Category Physics

‘Squeezing’ Increased Accuracy of Quantum Measurements

Tohoku University’s Dr. Le Bin Ho has explored how quantum squeezing can improve measurement precision in complex quantum systems, with potential applications in quantum sensing, imaging, and radar technologies. These findings may lead to advancements in areas like GPS accuracy and early disease detection through more sensitive biosensors.

Quantum squeezing is a concept in quantum physics where the uncertainty in one aspect of a system is reduced while the uncertainty in another related aspect is increased. Imagine squeezing a round balloon filled with air. In its normal state, the balloon is perfectly spherical. When you squeeze one side, it gets flattened and stretched out in the other direction...

Read More

As LLMs Grow Bigger, they’re more likely to give Wrong Answers than Admit Ignorance

As LLMs grow bigger, they're more likely to give wrong answers than admit ignorance
Performance of a selection of GPT and LLaMA models with increasing difficulty. Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07930-y

A team of AI researchers at Universitat Politècnica de València, in Spain, has found that as popular LLMs (Large Language Models) grow larger and more sophisticated, they become less likely to admit to a user that they do not know an answer.

In their study published in the journal Nature, the group tested the latest version of three of the most popular AI chatbots regarding their responses, accuracy, and how good users are at spotting wrong answers.

As LLMs have become mainstream, users have become accustomed to using them for writing papers, poems or songs and solving math problems and other tasks, and the issue of accuracy has become a bigger...

Read More

Language Agents Help Large Language Models ‘Think’ Better and Cheaper

Language agents help large language models 'think' better and cheaper
An example of the agent producing task-specific instructions (highlighted) for a classification dataset IMDB. The agent only runs once to produce the instructions. Then, the instructions are used for all our models during reasoning. Credit: arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2310.03710

The LLMs that have increasingly taken over the tech world are not “cheap” in many ways. The most prominent LLMs, such as GPT-4, took some $100 million to build in the form of legal costs of accessing training data, computational power costs for what could be billions or trillions of parameters, the energy and water needed to fuel computation, and the many coders developing the training algorithms that must run cycle after cycle so the machine will “learn.”

But, if a researcher needs to do a specializ...

Read More

Engineers 3D Print Sturdy Glass Bricks for Building Structures

In the middle of Killian Court, a stout pyramid of the glass bricks is four layers tall, and looks about 15 feet across and four feet high.
Here, the manufactured glass bricks are assembled together in a wall configuration in Killian Court.
Credits:Image: Ethan Townsend

The interlocking bricks, which can be repurposed many times over, can withstand similar pressures as their concrete counterparts. Engineers developed a new kind of reconfigurable masonry made from 3D-printed, recycled glass. The bricks could be reused many times over in building facades and internal walls.

What if construction materials could be put together and taken apart as easily as LEGO bricks? Such reconfigurable masonry would be disassembled at the end of a building’s lifetime and reassembled into a new structure, in a sustainable cycle that could supply generations of buildings using the same physical building blocks.

That’s the idea behind cir...

Read More