🚁 World’s first licensed autonomous air taxi takes flight in Saudi Arabia, China’s nuclear arsenal growing ‘faster than any other country’, GPT-4 fools people during online conversations

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Saudi Arabia initiated the trial of its first autonomous air taxi flight service to transport Hajj pilgrims.

The tests, conducted using a Chinese firm EHang’s EH216-S pilotless electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, are claimed to be the ‘world’s first air taxi to be licensed by a civil aviation authority’.

On June 12, EHang showcased its two-seat autonomous aircraft in Mecca. The event was organized in collaboration with the company’s new local partner, Front End. For more on this development, check out today’s Must-Read.

🔥Today’s job of the day as featured on jobs.interestingengineering.com:

> Software Engineer - Rendering Engine, PICO
> EMSO Systems Interface Engineer

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MUST-READ

🚁 World’s first licensed autonomous air taxi takes flight in Saudi Arabia

According to Abdulaziz Al-Duailej, the president of GACA, the trial “marks a major advancement in integrating Advanced Air Mobility solutions into Saudi Arabia’s aviation landscape,” said a statement by Ehang.

In May, Ehang carried out a similar demonstration in Abu Dhabi. In addition to EH216-S, the EH216-F (for high-rise firefighting) and EH216-L (for aerial logistics) demonstrated their debut flights during the trial run.

The trial moves Ehang one step closer to realizing its plan to start commercial services in Saudia Arabia. The initial step involves obtaining GACA’s validation of its type certificates.

☢️ China’s nuclear arsenal growing ‘faster than any other country’: Report

China is expanding its nuclear arsenal faster than any other country on the globe, as per a recent report.

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) launched its annual assessment of the state of armaments, disarmament, and international security on Monday.

The SIPRI Yearbook 2024 reveals that the number and types of nuclear weapons in development have increased substantially in the past year.

🤖 AI or human? GPT-4 fools people during online conversations

GPT-4 models have surprised users due to their innate ability to gauge written prompts and fetch suitable responses in several languages. This quality of the bot seems to perplex most people, so much so that they can hardly distinguish between a bot and a human.

This increased pandemonium caused the researchers at UC San Diego to address this dilemma. They ran the well-known Turing test, named after renowned scientist Alan Turing. The test aimed to determine the extent to which a machine could possess an intelligence level like that of a human.

The researchers published their findings on Cornell University’s arXiv server and concluded that people find it rather difficult to differentiate between the GPT-4 model and a human agent when they interact with a bot.

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IE QUIZ: THE RESULTS

In yesterday’s quiz, we asked, Can you find the missing number?

To derive the answer, let’s mark the bottom left corner as A, the top corner as B, and so on.

The number can be multiplied by multiplying the numbers as follows: B*C*A*A.

The answer is 32.

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