Neuralink Seeks People for First Trials, OpenAI Unveils DALL-E 3, and Fed Opts to Hold Interest Rates Steady. #Newsletter 24.
Neuralink Seeks People for First Trials, OpenAI Unveils DALL-E 3, and Fed Opts to Hold Interest Rates Steady. #Newsletter 24.
The Federal Reserve decided on Wednesday to keep the interest rates steady as per their economic projections at a range of 5.25% to 5.5%.
Fed Holds Interest Rates Steady
UK Inflation Rises by Less Than Expected
Neuralink Seeks People for First Trials
Cisco Agrees to Buy Splunk
OpenAI Unveils DALL-E 3
Fed Holds Interest Rates Steady
The Federal Reserve decided on Wednesday to keep the interest rates steady as per their economic projections at a range of 5.25% to 5.5% but they also signaled that there might be another hike towards the end of this year.
Michael Pearce, lead US economist for Oxford Economics believes that policymakers will not hesitate to make additional hikes if the situation continues.
Previous hikes have brought the inflation rates down from the high inflation in the recent summer but it remains higher than the Fed’s target of 2%.
The annual US inflation rate in August was 3.7%.
The Fed is expected to raise rates by a further 0.25 points over the next few months before bringing them back down to between 5-5.25% by the end of 2024.
By keeping the interest rates high Fed expects to keep economic activity at a steady pace and bring inflation back down to its 2% target.
UK Inflation Rises by Less Than Expected
British Economists had predicted inflation would rise, but by more than it actually did.
A larger increase had been expected based on the rising costs of power and the hike in oil prices.
Core inflation declined from 6.9% in July to 6.2% in August, an abrupt decrease resulting from a small rise in the cost of eating out and a decline in the cost of hotels and air travel.
Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has pledged to halve the inflation rate from its previous highs of 11.1% in October 2022. Although progress has been made, the government is still far behind its target.
Inflation rates in Europe are still very high at 5.2% and at roughly 3.7% in the US.
The Bank of England has Interest rates to 15-year highs to try to reduce inflation to the Bank’s prescribed rate of 2% while saving the country from recession.
The members of the rate-setting committee have been trying to balance raising rates to bring inflation down and increasing them by too much and causing unbearable damage.
While the majority are voting for increasing the rates, some argue that rates could be held steady due to a weak economy and slowing inflation.
Neuralink Seeks People for First Trials
Elon Musk’s start-up, Neuralink, a company working on a brain-computer interfaces claims to have acquired the technology to implant chips into human brains and is now seeking people to participate in these initial trials.
The PRIME study, short for Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface, is being carried out to evaluate both the safety and functionality of the implanted chip.
Trial patients will have a chip surgically placed in the part of the brain that controls movement. The chip, installed by a robot, will then record and send brain signals to an app.
The initial goal being “to grant people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts alone,” the company wrote.
The FDA granted permission in May to the company to implant chips into 10 individuals after the initial struggles to gain permission for its first clinical trials.
Patients, normally with quadriplegia due to injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that causes nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord to degenerate, will be selected for the trials.
Although rival companies like Blackrock Neurotech have done these trials and planted its first chips in 2004, Musk claims Neuralink will have an advantage by robots for the procedure.
The chip will allow paralyzed patients to use a cursor and keyboard just by thinking. It will operate using a battery that will also be charged wirelessly.
The signals will the be decoded and allow the person to move a cursor with only their brain.
Neuralink has also selected a hospital site for this experiment and is now planning to conduct it in the month of May.
Cisco Agrees to Buy Splunk
Cisco has a history of acquiring small companies but it’s now taken a huge step by signing an agreement to buy the cybersecurity firm Splunk for $28 billion, or $157 per share.
This deal is the largest enterprise software deal of the year surpassing the deal of Silver Lake partners taking Qualtrics for $12.5 billion in March.
Cisco hopes the acquisition can improve its security business and build out a more comprehensive security analytics platform with Splunk.
Cisco CEO, Chuck Robbins said of the acquisition “Our combined capabilities will drive the next generation of AI-enabled security and observability. From threat detection and response to threat prediction and prevention, we will help make organizations of all sizes more secure and resilient.”
Splunk CEO Gary Steele has also claimed that this unification will lead to improvement in the cybersecurity industry and will add to the value to the two companies.
Both companies have agreed on the deal and are just waiting for it to pass the regulators. If everything goes well the deal will close by the third quarter of 2024.
OpenAI Unveils DALL-E 3
DALL-E is an image-generating AI tool by OpenAI that generates images based on prompts and is currently on version 2.
Version 3 will be released in October to the customers of ChatGPT Plus and other enterprise customers.
After the explosion of ChatGPT, OpenAI seems to be working harder than ever to improve its systems and come up with even more improvements to its products.
The company claims that the new version of DALL-E will be able to produce detailed and correct images even with nuanced and incomplete prompts for the users of ChatGPT and refrain from producing violent and hateful content.
And to escape from any copyright issues, it will not produce images of public figures or decline to produce work in the style of a living artist. The company has faced many lawsuits by writers and artists that the software is trained by their works unlawfully.
Most in the AI industry are predicting that DALL-E 3 will be both better than Midjourney (which still runs in Discord) upon release and improve faster than it over time.
The content produced by this software is open source and can be used anywhere and anytime which has created problems for the artists and in turn for the company itself.