normal expectations: as they gain mass, they actually become smaller in size.
Many white dwarfs exist in pairs, forming what are known as binary systems, where two stars orbit each other. Most of these systems are ancient by galactic standards and have cooled over time to surface temperatures near 4,000 Kelvin.
Yet, astronomers have recently identified a remarkable group of short-period binary systems in which the stars complete an orbit in less than an hour. Surprisingly, these white dwarfs appear to be about twice as large as models predict, with much higher surface temperatures ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 Kelvin.
Conquer the cosmos and lead ships, fleets, and even entire civilizations to victory in the best space strategy games.
Did life really exist on Mars after all? Unfortunately, there is no conclusive evidence for this yet. Nevertheless, it would seem that some form of life was the driving force behind the mysterious Martian dune gullies. Earth scientist Dr. Lonneke Roelofs from Utrecht University has investigated how these gullies were formed. In a test setup, she observed that blocks of CO2 ice “dug” these gullies in a unique way.
“It felt like I was watching the sandworms in the film Dune,” Roelofs says. Her findings are published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Other researchers had previously suspected that these blocks could play a role in the formation of the gullies. Roelofs has now proven this by having CO2 ice blocks actually dig those gullies in an experiment—a phenomenon that we do not know here on Earth and that had never been observed by anyone before.