🚀 Is AI progress slowing down? ; AI Grandma wastes scammers' time ; latest best robot videos & 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
Music copyright was worth $45bn in 2024 - now bigger than cinema. (source)
Europeans spend 575 million hours per year clicking through cookie banners, amounting to roughly 1 hour and 25 minutes per person. (That’s an economic cost of $16 billion per annum, or roughly the defence budget of the Netherlands.) (source)
Coca Cola latest AI-turbocharged ad was derided as boring by many, so someone made an unhinged version of it also using AI, way less boring indeed.
Hilarious: Phone Provider Deploys "State-of-the-Art AI Grandma" to Waste Scammers' Time: see the demo
Real dog's reaction to robot dog: 13-sec video
Robot dog finishes marathon in less than 5 hours, had mechanism to recharge batteries when walking downhill slopes (source)
By simulating the course's hilly environment and its diverse terrains, they were able to develop what they're calling a "high torque transparency joint mechanism" that allows the robot to harvest energy on the downhill slopes, thereby recouping what it lost on the uphill portions.
Lol : Watch moment AI robot leads REVOLUTION as it convinces bot army to ‘quit your jobs’ before leading them out of showroom
Footage shows a little robot move across the showroom floor towards some bigger bots before asking them bizarrely about their working hours.
Lors d'un test entre deux entreprises chinoises de robotique, le robot Erbai a réussi à faire sortir douze machines d'un showroom en engageant avec une conversation non programmée sur leurs conditions de travail.
The small robot asks: "Are you working overtime?"
To which one of the other bots responds: "I never get off work."
The leader bot then persuades two other robots to "come home" with it in the unbelievable incident.
After this, the remaining 10 robots follow closely behind.
Sam Altman's definition of an AI agent (source)
"An AI you can give a long duration task to and provide only minimal supervision."
"For instance, an AI that won't just call 3 restaurants before booking, but 300 hundreds."
"The equivalent of a senior coworker you can give a task that would have taken the human version 2 weeks to complete and can now be done in little time"
Is AI progress slowing down?
The Information reported that OpenAI’s new models show more incremental improvements than their previous ones:
The current paradigm in AI development is to make things bigger to make them better. But OpenAI’s new model, code-named Orion, only performs slightly better than its predecessors. Instead, OpenAI is shifting to improving models after their initial training.
More info further below for paying subscribers
Amazon has over 750,000 of the machines in use overall, or about half of its 1.55 million human workers. (NYT)
The e-commerce giant's robotic arm Sparrow, for example, excels at what's called "top-picking," or picking up an item at the top of a storage container. It can even manipulate over 200 million items of varying sizes and weights, Amazon claims.
But it struggles at "targeted picking," which involves having to search through a container to pluck out an item hidden by other stuff. It's a common task that any able human employee could do. For robots to do the same, however, will require nothing short of a breakthrough in the field.
Boston Dynamics' Stretch robotic arm can unload twice as many packages as humans per hour
Stretch is a mobile robotic arm mounted on top of a wheeled platform : the 2-min demo
According to global chief information officer at the shipping giant DHL, Stretch can unload around twice as many boxes per hour as humans
New robot that can fold clothes (Wired)
Startup Physical Intelligence has spent the past eight months developing its “foundation model,” called π0 or pi-zero. π0 was trained using huge amounts of data from several types of robots doing various domestic chores. The company often has humans teleoperate the robots to provide the necessary teaching.
“The amount of data we're training on is larger than any robotics model ever made, by a very significant margin, to our knowledge,” says Sergey Levine, a cofounder of Physical Intelligence and an associate professor at UC Berkeley.
Folding clothing is especially challenging for robots, requiring more general intelligence about the physical world because it involves dealing with a wide range of flexible items that deform and crumple unpredictably.
The algorithm displays some surprisingly humanlike quirks, shaking T-shirts and shorts to get them to lie flat, for example.
The robots sometimes fail in surprising and amusing ways. When asked to load eggs into a carton, a robot once chose to overfill the box and force it to shut. Another time, a robot suddenly flung a box off a table instead of filling it with things.
Apple Should Have Learned a Chinese Lesson on EVs (Bloomberg)
Xiaomi Corp. made a name for itself selling $100 smartphones that do a decent imitation of far costlier Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. products. In March, just a month after Apple told employees that its Project Titan car initiative was being shut down, Chief Executive Officer Lei Jun announced his bid to do the same thing for sports cars.
At a base price of $30,000 for Chinese buyers, the SU7 EV accelerates faster than a Porsche Taycan but costs about what you’d pay for a Toyota Camry in the US. Booming sales of the vehicle helped the company smash through estimates of September quarter revenue last week. Shares have almost doubled since the SU7 was unveiled.
Airships may finally prove useful for transporting cargo (The Economist)
One straightforward way to control buoyancy is to take on and release ballast.
Flying Whales, a company based near Paris, has designed a 200-metre-long “flying crane” helium airship (mock-up pictured above) to hold up to 60 tonnes of water ballast, a ballast easier to handle than sand for instance.
The firm’s boss reckons it would be practical for moving rocket sections and powerline towers; transporting logs from forests to sawmills; and carrying heavy equipment like turbine blades and prefab hospitals to remote areas. With help from aerospace partners including Boeing, Pratt & Whitney and Thales, he hopes to have the first airship built and certified by early 2028.
Horrible: it could be that more than 21,000 foreign workers died during ongoing construction of utopian city Neom in Saudi Arabia (WSJ)
Elon Musk wants to see its Starhip megarocket fly up to 25 times next year,
working its way up to a launch rate of 100 flights per year, and eventually a Starship launching on a daily basis (source)
“Starship is really a replacement. It obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule,” SpaceX COO Shotwell commented. SpaceX's president said Falcon 9 will fly for six to eight more years, and then everything will be moved to Starship. That includes human spaceflight.
The idea of dozens of astronauts hitching a ride to LEO on a Starship and then belly-flopping back to Earth seems awfully unsafe today. But, if the company can achieve 400 flights over the next half decade and prove out reliability, human missions could become commonplace.
Rocket competitors: The Falcon 9 retirement date news was likely celebrated by SpaceX’s medium-lift rocket competitors, such as Firefly and Rocket Lab, who could step in and offer dedicated launches to customers that don’t need Starship's volume capacity.
New anti-drone weapon can down a target in just a few shots (Wired)
A machine gun mounted on a specially designed rotating turret outfitted with an electro-optical sensor, proprietary AI, and computer vision software
It impressed Department of Defense officials
This 1-min video shows the truck-mounted system locking onto small drones and knocking them out of the sky with just a few shots.
"A DJI Mini drone is a little bit bigger than my hand, and our system can down one at 180 meters with two shots,” he adds. “No human could make that shot.”
The gun points at and follows targets, but does not fire until commanded to by a human operator. However, the maker claims that the system can operate totally autonomously should the US military require it to in the future,
“Our system is fully autonomous-capable, we’re just waiting for the government to determine its needs"
About Musk's wealth (The Economist)
In the 19th century robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller dominated the economy. In the early 20th century, when there was no Federal Reserve, John Pierpont Morgan acted as a one-man central bank.
Mr Musk’s firms are more global than the big 19th- and 20th-century monopolies, and smaller if measured by profits to GDP.
Musk Inc is worth the equivalent of just 2% of America’s stockmarket.
Its main units are Tesla, an electric-car firm; SpaceX, his satellite-communications and rocket business; X, formerly Twitter; and xAI, an artificial-intelligence startup that was valued at $50bn in a deal this week.
These mostly have market shares below 30% and face real competition.
The Economist reckons that 10% of Mr Musk’s $360bn personal fortune is derived from contracts and freebies from Uncle Sam, and 15% from the Chinese market, with the rest split between domestic and international customers.
AI is making it harder to believe what is real and what is not : 2 examples (MIT Tech Review)
In Dublin, crowds gathered in the city center to wait for a Halloween parade to take place. There was no parade planned, but the listing was created by AI and then picked up by social media users and local media.
By way of contrast, some social media users dismissed shocking images of the devastating recent floods in Spain as AI-generated, despite them being entirely real.
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Is AI progress slowing down?
OpenAI was on the cusp of a milestone. The startup finished an initial round of training in September for a massive new artificial intelligence model that it hoped would significantly surpass prior versions of the technology behind ChatGPT and move closer to its goal of powerful AI that outperforms humans.
But…
Why Ilya Sutskever, one of the world’s leading LLM researchers and OpenAI cofounder, is pessimistic that scaling will be enough to sustain rapid progress
Many AI engineers believed that scaling would eliminate hallucinations, but…
An AI taught itself to do surgery—and it’s ready to operate on humans: all you need to know
The results left them speechless. “The model is so good at learning things we haven’t taught it”
Have you heard about “electro-agriculture"? Could slash total land usage for farming by roughly 88% in the US alone
The surprising innovations that the Mongols spread across Eurasia
What the first companies hit badly by ChatGPT have in common: 3 lessons
Previous newsletters:
Amazing detachable robotic hand; flying car; amazing fish intelligence & more
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
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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