There's a new ocean in the making! ⋆ AI of the week ⋆ Embracing Risk and Focus

As you sip your coffee and scroll through your news feed, somewhere out there, our planet is reshaping itself, creating new landscapes for future generations.

Thing 1 - 🌍 A New Ocean in the Making

What if you woke up one day to find that your backyard had started splitting apart? That's kinda what happened in Ethiopia back in 2005, when a massive crack, spanning over 35 miles, appeared.

What are you talking about, Z?

This isn't your garden variety geological event. The Afar region in Ethiopia sits at the crossroads of three tectonic plates: the Nubian, Somali, and Arabian plates. These massive slabs of Earth's crust are pulling away from each other bit by bit paving the way for an ocean to form right in the heart of Africa.

Photo by Anthony Philpotts via Julius Badayos

The Science Behind It

Geologists estimate that it will take 5 - 10 million years for the full transformation, but the process is a spectacle of nature's power. Beneath the surface, a suspected massive plume of superheated rocks from the mantle is thought to be driving this rifting, pushing the continent apart.

What's So Cool About It?

The Afar Triangle is a rare place on Earth where you can observe such dramatic tectonic movements on land. Each plate boundary is moving at a different pace, with the Arabian plate striding away at about an inch per year, while the African plates move between half an inch to 0.2 inches every year.

It sounds as fast as the slow lane in the grocery store checkout but it's speedy for tectonic plates where we look at movement over millions of years.

(h/t Massimo)

Thing 2 - AI of the week

RoboCasa environments

• UT Austin and NVIDIA announced RoboCasa, an open-source large-scale simulation framework of everyday tasks!
  The what? "A place where robot arms, dogs, and humanoids can train safely for daily tasks in procedurally generated simulations"
• OpenAI formed a Safety and Security Committee
• GPT-5 training underway?
  They also say they have "begun training its next frontier model and we anticipate the resulting systems to bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to AGI"
• Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner shared some new details about Sam Altman and why he was fired.
• Mistral released Codestral-22B. A code-specific model that's 3x smaller than LLaMA 3 70B and seems to outperform it.

Thing 3 - Embracing Risk and Focus: How to Light Up Your Life

People who pursue their dreams are not necessarily more confident than anyone else. They've just realized that the security of playing it safe is not worth the pain of never knowing what it feels like to be truly alive.

- Cory Muscara

A simple filter for managing your time:
You're not focused enough unless you're mourning some of the things you're saying no to.

- James Clear

Take big swings at things your soul craves for.

Cheers, Zvonimir