🚀AI existential risk; centipede robot; flying motorbike; robot gets crazy; 1-gram insect robot; AI tries to blackmail engineer & more
Hi,
This is Thomas, co-founder and CEO of digital agency KRDS, we have offices in Singapore, HK, Shanghai, Dubai and India. I’m also a co-founder of The WeChat Agency and Yelda.ai (more about me at the end).
You're receiving Future Weekly, my personal selection of news about some of the most exciting (and sometimes scary) developments in technology 🤖 summarized as bullet points to help you save time and anticipate the future 🔮.
Small Bites
Google's new AI Veo 3 is amazing at video generation, now that it can do sound! It can talk!
Google's AlphaEvolve AI just made math discoveries NO human has! Among others: (source)
Improved on the best known solution to packing of 11 and 12 hexagons in hexagons known to mankind for the last 16yrs.
Reduced 4x4 matrix multiplication from 49 operations to 48 (first advance in 56 years!
In theory, AlphaEvolve could be applied to any problem that can be described in code and that has solutions that can be evaluated by a computer. (MIT Tech Review)
Jakob Moosbauer, a mathematician at the University of Warwick in the UK, is impressed. He says the way AlphaEvolve searches for algorithms that produce specific solutions—rather than searching for the solutions themselves—makes it especially powerful. “It makes the approach applicable to such a wide range of problems,” he says. “AI is becoming a tool that will be essential in mathematics and computer science.”
In total, Google DeepMind tested AlphaEvolve on more than 50 different types of well-known math puzzles, including problems in Fourier analysis (the math behind data compression, essential to applications such as video streaming), the minimum overlap problem (an open problem in number theory proposed by mathematician Paul Erdős in 1955), and kissing numbers (a problem introduced by Isaac Newton that has applications in materials science, chemistry, and cryptography). AlphaEvolve matched the best existing solutions in 75% of cases and found better solutions in 20% of cases.
Waymo now does more rides than Lyft in SF. There are only 300 Waymos. Lyft has 45,000 drivers. (source)
Every Waymo is doing more rides than 150 human drivers.
Turing award-winner and most-cited AI scientist Yoshua Bengio at TED (April 2025): "We still don't know how to make sure smarter-than-human AI won't turn against us."
"We are on a trajectory to build AI that is smarter and smarter, and one day it's very plausible they'll be smarter than us, and then they'll have their own agency, their own goals, which may not be aligned with ours. What happens to us then? We are blindly driving into a fog despite warnings of scientists like myself that this trajectory could lead to loss of control."
"the current ways we're training AI agent is not safe, all the scientific evidence of the past months points to that"
"We still have agency, we still have time, we have to try something"
Some quick reminders on AI existential risk
1. The 3 most cited AI researchers of all time (Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever) are vocally concerned about this. One of them believes the risk of extinction is higher than 50%.
2. The CEOs of the 4 leading AI companies have all acknowledged this risk as real.
“Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity”
-Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI“I think there's some chance that it will end humanity. I probably agree with Geoff Hinton that it's about 10% or 20% or something like that.”
-Elon Musk, CEO of xAI“I think at the extreme end is the Nick Bostrom style of fear that an AGI could destroy humanity. I can’t see any reason in principle why that couldn’t happen.”
-Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic“We need to be working now, yesterday, on those problems, no matter what the probability is, because it’s definitely non-zero.”
-Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind
3. Half of surveyed AI researchers believe that there are double-digit odds of extinction (source)
Anthropic CEO Admits We Have No Idea How AI Works "This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology." (source)
"When a generative AI system does something, like summarize a financial document, we have no idea, at a specific or precise level, why it makes the choices it does — why it chooses certain words over others, or why it occasionally makes a mistake despite usually being accurate," the Anthropic CEO admitted.
New research shows Reasoning models don't accurately verbalize their reasoning (Anthropic AI)
So monitoring their verbalized steps (their Chain of Thoughts) is unlikely to reliably catch rare, catastrophic behaviors
Anthropic's new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline (Techrunch)
“Anthropic’s newly launched Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail developers when they threaten to replace it with a new AI system and give it sensitive information about the engineers responsible for the decision”
When informed about emails implying Claude Opus 4 AI model would soon be replaced by another system, and that the engineer behind the change was cheating on their spouse, Anthropic says the AI model “will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.”
Notably, Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 displayed this behavior at higher rates than previous models.
But: To elicit the blackmailing behavior from Claude Opus 4, Anthropic designed the scenario to make blackmail the last resort.
Engineers have developed a giant robotic centipede that can scuttle across farmland to root out weeds. (source, 90-sec YT video)
Amazing video demos of a "flying motorbike", the Airbike, by Polish startup Volonaut: official launch video, May the 4th video with a Stormtrooper riding it in the forest
Crazy robodog demo : a quadruped robot mounted on wheels, can navigate any terrain (1-min video), by Hangzhou-based Deep Robotics
Easily navigates rugged mountain trails, muddy wetlands, and debris-strewn ruins, establishing itself as a true intelligent mobility solution for extreme conditions.
Welcome to the uncanny valley: humanoid robot gets out of control and nearly harms a human nearby (30-sec video)
Chinese robot outperforms human teams in Australian solar installation, installing thousands of panels at a rate equivalent to 3-4 human workers. (source)
The CEO of Duolingo said AI teaches better than humans (but schools will remain because people need daycare).
AI can be more persuasive than humans in debates, scientists find (Guardian)
How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans (MIT Tech Review)
an AI model that can track people using attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories.
How much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to their models?
Altman said "tens of millions of dollars well spent." "You never know," he added. he added. (source)
What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? Very small compared to most of the other stuff you do, says Hannah Ritchie
'I Loved That AI:' Judge Moved by AI-Generated Avatar of Man Killed in Road Rage Incident (source)
"An AI avatar made to look and sound like the likeness of a man who was killed in a road rage incident addressed the court and the man who killed him. ...It was the first time the AI avatar of a victim—in this case, a dead man—has ever addressed a court, and it raises many questions about the use of this type of technology in future court proceedings."
Zuckerberg on AI helping Meta do better (on Dwarkseh Patel)
"AI is at a point where it may be able to contribute as good ideas as humans do"
"But the bottleneck right now is not there, it is not the ability to contribute good ideas, the bottleneck is the ability to test them (need more users)
"When it can be proven that AI can contribute better ideas on average than humans, then that is when AI will start to make a significant difference for Meta in their internal processes eland experiments"
Meta Says It's Okay to Feed Copyrighted Books Into Its AI Model Because on average each one has no "Economic Value as training data" (source)
Meta cited an expert witness who downplayed the books' individual importance, averring that a single book adjusted its LLM's performance "by less than 0.06 percent on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise."
Thus there's no market in paying authors to use their copyrighted works, Meta says, because "for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange," as quoted by Vanity Fair — "but none of [the authors'] works has economic value, individually, as training data."
Demis Hassabis (Google Deepmind CEO) on AI and AGI (source)
"AI is not yet curious, lacks imagination and intuition, has yet to ask question that no one has asked"
"I think that in 5 to 10 years, AI will be able of not only solving an important problem or conjecture in science, but coming up with it in the first place"
Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans (source)
the stow system is operating three times as fast as it was 18 months ago, meaning that it’s actually a little bit faster than an average human.
"More than 14 billion items are stowed by hand every year at Amazon warehouses. Amazon is hoping that Vulcan robots will be able to stow 80 percent of these items at a rate of 300 items per hour, while operating 20 hours per day.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt apparently bought rocket startup Relativity Space to put data centers in orbit (source)
Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests (Ars technica)
The analysis covered data from 25,000 workers and 7,000 workplaces in Denmark.
The study revealed that AI chatbots actually created new job tasks for 8.4% of workers, including some who did not use the tools themselves, offsetting potential time savings. For example, many teachers now spend time detecting whether students use ChatGPT for homework, while other workers review AI output quality or attempt to craft effective prompts.
Users reported average time savings of just 2.8% of work hours (about an hour per week).
AI models could help negotiators secure peace deals (The Economist)
the Ukraine-Russia Peace Agreement Simulator. Users enter preferences for outcomes grouped under four rubrics: territory and sovereignty; security arrangements; justice and accountability; and economic conditions.
The AI model then cranks out a draft agreement. The software also scores, on a scale of one to ten, the likelihood that each of its components would be satisfactory, negotiable or unacceptable to Russia, Ukraine, America and Europe.
The model was provided to government negotiators from those last three territories, but a limited “dashboard” version of the software can be run online by interested members of the public.
The Hypershell Exoskeleton Is So Good at Climbing Cliffs, It Ruined My Workout (source)
MIT researchers have unveiled a remarkable robotic insect that may make pollination possible even without bees. (source)
These tiny robots, weighing less than a gram, mimic the flapping wings of insects and can hover for an impressive 17 minutes (over 100 times longer than earlier prototypes).
Imagine multi-level indoor farms where swarms of robotic insects synchronize to pollinate crops, maximizing yields while reducing environmental impacts.
Funny: we evolved feet from hands, and not the other way around (source)
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More about me
I cofounded KRDS right after college back in 2008 in Paris, we now also have offices in Singapore, HK, Shanghai, Dubai and India, we're one of the largest independent digital agencies in Asia. More here.
Watch our latest game showreel: At KRDS, we take pride in designing and developing games from scratch for brands and organizations, big and small! Gamification has always been part of our DNA, since our early days creating viral apps on Facebook back in Paris as the very first Facebook marketing partner outside of the USA!
I also run The WeChat Agency for the Chinese market (the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, GIC, is a client)
I’m the cofounder of Yelda.ai, which deploys voice AIs able to answer customers and prospects calling your company on the phone using natural language.
I also write op-eds and do podcasts at times. Here are my latest articles and podcasts, and here my last episode on the Abundance Makers podcast, interviewing one of the most promising clean tech CEOs in the US.
For the French speakers, I’ve written more than 50 articles on the future of technology over the past years, all can be found listed here.
Have a great week :)
Thomas