Africa’s AI researchers are ready for takeoff

Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics. Those expectations have been especially high in physics and chemistry, where the weird effects of quantum mechanics come into play. In theory, this is where quantum computers could have a huge advantage over conventional machines.

Enter AI: But while the field struggles with the realities of tricky quantum hardware, another challenger is making headway in some of these most promising use cases. AI is now being applied to fundamental physics, chemistry, and materials science in a way that suggests quantum computing’s purported home turf might not be so safe after all. 

Given the pace of recent advances, a growing number of researchers are now asking whether AI could solve a substantial chunk of the most interesting problems in chemistry and materials science before large-scale quantum computers become a reality. Read more from Edd Gent here. 

Bits and Bytes

The Saudis are planning a $100 billion AI powerhouse 
Speaking of the race for AI dominance, this piece looks at how Saudi Arabia wants in on AI action. And it’s putting its money where its mouth is. The country is investing a massive sum to develop a tech hub that it hopes will rival the neighboring United Arab Emirates. (Bloomberg)

AI is making it harder to believe what is real and what is not
Two recent examples show just how influential AI slop can be in warping our sense of reality. In Dublin, crowds gathered in the city center to wait for a Halloween parade to take place. There was no parade planned, but the listing was created by AI and then picked up by social media users and local media. By way of contrast, some social media users dismissed shocking images of the devastating recent floods in Spain as AI-generated, despite them being entirely real. 

AI companies are getting comfortable offering their technology to the military
Militaries around the world have been pouring money into new technologies, including AI. Meta and Anthropic are the latest tech companies to start courting them, joining the likes of Google and OpenAI. (The Washington Post) 

OpenAI is shifting its strategy as the improvement in its AI tools slows down
The current paradigm in AI development is to make things bigger to make them better. But OpenAI’s new model, code-named Orion, only performs slightly better than its predecessors. Instead, OpenAI is shifting to improving models after their initial training. (The Information)