šImpressive AI & robot demos; what's biocomputing?; Yann LeCun and Sam Altman on AGI & more
Crazy nuclear near-misses & accidents
Hi,
This is Thomas,Ā co-founder and CEO of digital agency KRDS, we have offices in Singapore, HK, Shanghai, Dubai and India. Iām also a co-founder of The WeChat AgencyĀ and Yelda.ai (more about me at the end).
You're receiving Future Weekly, my personal selectionĀ of news about some of the most exciting (and sometimes scary) developments in technology š¤ summarized as bullet points to help you save time and anticipate the future š®.
First, you'll find small bites about many different news (available to all), and then further down these summaries (for paid subscribers only, get free access by referring this newsletter to friends):
See what breakthrough climate tech that Swedish company revealed, āthe first product ever completely free from critical raw materialsā
Why is Meta's latest investment in AI massive compared to competitors?
What is "Biocomputing"? See how A Ball of Brain Cells on a Chip Can Learn Simple Speech Recognition and Math
Unbelievable: check that list of crazy nuclear near misses and incidents that have been dramatically underreported over the years (excerpts from the book The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI)
Small Bites
A very impressive AI demo:Ā turn your face intoĀ George Clooney or any famous person instantly
See it for yourself:Ā no need to create any account or pay anything, just give access to your camera and that's it, you move and you see the famous actor mirroring your every move, crazy
Insane to think about what's going to happen in the coming months and years with content, deepfakes, impersonation, scams...
Wow: impressive demo of a robot, developed byĀ Stanford researchers that can many diverse tasks
ššØšš¢š„š ššššš: A low-cost, open-source, mobile manipulator.
See it cooking different recipes, with very fine manipulation of ingredients:Ā See the video demo
Anther video where it does more tasks: laundry,Ā vacuum, water plants,Ā load and unload a dishwasher,Ā use a coffee machine,Ā obtain drinks from the fridge and open a beer,Ā open doors,Ā throw away trash: see that other crazy video
Will we have household robots for cooking and cleaning in less than a decade?
"Mobile ALOHA debunks a belief held in the robotics community that it was primarily hardware shortcomings holding back robotsā ability to do such tasks" āThe missing piece is AI,ā (MIT Tech Review)
Cool AR app to know where one still has to vacuum, check the 15-sec demo
Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, back from retirement: he was a core contributor on the Gemini technical paper, Alphabet's latest AI model, coding ābasically every dayā (source)
Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve a famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics. (MIT Tech Review)
A new study in Nature shows that AMIE, a Google chatbot, diagnosed heart and lung conditions more accurately than doctors in online healthcare. More surprisingly, the chatbot ranked higher on empathy - a trait considered beyond AIās reach (shared in Azeem Azhar's ExponentialView)
Another awesome use of AI! We donāt need risky superintelligence to revolutionize medicine:Ā AI helps discover a new structural class of antibiotics, the last one took 38 years (source)
Crazy: 2 years of progress of image-generation AI tool MidJourney, from Feb 2022 to now, in 8 pics:Bluffant :
February 2022
December 2023
What?? OpenAIās Sam Altman says human-level AI is coming but will change world much less than we think (source)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said artificial general intelligence, or AGI, could be developed in the āreasonably close-ish future.ā
"He expects the fuss caused by the first AGI to be short-lived. āThe world will have a two-week freakout and then people will go on with their lives,ā he toldĀ The Economist.
Altman said AI isnāt yet replacing jobs at the scale that many economists fear, and that itās already becoming an āincredible tool for productivity.ā
Isaac Singerās sewing machine, patented in 1851, meant sewing a shirt went from taking fourteen hours to just one hour.
Impressive prototype of a transformative flying robot: watch the 30-sec demo
Chinese carmaker BYD passed Tesla as the best-selling electric vehicle maker in the world
Europe now creates more startups than America: around 14,000 between January and September 2023, compared with 13,000 across the Atlantic. (The Economist)
A new type of jet engine could revive supersonic air travel (The Economist)
For a long time, engineers had lacked the tools to make real progress. That changed with advances in computer modelling, new alloys that can resist extreme temperatures and additive manufacturing, known as 3D printing.
Bill Gates: "the world is getter better"
In manufacturing, we are well on the way to making steel with electricity instead of coal. Buildings are getting greener thanks to a company that has developed a window that is many times more efficient than most windows used today.Ā
In agriculture, one company has developed microbes that provide plants with the fertilizer they need without producing excess greenhouse gases
Scientists have bred 160 drought-tolerant and disease-resistant varieties of maize. Farmers in Zimbabwe who planted one of these varieties harvested enough extra maize to feed their families for nine months.
NVIDIA's CEO and Founder said "Mooreās law is dead" in 2022.Ā Days later, Intelās chief Pat Gelsinger reported that Mooreās maxim was, in fact, āalive and wellā.
Delegates to the International Electron Devices Meeting, a chip-industry conference, were mostly on Mr Gelsingerās side. Researchers showed off several ideas dedicated to keeping Mooreās law going, from exploiting the third dimension to sandwiching chips Ā together and even moving beyond silicon, the material from which microchips have been made for the past half-century. (The Economist)
Powered by rain, this seed carrier could help reforest the most remote areas (CNN)
Inspired by natureās own design, the lab has created an āE-seedā carrier that is intended to be dropped by drones and drill into the soil.
itās made from a material that āself-drillsā in response to rain, when wet.Ā The carrier has an ā80% drilling success rate on flat land,ā
Click the CNN link to see a cool animation of the seed drilling itself in the ground
Ultrasonic 3D Printer Could One Day Repair Organs in the Body Without Surgery (source)
Lol, ChatGPT, when asked to progressively "make a man more muscular." The final result is a croissant!Ā Ā (source)
Yes, nature did invent mechanical gears:Ā This insect, a plant hopper, has functioning 'mechanical gears' connecting its hind legs, probably the first ones discovered in nature (voir la vidĆ©o de 15 secondes)
In a letter to his wife in 1780, John Adams, one of Americaās founders, wrote:
I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
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