135. ChatGPT The Advanced Chatbot, Paper-thin Solar Cell, AI Creating Code

That‘s Cool News | A weekly breakdown of positive Science & Tech news.

What is ChatGPT and why does it matter? | ZDNET (00:57)

• ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an AI and research company.
  • Launched on November 30, 2022.
• ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with a chatbot.
  • It answers questions and can assist you with tasks
  • Open to the public
• “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI," said nonother than Elon Musk
• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, stated on twitter the success of their chatbot:
  • “ChatGPT launched on wednesday. Today it crossed 1 million users!”
  • Altman tweeted that just 5 days after ChatGPT went online
• One twitter thread that I’ve seen that shows the power of this sophisticated chatbot was posted by Ben Tossell (@bentossell)
  • One tweet in the thread was a quote tweeting @jdjkelly post stating: “Google is done. Compare the quality of these responses (ChatGPT)”
  • The tweet has pictures comparing the question asked in Google Search and ChatGPT.
    • GPT was straightforward, explained thoroughly, and had examples.
• It should be noted when comparing GPT to a search engine
  • ChatGPT does not have the ability to search the internet for information and rather, uses the information it learned from training data to generate a response, which leaves room for error.
• One issue I have encountered with GPT is that the responses it generates are not always of high quality.
  • Responses may sound plausible, but they lack practical sense or are overly verbose.

NASA’s TBIRD Mission Demonstrates 1.4TB Optical Downlink | Via Satellite (06:18)

• NASA’s TBIRD mission recently achieved a record for optical communications in space
  • The satellite downlinked 1.4 terabytes of data over laser communications links in a single pass that lasted about five minutes.
  • TBIRD = TeraByte InfraRed Delivery
• According to NASA, the goal of the TBIRD program was to “establish a communication link from a nanosatellite in low-Earth orbit to a ground station at burst rates up to 200 Gbps.”
  • Built by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory
  • Integrated into NASA’s Pathfinder Technology Demonstrator 3 Satellite (PTD-3)
• NASA confirmed this amazing data transfer milestone on Twitter:
  • “Our tiny TBIRD payload just achieved a major milestone! The @NASA_Technology mission downlinked a record-setting data volume of 1.4 terabytes over laser comm links in a single, ~5-minute pass. TBIRD is showing the benefits laser comm can have for missions.”

Paper-thin solar cell can turn any surface into a power source | TechXplore (09:34)

• MIT engineers have developed ultralight fabric solar cells that can quickly and easily turn any surface into a power source.
  • These durable, flexible solar cells are much thinner than a human hair.
  • Are glued to a strong, lightweight fabric, making them easy to install on a fixed surface.
• Because they are so thin and lightweight, these solar cells can be laminated onto many different surfaces.
  • Could be integrated onto the sails of a boat to provide power while at sea,
  • Adhered onto tents and tarps that are deployed in disaster recovery operations
  • Applied onto the wings of drones to extend their flying range.
• They are one-hundredth the weight of conventional solar panels, generate 18 times more power-per-kilogram, and are made from semiconducting inks.
  • Uses printing processes that can be scaled in the future to large-area manufacturing.
• When they tested the device, the MIT researchers found it could generate 730 watts of power per kilogram when freestanding and about 370 watts-per-kilogram if deployed on the high-strength fabric.
  • 18 times more power-per-kilogram than conventional solar cells.
• After rolling and unrolling a fabric solar panel more than 500 times, the researchers saw that the cells still retained more than 90 percent of their initial power generation.
• Jeremiah Mwaura, a co-author on the study, explains why the team is looking at the encasing method next:
  • “Encasing these solar cells in heavy glass, as is standard with the traditional silicon solar cells, would minimize the value of the present advancement, so the team is currently developing ultrathin packaging solutions that would only fractionally increase the weight of the present ultralight devices."

Cheap sodium-sulfur battery boasts 4x the capacity of lithium-ion | New Atlas (16:21)

• An international team of scientists eyeing next-generation energy storage solutions have demonstrated an eco-friendly and low-cost battery with some exciting potential.
  • Sodium-sulfur battery design offers a fourfold increase on energy capacity compared to a typical lithium-ion battery
• The creation falls into a category of batteries known as molten-salt batteries.
  • Energy storage system that uses a molten salt electrolyte to store electrical energy.
  • Molten salt: Is solid at standard temperature and pressure but enters the liquid phase due to elevated temperature.
    • Regular table salt has a melting point of 801 °C (1474°F).
• These batteries are theoretically attractive for use in grid-scale energy storage systems.
  • Capable of storing large amounts of energy for long periods of time
  • Also be discharged very quickly to meet sudden increases in demand.
• The research team set out to address a couple of shortcomings with current sodium-sulfur batteries:
  • Short life cycles and limited capacities
• The team’s design makes use of carbon-based electrodes and a thermal degradation process known as pyrolysis to alter the reactions between the sulfur and sodium.
  • Pyrolysis: The thermal decomposition of materials at elevated temperatures in an inert atmosphere.
• Result: a sodium-sulfur battery with a high capacity of 1,017 mAh/g at room temperature
  • The unit mAh/g stands for milliampere-hours per gram, and it is used to express the amount of electrical charge that a battery can store per unit of mass.
• Importantly, the battery demonstrated good stability and retained around half of this capacity after 1,000 cycles, described in the team’s paper as “unprecedented.”
• End on a quote from lead researcher Dr Shenlong Zhao:
  • “Our sodium battery has the potential to dramatically reduce costs while providing four times as much storage capacity … This is a significant breakthrough for renewable energy development which, although reduces costs in the long term, has had several financial barriers to entry.”

AlphaCode can solve complex problems and create code using AI | Interesting Engineering (22:33)

• A novel system called AlphaCode, created by DeepMind,uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create computer code.
  • Recently participated in programming competitions, using critical thinking, algorithms, and natural language comprehension.
  • The software generates code in Python or C++, while filtering out any bad coding.
  • Generates code at an exceptional rate
• The system was trained to solve problems and generate code solutions.
  • It filters out bad code through a process that involves keeping only 1% of the programs that pass the test cases.
• There are a few AI coding systems, with another well-known system for coders called Codex.
  • Codex was created by OpenAI, the makers of DALL-E and ChatGPT.
  • Proficient in a dozen programming languages and powers GitHub copilot
• AlphaCode was created to assist programmers by generating code, while also solving more complicated problems.
  • Trying to solve issues that arose in other AI coding systems, such as solving difficult problems that require analysis and logic on a deeper level.
• DeepMind discovered three key points that needed to be incorporated:
  • An extensive and clean competitive programming dataset for training and evaluation,
  • Large and efficient-to-sample transformer-based architectures, and large-scale model sampling to explore the search space,
  • Followed by filtering based on program behavior to a small set of submissions
• AlphaCode in the study, solved about 34.2% of the problems:
  • “With up to a million samples per problem, we can solve 34.2% of problems in our validation set; and with one hundred thousand samples, we solve 31.8% of problems in our validation set”
• DeepMind entered AlphaCode into online coding competitions.
  • In competitions with 5000 programmers or more, AlphaCode ranked in the top 54.3%.
• Yujia Li, a computer scientist at DeepMind and paper co-author stated:
  • “AI coding might have applications beyond winning competitions … It could do software grunt work, freeing up developers to work at a higher, or more abstract level, or it could help noncoders create simple programs.”