technologyreview.com

someguy3 , to Futurology in Researchers are making progress on producing cows from just stem cells, with no eggs or sperm involved. Some people are wondering if the same tech might one day work with humans.

Synthetic embryos are clones, too—of the starting cells you grow them from. But they’re made without the need for eggs and can be created in far larger numbers—in theory, by the tens of thousands. And that’s what could revolutionize cattle breeding. Imagine that each year’s calves were all copies of the most muscled steer in the world, perfectly designed to turn grass into steak.

“I would love to see this become cloning 2.0,” says Carlos Pinzón-Arteaga, the veterinarian who spearheaded the laboratory work in Texas.

The article said it was not just for cattle, more for general science research.

AnUnusualRelic , to Futurology in Researchers are making progress on producing cows from just stem cells, with no eggs or sperm involved. Some people are wondering if the same tech might one day work with humans.
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

There's no reason it couldn't work with any animal.

OldManBOMBIN ,

Any animal we have DNA for, I assume.

Do we have any dino DNA? Cave bear? Mammoth?

Drusas ,

We have mammoth DNA and scientists have been working to restore them for at least a couple of decades now. Every few years you'll see an article about how it's just around the corner to clone one.

neuropean ,

Lol, it’s click-bait garbage.

Sure, we’ve sequenced the genome, but they’ve tried somatic cell nuclear transfer only to find out that the cell dies with the mammoth nucleus. Unless it was stored in cryogenic storage beneath lead shielding to protect from ionizing background radiation it’ll never work.

The only hope they have is cloning huge sections of the mammoth genome into the elephant genome, which is a project the size and scale of which will never be performed if we can’t even be fucked to properly care for their only surviving relative the elephants (or even care enough to do anything about global warming for that matter).

CanadaPlus ,

which is a project the size and scale of which will never be performed if we can’t even be fucked to properly care for their only surviving relative the elephants (or even care enough to do anything about global warming for that matter).

You know, I can't rule out billions of dollars being poured into resurrecting a species with nowhere to go. The human capacity for BS is truly enormous.

Drusas ,

It being clickbait garbage was partly my point when I mentioned that there's an article every few years saying how it's just around the corner.

AnUnusualRelic ,
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

Getting a live mammoth, assuming we'd manage it would just get one sad and lonely animal which would be isolated from any other member of its species. For creatures that most likely had social structures as strong and important as those of elephants, it seems like you'd get a neurotic animal. It's not at all a given that it could integrate in an elephant group.

Annoyed_Crabby ,

It kinda need stem cell for it to work.

SineIraEtStudio , (edited )

Research in the last 5ish years has shown that "any" cell can be induced to change into a stem cell by changing its environment and adding specific growth factors.

Edit:
I spent an hour looking for the research I was referring to. I found the papers and dissertation of the author who's talk I went to where the topic was discussed. Unfortunately, with a quick read I didn't find where the author talked about it, leading me to believe it was a discussion had at the end of their defense.

Although I couldn't find the research, [email protected] found what I was talking about (induced pluripotent stem cells)

Edit 2: As [email protected] points out the techniques are not currently at the level where induced stem cells can replace native stem cells.

neuropean ,

I assure you that if the article you read was true, it’s a very niche case and not true in most contexts.

BubbleMonkey ,
@BubbleMonkey@slrpnk.net avatar

https://www.sciencealert.com/in-a-first-scientists-fully-wipe-a-cells-memory-before-turning-it-into-a-stem-cell

This link is a relatively new development, but
induced pluripotent stem cells have been in use since around 2006 for research purposes. They can be made from a variety of cell types.

CanadaPlus ,

There's so many "buts" attached to that it's not even funny. They don't work as well as an actual stem cell, for one thing. That's why there's still plenty of demand for the embryonic kind.

BubbleMonkey ,
@BubbleMonkey@slrpnk.net avatar

Person I replied to said it was niche creation case, I was simply showing that’s not the case. Nothing else.

The article I linked to does mention those things though. That’s part of why the advance is important.

CanadaPlus ,

It's a thing, but there's lots of catches with the technique. That's why stem cells are still in the laboratory.

SineIraEtStudio ,

Certainly. The research is still ongoing but shows promise and is making progress toward being a viable replacement.

I'll edit my original comment to clarify that point.

CanadaPlus ,

No, a critter is more than just DNA. And most genome sequences aren't complete, and DNA is currently slow to print artificially, and the OG samples from anything dead in ambient conditions for more than days are badly degraded.

If we have DNA we could maybe do it one day, in principle. Especially for critters like mammoths with living relatives. This particular tech from the story isn't highly related, though.

neuropean ,

Ethical research guidelines bar any attempts to culture human embryos beyond 14 days of gestation, so as usual it’s clickbait and not something that will be explored anytime soon.

meleethecat ,

All it takes is one eccentric billionaire that wants to clone themself.

CanadaPlus ,

As a general concept, sure. Actually making it happen in a petri dish can be detail-intensive and unreliable, which is why we haven't been doing it routinely for decades.

inb4_FoundTheVegan , to Technology in An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary
@inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world avatar

It's noble how many of you are willing to get philosophical about the rise of deep fakes freeing us from puritan beliefs and readdressing the concept of truth.

While completely fucking ignoring the harassment and extortion of deep fakes. Y'all want to get high minded about YOUR right to free speach using OTHER peoples bodies as a gateway to some utopia, while playing dumb that this is just another form of mysgonstic abuse. If it truly is just you something you are doing in the privacy of your own home, why the fuck do you need other people's media?

Your ideals are built upon YET AGAIN women taking one for the team. The "truth" is immposible to know so YOLO, let's turn any women who made the mistake of being photographed in to porn. Her consent doesn't matter between the privacy of me and my dataset, even if I do upload it and blackmail her a lil'.

kromem , to Technology in An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

A reminder for anyone reading this that you are in a universe that behaves at cosmic scales like it is continuous with singularities and whatnot, and behaves even at small scales like it is continuous, but as soon as it is interacted with switches to behaving like it is discrete.

If the persistent information about those interactions is erased, it goes back to behaving continuous.

If our universe really was continuous even at the smallest scales, it couldn't be a simulated one if free will exists, as it would take an infinite amount of information to track how you would interact with it and change it.

But by switching to discrete units when interacted with, it means state changes are finite, even if they seem unthinkably complex and detailed to us.

We use a very similar paradigm in massive open worlds like No Man's Sky where an algorithm procedurally generates a universe with billions of planets that can each be visited, but then converts those to discrete voxels to track how you interact with and change things.

So you are currently reading an article about how the emerging tech being built is creating increasingly realistic digital copies of humans in virtual spaces, while thinking of yourself as being a human inside a universe that behaves in a way that would not be able to be simulated if interacted with but then spontaneously changes to a way that can be simulated when interacted with.

I really think people are going to need to prepare for serious adjustments to the ways in which they understand their place in the universe which are going to become increasingly hard to ignore as the next few years go by and tech trends like this continue.

SomeGuy69 ,

Your comment reads like rambling, unless you're so much smarter than anybody else. I couldn't make out many cohesive thoughts, merely guessing here.

First of, our universe doesn't change the moment we touch something, else any interaction would create a parallel universe, which in itself is fiction and unobservable.

Then you talk about removing persistent information. Why would you do that and how would you do that? What is the point of even wanting or trying to do that? An AI robot talking and moving isn't that different than when we had non AI, case based reasoning. Even the most random noise AI can produce is based of something. It's a sum of values. We didn't and don't generate a computerized random number any differnt.

You can't proof that our universe is or isn't simulated, simplified the simulation would only need to stimulate your life in your head, not more. Actually what your eyes see and what your brain is receiving, is already a form of simulation, as it is not exact.

No Man's Sky is using generic if else switch cases to generate randomness. Else you'd get donut planets for instance or a cat as planet, but you never will in infinite generations. Just because there's mathematical randomness by adding noise, doesn't make it change much about its constraints.
Even current AI is deterministic, but the effort to prove that isn't realistically approachable. I personality believe even a human brain would be provable deterministic, if you could look into the finest details and reproduce it. But we can't reverse time, so that's going to be impossible.

However we can only observe our own current universe. So how would AI change that now? Also our universe is changing even when you yourself interact with nothing.

It would help if your were more precise in what you're implying. What change of anyone's perspective? Doesn't seam to be any different to the past, unless you mean tech illiterate, like people would react on seeing a video/photo of themselves for the first time. It's not like AI can read your mind and interact with things the same way you would, nor even predict or do the same as you.

AI is just guessing and that's often good enough, but it can be totally wrong (for now) by doing deterministically things with only one solution. It can summarize text but will fail by simple math calculations, because it's not calculating but guessing by probability, in its realm of constraints.

autotldr Bot , to Technology in An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

This is the best summary I could come up with:


“I think we might just have to say goodbye to finding out about the truth in a quick way,” says Sandra Wachter, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, who researches the legal and ethical implications of AI.

We’re about to take on a topic that’s pretty delicate and honestly hits close to home—dealing with criticism in our spiritual journey,” I read off the teleprompter, simultaneously trying to visualize ranting about something to my partner during the complain-y version.

Historically, making AI avatars look natural and matching mouth movements to speech has been a very difficult challenge, says David Barber, a professor of machine learning at University College London who is not involved in Synthesia’s work.

And while anyone can join the platform, many features aren’t available until people go through an extensive vetting system similar to that used by the banking industry, which includes talking to the sales team, signing legal contracts, and submitting to security auditing, says Voica.

Claire Leibowicz, the head of the AI and media integrity at the nonprofit Partnership on AI, says she worries that growing awareness of this gap will make it easier to “plausibly deny and cast doubt on real material or media as evidence in many different contexts, not only in the news, [but] also in the courts, in the financial services industry, and in many of our institutions.” She tells me she’s heartened by the resources Synthesia has devoted to content moderation and consent but says that process is never flawless.

It really shines when presenting a story I wrote about how the field of robotics could be getting its own ChatGPT moment; the virtual AI assistant summarizes the long read into a decent short video, which my avatar narrates.


The original article contains 4,026 words, the summary contains 289 words. Saved 93%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

LainTrain , to Technology in Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media

Social media is just another scapegoat like Russian bots.

The truth is much worse: most people are, and have always been awful, bloodthirsty ghoulish pieces of shit and they were so before social media, you just know it now.

aberrate_junior_beatnik ,
greater_potater , to Technology in Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone

Wait so then does playing a game that maxes out my GPU for two hours use enough power to charge 1000 smartphones?

Because that's a lot.

DreadPotato ,
@DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz avatar

A high(er) end smartphone has a battery capacity of approx. 0.019kWh (5000mAh), a gtx3080 has a max power draw of 320W so running that (at max load) for two hours is 0.64kWh, which is equivalent to fully charging ~34 smartphones.

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