Weekly Dose of Optimism #70
Weekly Dose of Optimism #70
Ceasefire, Q*, Deep learning Cancer Detection, Warp Speed Learnings, Nuclear Wins, Starship Separation
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Friday and welcome back to our 70th Weekly Dose of Optimism.
We’re sending everyone a happy belated Thanksgiving, and we hope you were able to spend it with family, friends, and loved ones. There’s a lot to be thankful for over here at Not Boring HQ, and none of it would be possible without you. Thank you for reading, sharing, and spending your time with us.
We’re keeping it sweet and simple this week, just links and quotes, to maximize family time…and also because it’s Black Friday, a very busy day for Dan! His company, Create, is running their best offer of the year: 30% off all orders + free Create trucker hat (when you spend $100). If you’re looking to kick-off your post-Thanksgiving fitness routine or load up on the perfect tasty-but-healthy stocking stuffer, check out Create’s new Blue Raspberry creatine gummies…they are delish.
Let’s get to it.
(1) Israel–Hamas war: The hostage deal and ceasefire explained
From Reuters
Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas will start a four-day truce on Friday morning with the first batch of Israeli hostages released later that day, mediators in Qatar said.
Under the Israel-Hamas deal, the two sides agreed to a four-day truce so that 50 women and children under the age of 19 taken hostage could be freed in return for 150 Palestinian women and teenagers in Israeli detention.
(2) OpenAI Made an AI Breakthrough Before Altman Firing, Stoking Excitement and Concern
Jon Victor Amir Efrati for the Information
In the following months, senior OpenAI researchers used the innovation to build systems that could solve basic math problems, a difficult task for existing AI models. Jakub Pachocki and Szymon Sidor, two top researchers, used Sutskever’s work to build a model called Q* (pronounced “Q-Star”) that was able to solve math problems that it hadn’t seen before, an important technical milestone. A demo of the model circulated within OpenAI in recent weeks, and the pace of development alarmed some researchers focused on AI safety.
(3) Large-scale pancreatic cancer detection via non-contrast CT and deep learning
From Nature
Here, we develop a deep learning approach, pancreatic cancer detection with artificial intelligence (PANDA), that can detect and classify pancreatic lesions with high accuracy via non-contrast CT. PANDA is trained on a dataset of 3,208 patients from a single center. PANDA achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.986–0.996 for lesion detection in a multicenter validation involving 6,239 patients across 10 centers, outperforms the mean radiologist performance by 34.1% in sensitivity and 6.3% in specificity for PDAC identification, and achieves a sensitivity of 92.9% and specificity of 99.9% for lesion detection in a real-world multi-scenario validation consisting of 20,530 consecutive patients.
(4) FDA adopts Operation Warp Speed lessons for rare disease pilot program
Lecia Bushak from Medical Marketing Media
The FDA announced the launch of a pilot program, dubbed START, to address challenges associated with rare disease development and speed up the regulatory process.
(5) Nuclear Wins
A) EU Parliament voted in favor of recognizing nuclear power as a net-zero technology within the Net-Zero Industry Act.
h/t Carl Berglof
Other net zero technologies are also supported by the measures in the act, including sustainable alternative fuels technologies, advanced technologies to produce energy from nuclear processes with minimal waste from the fuel cycle, small modular reactors, and related best-in class fuels.
B) Canada votes to make nuclear reactors and refurbs eligible for green bonds
h/t Brahm Neufeld
Bonus 1: SpaceX Achieves Successful First Stage Burn, Starship Separation in IFT-2 Test Flight
Ben Evans for AmericaSpace
“Starship successfully lifted off under the power of all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster and made it through stage separation,” SpaceX tweeted. “The booster experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly shortly after stage separation while Starship’s engines fired for several minutes on its way to space.”
Bonus 2 : Age of Miracles Nuclear Mailbag
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback and questions about nuclear, so we brought in some friends to help answer them on a light Thanksgiving edition of Age of Miracles.
That’s all for this week. We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.
Thanks for reading,
Dan + Packy