This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through January 13)

OpenAI’s New App Store Could Turn ChatGPT Into an Everything App
Lauren Goode | Wired
“OpenAI calls these apps GPTs. By some measures they’re already widespread: OpenAI claims that greater than 3 million customers have created customized variations of ChatGPT because it turned attainable in November. They’re more likely to multiply even sooner now that just about anybody can create and publish a GPT on the internet, after verifying their profile by making their title seen or linking it to a official web site.”

US SEC Approves Bitcoin ETFs in Watershed for Crypto Market
Hannah Lang and Suzanne McGee | Reuters
“A decade within the making, the ETFs are a game-changer for bitcoin, providing traders publicity to the world’s largest cryptocurrency with out immediately holding it. They supply a serious enhance for a crypto trade beset by scandals. The Securities and Alternate Fee stated it permitted 11 purposes, together with from BlackRock, Ark Investments/21Shares, Constancy, Invesco and VanEck, regardless of warnings from some officers and investor advocates that the merchandise carried dangers.”

Quantum Computing Startup Says It Will Beat IBM to Error Correction
John Timmer | Ars Technica
“It’s most likely a measure of quantum computing’s progress that, whereas this highway map appears optimistic and aggressive, it doesn’t appear utterly ludicrous. A couple of years in the past, logical qubits had been a theoretical assemble; their fundamentals have now been demonstrated. Two corporations have already got {hardware} with over 1,000 qubits. Quera may face challenges—many corporations on this area have discovered that their tech has did not scale as anticipated. However the subject as an entire seems to be shifting steadily towards making logical qubits a actuality.”

Toyota’s Robots Are Learning to Do Housework—By Copying Humans
Will Knight | Wired
“Having robots study to do issues for themselves has confirmed difficult due to the complexity and variability of the bodily world and human environments, and the problem of acquiring sufficient coaching knowledge to show them to deal with all eventualities. There are indicators that this could possibly be altering. The dramatic enhancements we’ve seen in AI chatbots over the previous 12 months or so have prompted many roboticists to surprise if comparable leaps may be attainable in their very own subject. The algorithms which have given us spectacular chatbots and picture turbines are additionally already serving to robots study extra effectively.”

The Hubless Electric Motorcycle With Sci-Fi Style and a Great Name
Tim Stevens | The Verge
“‘We got here to a conclusion that we would wish to maneuver the motor outdoors of the principle chassis, out of the physique of the motorbike,’ [Verge Motorcycles CTO Marko Lehtimäki] stated. So that they determined to strive one thing completely different by placing the motor contained in the rear wheel. In-wheel electrical motors usually are not precisely uncommon. The truth is, they’re frequent within the e-bike scene, discovered on choices just like the VanMoof S4 or the Hen Bike. The TS Extremely’s motor, although, is one thing completely different. It’s a hubless ring design, which suggests you may put your hand proper via the middle of the wheel.”

This ‘Self-Eating’ Rocket Consumes Its Own Body for Fuel
Passant Rabie | Gizmodo
“The engine makes use of high-density polyethylene plastic tubing as gas, which burns with the principle propellants: liquid propane and gaseous oxygen. Because the rocket launches to orbit, it burns the plastic tubing, which is fed into the engine’s combustion chamber, till it’s no extra. Because it requires much less propellant packed from Earth, the rocket has extra room to hold payloads to area in comparison with different automobiles of comparable mass.”