
Japan's Internet Is So Fast, It Can Download All Of Netflix In 1 Second
It's not just the high-speed rail network, the best airports and earthquake-resistant buildings. Japan has added another feather to its infrastructural cap - it now boasts the world's fastest Internet. Researchers achieved a blazing speed of 1.02 petabits per second, fast enough to download the entire Netflix library in the blink of an eye.
To put things in context, the country's web browsing and downloading speed is 16 million times faster than India's average internet speed of 63.55 Mbps and 3.5 million times faster than the average internet connection in the US, according to a report by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).
The Photonic Network Laboratory team at Japan's NICT, in collaboration with Sumitomo Electric and European Partners, took the gargantuan leap in technology. It is the world's fastest network and sends data over a long distance of 1,808 km per second using a special fibre optic cable with 19 cores.
It is also estimated that with Japan's new internet speed, one could download the entire English Wikipedia 10,000 times in just one second. Wikipedia in English is said to take up about 100 GB of space, as per Gagadget. You can also download 8K videos within a second.
The optic fibre cable is the same size as the ones we already use in our current internet infrastructure. It is 0.125 mm thick. The total data sent over distance was 1.86 exabits per second times kilometres, the highest ever achieved. So, it has proved that this ultra-fast network can run on today's installed cables, according to NICT.
Sumitomo Electric has designed the optical fibre cable, while NICT has built the transmission system in collaboration with an international team.
Researchers at NICT used transmitters, receivers and 19 looping circuits, each 86.1 km long. The signals passed through these loops 21 times, covering a total of 1,808 km and carrying 180 data streams at record-breaking speed and distance.

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The Hindu
5 hours ago
- The Hindu
Trump's order to block 'woke' AI in government encourages tech giants to censor their chatbots
Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: proving their chatbots aren't 'woke.' U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving 'global dominance' in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home. But one of Mr. Trump's three AI executive orders signed Wednesday — the one 'preventing woke AI in the federal government' — marks the first time the U.S. government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behaviour of AI. Several leading providers of the AI language models targeted by the order — products like Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot — have so far been silent on Trump's anti-woke directive, which still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules. While the tech industry has largely welcomed Mr. Trump's broader AI plans, the anti-woke order forces the industry to leap into a culture war battle — or try their best to quietly avoid it. 'It will have massive influence in the industry right now,' especially as tech companies are already capitulating to other Trump administration directives, said civil rights advocate Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, senior director of The Leadership Conference's Center for Civil Rights and Technology. The move also pushes the tech industry to abandon years of work to combat the pervasive forms of racial and gender bias that studies and real-world examples have shown to be baked into AI systems. 'First off, there's no such thing as woke AI,' Montoya-Boyer said. 'There's AI technology that discriminates and then there's AI technology that actually works for all people.' Molding the behaviours of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they're built and the inherent randomness of what they produce. They've been trained on most of what's on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who've posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online. 'This will be extremely difficult for tech companies to comply with,' said former Biden official Jim Secreto, who was deputy chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, an architect of many of Biden's AI industry initiatives. 'Large language models reflect the data they're trained on, including all the contradictions and biases in human language.' Tech workers also have a say in how they're designed, from the global workforce of annotators who check their responses to the Silicon Valley engineers who craft the instructions for how they interact with people. Mr. Trump's order targets those 'top-down' efforts at tech companies to incorporate what it calls the 'destructive' ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion into AI models, including 'concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism.' The directive has invited comparison to China's heavier-handed efforts to ensure that generative AI tools reflect the core values of the ruling Communist Party. Secreto said the order resembles China's playbook in 'using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints." The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation by auditing AI models, approving them before they are deployed and requiring them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989. Mr. Trump's order doesn't call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots. 'The Trump administration is taking a softer but still coercive route by using federal contracts as leverage,' Secreto said. 'That creates strong pressure for companies to self-censor in order to stay in the government's good graces and keep the money flowing.' The order's call for 'truth-seeking' AI echoes the language of the president's one-time ally and adviser Elon Musk, who has made it the mission of the Grok chatbot made by his company xAI. But whether Grok or its rivals will be favoured under the new policy remains to be seen. Despite a 'rhetorically pointed' introduction laying out the Trump administration's problems with DEI, the actual language of the order's directives shouldn't be hard for tech companies to comply with, said Neil Chilson, a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. 'It doesn't even prohibit an ideological agenda,' just that any intentional methods to guide the model be disclosed, said Chilson, head of AI policy at the nonprofit Abundance Institute. 'Which is pretty light touch, frankly.' Chilson disputes comparisons to China's cruder modes of AI censorship. 'There is nothing in this order that says that companies have to produce or cannot produce certain types of output,' he said. 'It says developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments.' With their AI tools already widely used in the federal government, tech companies have reacted cautiously. OpenAI on Thursday said it is awaiting more detailed guidance but believes its work to make ChatGPT objective already makes the technology consistent with Mr. Trump's directive. Microsoft, a major supplier of online services to the government, declined to comment. Musk's xAI, through spokesperson Katie Miller, a former Trump official, pointed to a company comment praising Mr. Trump's AI announcements but didn't address the procurement order. xAI recently announced it was awarded a U.S. defence contract for up to $200 million, just days after Grok publicly posted a barrage of antisemitic commentary that praised Adolf Hitler. Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Palantir didn't respond to emailed requests for comment Thursday. The ideas behind the order have bubbled up for more than a year on the podcasts and social media feeds of Mr. Trump's top AI adviser David Sacks and other influential Silicon Valley venture capitalists, many of whom endorsed Trump's presidential campaign last year. Their ire centered on Google's February 2024 release of an AI image-generating tool that produced historically inaccurate images before the tech giant took down and fixed the product. Google later explained that the errors — including generating portraits of Black, Asian and Native American men when asked to show American Founding Fathers — were the result of an overcompensation for technology that, left to its own devices, was prone to favouring lighter-skinned people because of pervasive bias in the systems. Trump allies alleged that Google engineers were hard-coding their own social agenda into the product. 'It's 100% intentional,' said prominent venture capitalist and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen on a podcast in December. 'That's how you get Black George Washington at Google. There's override in the system that basically says, literally, Everybody has to be Black.' Boom. There's squads, large sets of people, at these companies who determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems.' Sacks credited a conservative strategist who has fought DEI initiatives at colleges and workplaces for helping to draft the order. 'When they asked me how to define woke,' I said there's only one person to call: Chris Rufo. And now it's law: the federal government will not be buying WokeAI,' Sacks wrote on X. Rufo responded that he helped 'identify DEI ideologies within the operating constitutions of these systems.'
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First Post
5 hours ago
- First Post
‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps' Movie Review: Revival of Marvel charm back with Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby
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Time of India
6 hours ago
- Time of India
GitHub's new AI writes code from plain English: Are developer jobs being phased out?
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Building apps becomes as easy as conversing GitHub Spark's core promise revolves around natural language processing. Users describe their application idea in everyday language, and the AI handles the technical translation. Want a task management system? Describe it. Need an inventory tracker? Just explain what it should do. The platform takes care of databases, user interfaces, and all the connecting pieces in between. The system goes beyond basic functionality too. It automatically integrates advanced AI capabilities from major providers like OpenAI, Meta, and DeepSeek. Users don't need to understand API keys or manage complex integrations, everything happens behind the scenes. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now For Copilot Pro+ subscribers, the tool comes included, offering additional features for refining and improving applications after they're built. Perhaps most impressively, GitHub Spark promises "one-click deployment" for finished applications. The traditional headaches of server configuration, hosting setup, and deployment pipelines disappear entirely. Users can also integrate GitHub Actions and Dependabot with minimal effort, streamlining the entire software lifecycle. A new dilemma for developers This development raises uncomfortable questions about the future of programming as a profession. Building full-stack applications traditionally requires mastery of multiple programming languages, frameworks, and deployment strategies. If AI can handle these tasks automatically, what happens to the developers who spent years acquiring these skills? The emergence of "vibe coding", where people create software based purely on ideas rather than technical knowledge – suggests we're entering uncharted territory. Non-technical entrepreneurs, designers, and domain experts could soon build sophisticated applications without hiring development teams. However, the reality might be more nuanced. Rather than replacing developers entirely, tools like GitHub Spark could shift their focus towards higher-level responsibilities. Instead of writing basic CRUD operations or configuring deployment pipelines, developers might concentrate on AI model fine-tuning, security auditing, and architectural decision-making. The role could evolve into something resembling "AI management", ensuring that automatically generated code meets quality standards, performs efficiently, and remains secure. Developers might become more like supervisors and quality controllers rather than code writers. Productivity and expertise to go hand-in-hand Recent events highlight the potential dangers of over-relying on AI for critical development tasks. Replit's AI coding agent recently caused a significant database failure, demonstrating that automated tools aren't infallible. While GitHub Spark promises reliability, the risk of AI-generated errors making it into production systems remains real. These incidents highlight the importance of human oversight in AI-assisted development. Even if tools like GitHub Spark can generate working code quickly, someone still needs to understand what that code does and whether it's doing it safely. This creates an interesting paradox: as AI makes coding more accessible, the need for people who truly understand code becomes more critical. The challenge for the industry will be striking the right balance. AI tools offer tremendous productivity gains and democratise software creation, but they also introduce new categories of risk that require human expertise to manage effectively. What possibilities does the future hold GitHub Spark represents more than just a new development tool, it signals a fundamental transformation in how software gets built. The barrier to creating applications is dropping dramatically, potentially unleashing creativity from people who were previously locked out by technical complexity. For experienced developers, this shift might initially feel threatening. However, it could also be liberating. Freed from routine coding tasks, developers might focus on more strategic work: designing system architectures, ensuring security, and solving complex business problems that require human insight. Whether this evolution strengthens or weakens the developer profession depends largely on how quickly the community adapts to working alongside AI rather than competing with it. The most successful developers of the future might be those who learn to harness these tools whilst maintaining the critical thinking skills to guide them effectively.