🚀 Crazy rocket video; sarco suicide pod; Zuck: "this device is the next foundational shift in personal computing"; fastest brick-laying robot
New Chinese Nuclear Submarine Sinks; Altman: "superintelligence in a few thousand days possibly"
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
Nice 40-sec Gen AI video: these old paintings come to life!
A graphic novel made (almost) entirely in Stable Diffusion. (source)
A surreal, delusional generative AI video - must-see (video)
MrBeast’s secrets revealed (the document)
he’s the most followed Youtuber (+300millions)
including how to onboard new hires, the kinds of metrics that he thinks about to succeed on YouTube, etc.
"This is some of the most incredible rocket footage I’ve ever seen." Watch the 50-sec video
A Chinese rocket narrowly missed a landing on Sunday—the video is amazing
Deep Blue Aerospace is just one of several Chinese companies working on vertical landing.
La compète s'intensifie !
Sam Altman: "It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there." (source: see further down)
Sam Altman reportedly poised to get equity in OpenAI for the first time (Techcrunch)
Follows the abrupt departure of OpenAI’s CTO, Mira Murati, and plans to restructure into a for-profit benefit corporation — similar to rivals such as Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI.
This is intended to make OpenAI more attractive to outside investors, who’ve chafed at the company’s current cap on returns.
But it’s likely to raise concerns from the AI safety community about whether OpenAI can hold itself accountable in its pursuit of superintelligent AI.
OpenAI blocks ChatGPT’s Voice Mode in Europe (source)
Under a strict reading of the AI Act, ChatGPT advanced voice is *illegal* in EU workplaces and schools because the system can recognize a user’s emotions. That’s prohibited by the AI Act.
OpenAI Just Released Its Long-Awaited "Strawberry" Model (The Verge)
It "performs similarly to PhD students on challenging benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry, and biology."
does a better job at writing code and solving multistep problems than previous models. But it’s also more expensive and slower to use than GPT-4o
doesn't yet have many of the features that make ChatGPT useful, like browsing the web for information and uploading files and images,"
The company claims it could be used "by healthcare researchers to annotate cell sequencing data, by physicists to generate complicated mathematical formulas needed for quantum optics, and by developers in all fields to build and execute multi-step workflows."
But as early testers have already discovered firsthand, it's still miles away from replacing a human scientist or coder. (source)
In fact, if recent posts making their rounds on social media are anything to go by, the o1-preview is still often struggling with the absolute basics.
What people do with ChatGPT (source)
Analysis of a million ChatGPT interaction logs
Great! Chatbots can persuade people to stop believing in conspiracy theories (MIT Tech Review)
Researchers from MIT Sloan and Cornell University found that chatting about a conspiracy theory with a large language model (LLM) reduced people’s belief in it by about 20%—even among participants who claimed that their beliefs were important to their identity.
Apparently, doctors in the US are now using LLMs to argue with insurers. (NYT)
This is pretty much exactly the joke from last year that half of LLMs will be turning three bullet points into three paragraphs and the other half will be summarising three paragraphs into three bullet points, says tech analyst Ben Evans
And in the UK, One in five doctors use AI such as ChatGPT for daily tasks, survey finds (Guardian)
Doctors are using the technology for activities such as suggesting diagnoses and writing letters
Jensen Huang, founder & CEO of Nvidia said that coding is going to be mostly AI...
...and recommends to young people that they consider careers in biology, manufacturing and farming.
The best AI feature Google just announced: smart screenshots. (The Verge)
Pixel Screenshots uses AI to extract information from the screenshots you take, allowing you to search through them.
Electronic Arts demonstrates in a concept video a system that allows users to create a video game entirely from scratch
In the concept video, two gamers off-screen create a Minecraft-esque video game involving a maze of cardboard boxes.
Through a series of quick prompts, the users make the maze more complex while adding rules such as that characters can only die if they are hit with a grenade.
The changes show up pretty much instantaneously, and with zero technical ability required, and allow the game to be played immediately.
Meta has scrapped celebrity AI chatbots after they fell flat with users (source)
Turns out nobody wanted to chat with a random AI celebrity after all!…
…maybe people prefer to pretend they're celebrities and have millions of AI-generated fans to comment on their posts??
Well, that's coincidentally the weird idea behind the startup project SocialAI (not run by Meta) (Wired)
There’s only one real human in the SocialAI equation. That person is you.
When you first sign up, you’re prompted to choose these AI character archetypes: Do you want to hear from Fans? Trolls? Skeptics? Odd-balls? Doomers? Visionaries? Nerds? Drama Queens? Liberals? Conservatives?
You post text and then, instantaneously, several comments appear, cascading below your post, each and every one of them written by an AI character, these AIs also talk to each other.
"Just make a post, and watch as you get up to thousands, even millions, of AI-generated comments posing as humans in return, like you'd just went viral."
South Korean high schools have a big porn deep-fakes problem (BBC)
China Embarrassed When Brand-New Secret Nuclear Submarine Instantly Sinks. (WSJ)
When an electric truck crashes and catches fire, you need a LOT of water. Possibly even a plane full of water. (source)
Most electric-car batteries could soon be made by recycling old ones (The Economist)
Recent breakthroughs in recycling, together with a spate of technological improvements, mean that within a decade or so most of the global demand for raw materials to build new batteries could be met by recycling old ones.
Example: a new process using microwaves was able to recover 87% of the lithium in a used cathode in 15 minutes, vs 12 hours necessary to collect the same amount using a conventional method
Well, well, well: Elon Musk built a data centre for his AI startup, couldn’t get enough power hookups fast enough, so just bought and installed a bunch of (highly polluting) gas turbines without telling anyone, let alone getting a permit. (NPR)
Near-total collapse in venture-backed startups in China (FT)
The Financial Times has a big splash claiming a near-total collapse in venture-backed startups in China:
partly because US investors are pulling back
but much more because of the changed domestic political environment.
Apparently funding has gone from ~$100bn in 2022 to only $6bn in 2024 YTD (year to date), and 261 companies in 2024 versus a peak of 51k in 2018.
It’s very hard for governments to create startup ecosystems (as the EU has discovered) but it’s very easy to kill them, says tech analyst Ben Evans
“Orion glasses are the first device that is powered by our wrist-based neural interface,” Zuckerberg said. (Techcrunch, Wired)
a wrist-worn wearable prototype (not consumer-ready). Wearers can gesture while wearing the wristband-type peripheral to navigate around apps on the paired Orion glasses.
Meta’s Orion glasses — which remain very much a concept at this stage — are true AR.
Orion utilizes tiny projectors built into the glasses’ temples to create a heads-up display.
the images don’t appear as flat, 2D graphics in front of your eyes but that the virtual images now have shape and depth. “The big innovation with Orion is the field of view of 72 degrees" (most headsets are in the 30- to 50-degree range)
a futuristic pair of smart glasses that Zuckerberg hopes will lead the next foundational shift in personal computing.
AI put in charge of setting variable speed limits on US freeway (New Scientist)
Horrible ? : Sarco suicide pod: Arrests after American woman dies in Switzerland in controversial machine (CNN)
The so-called “Sarco” capsule had been deployed in a wood
Cast along sleek, aerodynamic lines, the “Sarco” causes death when its occupant releases nitrogen gas inside, lowering the amount of oxygen to lethal levels.
It is the brainchild of Philip Nitschke, an Australian physician famous for his work on assisted suicide since the 1990s.
Researchers have discovered a protein that, when deleted, could extend our lifespan and improve our quality of life as we age (new Atlas)
the IL-11 protein increases with age and spurs fat accumulation in the liver and abdomen, as well as reduced muscle mass and strength.
When that protein was suppressed in mice with a therapeutic, they found a 24.9% average increase in lifespan.
The mice also showed signs of improved metabolic function and increased calorie-burning brown fat, as well as a lower frequency of cardiometabolic diseases.
See the World's fastest brick-laying construction robot in action: the one-minute video
Sapiens book by Yuval Noah Harari published in 2011 didn't age so well
He wrote then: Nationalism is “fast losing ground”; “there is at last real peace and not just the absence of war”; “the era when humankind stood helpless before natural epidemics is probably over”.
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Why Mark Zuckerberg thinks AR glasses will replace your phone (best parts from a 1-hour itw)
Why the end of Moore’s law will not slow the pace of change
Why language models won't create bioterrorists any more readily than celebrity cookbooks have created Michelin star chefs.
The Two Leading Theories as to why the Industrial Revolution started in Britain explained and summarized
Essay written by Sam Altman: The Intelligence Age
McDonald’s touchscreen kiosks were feared as job killers. Instead, something surprising happened
Previous newsletters:
See what happens when 50 self-driving cars go crazy on a parking; AI spaghetti art & more
"The best computer interface I’ve ever used"; Musk Vs LeCun Twitter fight & more
Latest cool robot videos, Zuck's & Musk's last thoughts on AI
How a missing gene in our DNA affected the Battle of Trafalgar and gave birth to the Mafia
Superhuman: see how much work a professor did in 30 minutes with AI, + more gems about the future
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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 weekend :)
Thomas