【推荐1】We are unavoidably linked to the ocean. Collectively, it covers about 71% of our world and is instrumental in the processes that keep us alive. While the rainforests may be referred to as “the lungs of the planet”, scientists say it’s actually the ocean that provides 50% — 80% of the oxygen we breathe. Besides, through a “conveyor belt” action, it helps regulate Earth’s climate by transporting heat away from the equator, towards the poles to cool. The ocean also proves itself essential in the fight against climate change too. It absorbs 50 times more carbon dioxide than our atmosphere-or rather, it’s not the ocean itself but what lives in it. And perhaps one of the most incredible forms is the humble seagrass.

Across the globe, there are more than 70 species of seagrass, growing in shallow and sheltered coastal areas and covering 300,000 square kilometres, which absorbs 10% of the ocean’s carbon each year and captures carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests. Seagrass builds its leaves and roots using carbon, which it extracts from water through the process of photosynthesis (光合作用) — and it holds on to it, even after death. Dead plant material decomposes (分解) slowly on the ocean floor, and this means that the carbon stored within is eventually buried under the seabed.

Significant as it is, seagrass is critically endangered. According to the U. N. Environment Programme, a seagrass area the size of a football pitch is destroyed every 30 minutes around the world. Fortunately, restoration missions are already underway, in places as far afield as Kenya, Mozambique, and the UK. But rising temperatures remain a twofold threat: an increase in storms that tear the shallow-rooted seagrass from its beds, and rising sea-levels that block out the sunlight.

However, seagrass is known to adapt to survive-and gene sequencing of the Zostera marina seagrass has shown it has done so on three separate occasions already. Could it be one of Earth’s great survivors that will save us all? Only time will tell.

【推荐1】A growing number of people are using ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) program, to create books for sale. Although sales have so far been slow, human writers are worried that ChatGPT-created books might hurt the writing and publishing industry.

Until recently, Brett Schickler never imagined he could be a published author. But after learning about the ChatGPT AI program, Schickler decided that he had a good chance.

“The idea of writing a book finally seemed possible,” said Schickler, a salesman in Rochester, New York. “I thought ‘I can do this.’”

Using the AI software, Schickler created a 30-page illustrated children’s e-book in a few hours. He offered it for sale in January through Amazon’s self-publishing department. The e-book, which is named The Wise Little Squirrel: A Tale of Saving and Investing, has made Schickler less than $100.

While that may not sound like much, it is enough to make him want to create other books using the software. “I could see people making a whole career out of this,” said Schickler.

There were over 200 e-books in Amazon’s Kindle store as of mid-February that say ChatGPT is a writer or co-writer. And the number is rising daily. But because of the nature of ChatGPT and the fact that many writers didn’t concede that they had used it, it is nearly impossible to get a full count of how many e-books may have been written by AI.

Some professional writers are becoming worried about the effects that ChatGPT could have on the book publishing industry. Mary Rasenberger is the executive director of the Authors Guild, a writer’s group. She said, “This is something we really need to be worried about — these books will flood the market and a lot of authors are going to be out of work.”

【推荐2】This was a major week in AI (Artificial Intelligence), with some of the largest companies announced its flagship and leading models: GPT-4 from OpenAI’s made its first show to the public, while Google put out its Med-PaLM 2, a new-and-improved medical model etc. Meanwhile, Company Anthropic introduced its ChatGPT competitor Claude API which is a lighter and cheaper. And in China, Tsinghua launched ChatGLM, a chat-based Chinese-English model, in somewhat as a reminder of ChatGPT. In this AI spring, much awaits for customers.

Designs are on the rise. November’s release ChatGPT turned AI a breaking news. Two months later, it amounted to 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Earlier this month, OpenAI came to market for the first time — the ChatGPT. Finally, both Google and Microsoft put out AI plans as well.

Funds are flooding. Recent attention turns to a large amount of investment on Microsoft’s $10 billion OpenAI. The past few months have witnessed a “gold rush” for new AI model startups. Some standouts: Adept raised $350 million, Google dropped another $300 million into Anthropic, Character AI raised $200 million from Andreesen Horowitz, Perplexity raised $25 million, and Salesforce Ventures launched a $250 million fund.

Demands for policy. As foundation models change rapidly, the demand for AI policy grows as well, which catches the attention of top policymakers across the world, attempting to ensure AI security. In the U.S., Congressman Ted Lieu presented a report calling for AI regulation that was written by ChatGPT, accompanied by a column (专栏) in the New York Times.

“AI is no longer a matter of science fiction, nor is it a technology confined or restricted to research labs. AI will drastically change our lives. Jobs like journalists, lawyers and doctors are facing challenges. AI is a technology that is already being highly concerned.”

【推荐3】If you have gone to the cinema and watched the popular movie “The Wandering Earth II”   recently, you might be impressed by the intelligent computer MOSS. It can make the reasonable decision in the shortest time based on the given conditions. In fact, such strong AI like MOSS does not exist in reality for the time being.

However, weaker AI, which replaces human processing in a specific field, has already influenced our daily life. For example, OpenAI, the San Francisco-based startup opened up the language model ChatGPT for public testing in November 2022. Compared with traditional search engines, which display simple results according to searching keywords, ChatGPT can interact with people just like dialoguing, answer professional questions, and also answer follow-up questions.   Thanks to its revolutionary user experience, ChatGPT obtained more than one million users just five days after its release.

More than a Chatbot, ChatGPT can also realize article creation, code generating and other functions only by requesting. ChatGPT can even write code such as Python，debug (排错）code and generate comments for code just like a professional programmer. It also presented strong capacity in content continuation, literary creation, music creation, etc. It is so powerful that New York City public schools have banned it from their networks and school devices.

However, ChatGPT is still far from perfect. Even OpenAI's CEO once said, “It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. It's a preview of progress. We have lots of work to do on robustness（稳健性）and truthfulness.”

Even though AI like ChatGPT still has a long way to go, predictions about how the technology will influence our society are already there. Among the industries that may be most affected by ChatGPT, experts say,are journalism, law and translation.