Weekend Edition!

Air Horse One. China’s Toddler-to-Pet Balance. Graphene.

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1. The first brain implant made of graphene, hailed as a “wonder material” after its discovery at Manchester university 20 years ago, is set to begin a clinical trial in the city at the end of this month. Researchers at Manchester’s National Graphene Institute hope the landmark trial will lead to interfaces between the human brain and external computers that are more sensitive than today’s devices. Potential applications include better treatments for neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and stroke, as well as translating the thoughts of disabled people into speech or movement. A medical team at Salford Royal hospital is preparing to place a flexible interface with 64 graphene electrodes on the brain of the first trial patient, during neurosurgery to remove a glioblastoma tumour. The implant will stimulate and read neural activity with high precision, so that functional parts of the brain can be preserved when the cancer is cut out. “The primary objective of this ‘first in human’ trial is to demonstrate the safety of graphene electrodes applied to the brain in eight to ten patients,” said Manchester professor Kostas Kostarelos, chief scientific investigator for the trial. “We’ll also assess the quality of the signals recorded and the implant’s ability to stimulate the brain.” (Source: ft.com)

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2. Financial Times:

Big Tech companies have boosted their capital spending by 50 per cent to more than $100 billion this year, as they race to build the infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence, despite growing scepticism from Wall Street about the returns on the unprecedented investment.

Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta all revealed massive increases in spending in the first six months of 2024 — totalling $106 billion — in their latest quarterly earnings reports, as their leaders brushed off stock market jitters to pledge further investment hikes over the next 18 months.

“At this point, I’d rather risk building capacity before it is needed, rather than too late,” Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg said this week, as he predicted the Facebook parent’s capital spending could hit $40 billion this year.

Their collective forecasts mean Big Tech’s AI-related investment could more than double by year-end. Analysts at Dell’Oro Group now expect as much as $1 trillion could be channeled into infrastructure such as data centers within five years, even though the companies have so far failed to convince investors that their customers are prepared to spend big on AI products and services. (Source: ft.com)

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3. Bloomberg:

Rocco Casagrande entered the White House grounds holding a black box slightly bigger than a Rubik’s Cube. Within it were a dozen test tubes with the ingredients that — if assembled correctly — had the potential to cause the next pandemic. An AI chatbot had given him the deadly recipe.

Casagrande, a biochemist and former United Nations weapons inspector, wasn’t planning to unleash a bioweapon in a room full of White House officials. He was there to brief them on the many ways artificial intelligence could teach users to make dangerous viruses. Tools like ChatGPT could help terrorists identify potent biological agents and secure the materials needed to make them, he told a room full of US officials in the spring of 2023. It wouldn’t be long before AI could not only help recreate existing pathogens, but also devise potentially more dangerous ones.

“What if every terrorist had a little scientist sitting on their shoulder?” Casagrande said months after the White House briefing. The prospect of AI-made bioweapons was no longer science fiction. “These tools had gone from absolute crap a year ago to being quite good.”

Word of the meeting spread through the nation’s security networks. Officials from the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, Commerce, among others, sought demonstrations for themselves throughout that spring and summer. Casagrande was working with an AI startup that wanted to get the word out about these risks. People familiar with his presentations, who asked not to be named discussing sensitive national security issues, said the meetings were a wake-up call about how unprepared the US was for what AI could help create. (Source: bloomberg.com)