All posts tagged: trials

Embracing Glory Amidst Trials: Lessons from Amos

Embracing Glory Amidst Trials: Lessons from Amos

Published by Sam Flores

By R. Loren Sandford    What’s coming in the next few years? There’s bad news and there’s good news. The prophet Amos in ancient times brought a set of indictments against Israel that read very much like the sins of America and the Western world. 1. They rejected God’s law (Amos 2:4). In many ways too numerous to list here, so have we. 2. They believed in lies concerning false gods and demonic philosophies (Amos 2:4). The list of deceptions in modern times is long and spans a range of doctrines and philosophies, from open theism taught in the church to post-modernistic philosophy dominant in the world around us. The former denies the foreknowledge of God and, by extension, the fullness of His sovereignty; the latter writes God out of the equation altogether. And those are just two examples. 3. They had fallen into an economic self-focus that led to abuse (Amos 2:6-8). This is the America and the West that I have known all my life. Even in the church we have been obsessed …

The Download: AI bottleneck debates, and BCI trials take off

The Download: AI bottleneck debates, and BCI trials take off

Published by Miika Tikkanen

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth last month with a huge claim: it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had held back large language models for almost a decade. The purported breakthrough comes from slashing the number of computations transformers need to carry out to generate answers. The result is a faster and cheaper LLM that uses far less energy than any other model on the market. Many experts remained skeptical—but Subquadratic has started to share the receipts. They suggest that their approach might be worth paying attention to. Here’s how the system works—and why some researchers still aren’t convinced. —Will Douglas Heaven Brain-computer interface trials are taking off —Jessica Hamzelou This week, I covered the story of Casey Harrell—a man with ALS who is “the first power user” of a brain implant. The device has enabled him …

Brain-computer interface trials are taking off

Brain-computer interface trials are taking off

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Synchron, another BCI company, is currently testing its devices in trials in North America and Australia. Shanghai-based Neuracle has been trialing a BCI since November 2024, and it recently obtained approval for the device to be used outside of clinical trials. Precision Neuroscience, cofounded by a former co-creator of rival Neuralink, is also trialing its BCI, which sits on the surface of the brain. At the same time, academic research has continued. The UC Davis team that worked with Harrell is part of BrainGate—a BCI research effort that has been running for the past two decades. Other academic teams are exploring a variety of devices, from the fully implanted to the minimally invasive. Since 2024, when Patrick-Krueger’s paper was published, the number of people who have been implanted with a brain electrode has more than doubled, according to Vansteensel. “My current estimation would be around 150 people,” she says. The technology is improving too. Take the BrainGate trial, for example. The first 17 years of that trial focused on the use of what researchers call “point-and-click” …