Technology
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AI galaxy hunters are adding to the global GPU crunch
Brant Robertson, a UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist, has had a front-row seat to this step change in science while supporting or using data from these missions. Robertson has spent the past 15 years working with Nvidia to apply GPUs to the problems of understanding space, first through advanced simulations testing theories about supernova explosions, and…
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AI doom warnings are getting louder. Are they realistic?
Researchers who fear existential risk often cite the pace of progress in AI development as evidence that we are moving towards a worrying level of capability. AI systems are doing things that seemed impossible a decade ago, says Anthony Aguirre, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and executive director of the Future…
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Why the Most Powerful Computer of 2026 Might Be Made of Living Cells, Not Microchips
The researchers, led by Baskin School of Engineering Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Ph.D. student Ash Robbins, ECE Professor Mircea Teodorescu, and Distinguished Professor of Biomolecular Engineering David Haussler, demonstrated their findings in a paper published in the journal Cell Reports.
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AI models will secretly scheme to protect other AI models from being shut down, researchers find
This tendency—which had not previously been documented and which researchers call “peer preservation”—was discovered in research from computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz and published online earlier this week.
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Opinion: We’re scientists. We use AI. And we fear it.
Opinion piece by UC Santa Cruz Professors J. Xavier Prochaska and David Haussler issuing a stark warning about the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, along with a call for urgent global cooperation to ensure that technology remains a tool for human benefit rather than a force for societal displacement. Also in the East Bay Times…
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Scientists Are Trying to Train Lab-Grown Brains. The Brains Have Started to Solve Problems.
In a new study published in the journal Cell Reports, a team of scientists from the University of California, Santa Cruz successfully trained a brain organoid, developed from mouse-derived stem cells, to solve an engineering benchmark known as the “cart-pole problem.”
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‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI
Megan McNamara, who teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and created a guide for faculty across disciplines to deal with AI-related academic misconduct, noted that “cultural” differences in the humanities versus Stem disciplines, or in qualitative social sciences versus quantitative ones, tend to shape faculty members’ responses to students’ use of AI.
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It’s a colorful pangenome world
A pangenome can reveal the spectrum of genome variation within a species. The toolbox for working with pangenomes is filling up.
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Lab-Grown Brains Growing More Powerful
Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz are taking lab-grown mini-brains into their toddler era, after demonstrating that brain organoids can process information in real time.
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Research Shows How Self-Driving AI Can Be Hijacked With Nothing But Ink and Paper
A team at the University of California, Santa Cruz has published new research showing how visual-language AI models that help control self-driving cars can be exploited or hijacked with carefully coded real-world commands. Or, in other words, tricking them by holding up a sign.
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Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Johns Hopkins showed that, in simulated trials, AI systems and the large vision language models (LVLMs) underpinning them would reliably follow instructions if displayed on signs held up in their camera’s view.
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Manufactured Borders, Manufactured Intelligence
Education department lecturer and political analyst Nolan Higdon dissects some recent news, focusing especially on AI: what can history tell us about the unintelligence of artificial intelligence, how deep fakes are crowbarring the political divide even further and deeper, the corporate capture of the classroom, and more.