🚀 Lion burgers & tiger steaks ; how AI will radically alter the practice of law ; IA will launch real business before 5 years & more
Hi,
This is Thomas, Cofounder and CEO of digital agency KRDS (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 🔮.
First, you'll find small bites about many different news, and then further down these summaries:
Why Morgan Stanley predict that Tesla's Dojo supercomputer could add $500 billion to the company’s value (Wired)
Mark Zuckerberg’s interview in the metaverse with photo a photorealistic avatar: main takeaways
Why AI can definitely accelerate scientific research: Two areas in particular look promising (The Economist)
See what brain implants could do for that stroke survivor (MIT Tech Review)
The 3 big ways generative AI could radically alter the practice of law (The Economist).
Small Bites
In case you missed, my essay from last week: Green, On-Demand, Abundant Energy by 2050 is Definitely Possible: Here's the Plan
Thanks for your great feedback for those who reached out to me
Critics made a lot of fun of Tesla's Optimus humanoid robot previously (given what Boston Dynamics can do), but progress is quite impressive in such little time
Now he can sort objects autonomously with a fully end-to-end trained neural network.
Interesting AI use cases (The Economist)
A Chinese AI model is already able to come up with weather predictions thousands of times faster and cheaper than the current standard, without any meaningful dip in accuracy.
A more futuristic use for LLMs proposed by a psychologist: If an LLM could be prompted with real (or fabricated) back stories so as to mirror accurately what human participants might say, they could theoretically replace focus groups, or be used as agents in economics research.
Spotify will use AI to replicate podcasters’ voices and translate them to other languages (source)
OpenAI is in talks with Sir Jony Ive, Apple’s former designer, to create a new gadget for the AI era (The Economist)
The idea is to build a new consumer-electronics device better suited to the back-and-forth of seeing, talking and listening AIs, there is a fair chance it will no longer be reliant on the touchscreen.
“Ambient computing”: they imagine a future device in the form of something as simple as a pendant or glasses that can process the world in real time, using a sophisticated virtual assistant capable of fielding questions and processing images.
Poor Queen Anne :( Queen in the 17th century, 17 pregnancies, only 5 live births, no kids survives to adulthood (source)
ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak : la démo impressionnante vidéo d'OpenAI d'1min30 pour réparer son vélo
Impressive, Huawei autonomous driving: c’est autre chose que les autoroutes en ligne droite de la Californie ou les grandes rues larges de SF ! Une vraie conduite en ville avec un environnement extrêmement versatile. Impressionnant. (1-min demo video)
Tesla is experimenting with 3D printing the entire body of its cars as one piece, no one has ever done that in the industry (source)
Scaled up, this technique could get Tesla closer to Musk’s goal of halving production costs
Maps can be so misleading!
Max Tegmark, physicist and organizer of the Pause AI letter:
“It’s also clear that AI leaders like Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google Deepmind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic AI) are very concerned themselves. But they all know they can’t pause alone,” Tegmark says. Pausing alone would be “a disaster for their company, right?” “They just get outcompeted, and then that CEO will be replaced with someone who doesn’t want to pause. The only way the pause comes about is if the governments of the world step in and put in place safety standards that force everyone to pause.”
So how about Elon … ? Musk signed the letter calling for a pause, only to set up a new AI company called X.AI to build AI systems that would “understand the true nature of the universe.” (Musk is an advisor to the FLI.) “Obviously, he wants a pause just like a lot of other AI leaders. But as long as there isn’t one, he feels he has to also stay in the game.”
Transgenic Silkworms Spin Spider Silk 6x Tougher Than Kevlar (source)
Is it a good thing for great startups to IPO? Will that destroy value? (The Economist)
A final lesson is that exposure to the stockmarket creates the discipline needed to rein in founders. Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Meta, has already lost $40bn building his virtual-reality dreams and plans to spend even more. He can do this because dual share classes give him 61% of voting rights. Similarly the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, hold 51% of the voting rights at Alphabet, which may explain why the company has struggled to thrive beyond search. Apple and Microsoft, by contrast, are older, no longer dominated by their founders—and far more valuable.
Well…We may soon be able to eat exotic cell-cultivated meat: Lion burgers, tiger steaks, and mammoth meatballs (source)
Crazy: A device tied to your belt that waves your shirt so as to create a cooling breeze (see the 15-sec video)
Crazy:
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More to chew!
Morgan Stanley report predicts that Tesla's Dojo supercomputer could add $500 billion to the company’s value (Wired)
The report makes an impassioned case for why Dojo and the huge amount of driving data the company is collecting from Tesla vehicles on the road, could pay huge dividends in future.
Morgan Stanley’s analysts say that Dojo will provide breakthroughs that give Tesla an “asymmetric” advantage over other carmakers in autonomous driving and product development.
The report even claims the supercomputer will help Tesla branch into other industries where computer vision is critical, including health care, security, and aviation.
Impressive: Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview in the metaverse using a photorealistic avatar of himself, he's talking with the host sitting at the other end of the country
The host, Lex Friedman, is so impressed "it's the most impressive thing I've ever seen, I feel you're literally next to me"
Both had to be scanned in a special lab for hours by hundreds of cameras before this could happen.
But then, their VR headset is able to read live their emotions, and only send the details about them to the other headset so as to animate the avatar of the speaker. It's an efficient way to send information, no need to send the whole tridimensional videos in live, would be too sata-intensive. Only the details about what emotions to assign to the avatar preloaded in the system.
But it means that if could technically be possible for someone to impersonate someone else, though the voice is transmitted as is by default, so to really hack someone, you would also need software to alter and impersonate the voice, which is also doable.
Zuckerberg said Meta plans to integrate them into its apps, but that the technology isn't quite ready yet.
Zuckerberg says the plan for the future is being able to do a "very quick scan" using your smartphone. "You just take your phone, wave it in front of your face for a couple of minutes, say a few sentences, make a bunch of expressions... and then produce something that's of the quality of what we have right now," he told Fridman.
Zuckerberg suggested that users would be able to edit their virtual avatar to be more emotive, and joked that he might use it to adjust his famously expressionless delivery : to have your avatar smile more than you do normally
From this to that, not bad Zuck!
AI can definitely accelerate scientific research : Two areas in particular look promising (The Economist)
The first is “literature-based discovery” (LBD), which involves analysing existing scientific literature, using ChatGPT-style language analysis, to look for new hypotheses, connections or ideas that humans may have missed. LBDis showing promise in identifying new experiments to try—and even suggesting potential research collaborators. This could stimulate interdisciplinary work and foster innovation at the boundaries between fields. LBD systems can also identify “blind spots” in a given field, and even predict future discoveries and who will make them.
In an early success, an LBD system put together 2 separate observations—that Raynaud’s disease, a circulatory disorder, was related to blood viscosity, and that fish oil reduced blood viscosity—and suggested that fish oil might therefore be a useful treatment. This hypothesis was then experimentally verified.
The second area is “robot scientists”, also known as “self-driving labs”. These are robotic systems that use AI to form new hypotheses, based on analysis of existing data and literature, and then test those hypotheses by performing hundreds or thousands of experiments, in fields including systems biology and materials science. Unlike human scientists, robots are less attached to previous results, less driven by bias—and, crucially, easy to replicate. They could scale up experimental research, develop unexpected theories and explore avenues that human investigators might not have considered.
Brain implants helped create a digital avatar of a stroke survivor’s face along with a voice (MIT Tech Review, video)
The image is clearly computerized, and the voice is halting, but it’s still a remarkable moment. The image is a digital avatar of a person who lost her ability to speak after a stroke 18 years ago.
Now, as part of an experiment involving a brain implant and AI algorithms, she can speak with a replication of her own voice and even convey a limited range of facial expressions via her avatar.
The implant doesn’t record thoughts. Instead it captures the electrical signals that control the muscle movements of the lips, tongue, jaw, and voice box—all the movements that enable speech.
both managed to speak at a rate of about 60 to 70 words per minute. That’s roughly half the rate of normal speech, but more than four times faster than had been previously reported.
still quite a high error rate around 25%
though these proofs of concept are still a very long way from tech that’s available to the wider public.
Generative AI could radically alter the practice of law (The Economist)
AI has the potential to transform the legal profession in 3 big ways.
First, it could reduce big firms’ manpower advantage.
In large, complex lawsuits, these firms tell dozens of associates to read millions of pages of documents looking for answers to senior lawyers’ questions and hunches.
Now a single lawyer or small firm will be able to upload these documents into a litigation-prep AI and begin querying them. As Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School notes, “You can be a smaller, leaner specialised firm and have the capacity to process these sorts of cases.”
Second, AI could change how firms make money.
Richard Susskind, technology adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England, argues that firms profit by “having armies of young lawyers to whom they pay less than they charge clients”. If AI can do the work of those armies in seconds, firms will need to change their billing practices. Some may move to charging flat fees based on the service provided, rather than for the amount of time spent providing it. Stephen Wu of Silicon Valley Law Group speculates that firms may charge “a technology fee”, so that “clients don’t expect to get generative ai for nothing”.
Third, AI could change how many lawyers exist and where they work.
Eventually, Mr Lessig argues, it is hard to see how ai “doesn’t dramatically reduce the number of lawyers the world needs”. If AI can do in 20 seconds a task that would have taken a dozen associates 50 hours each, then why would big firms continue hiring dozens of associates? A veteran partner at a prestigious corporate-law firm in New York expects the ratio of associates to partners to decline from today’s average of perhaps seven to one at the top firms to closer to parity. If associates aren’t worried about their jobs, he says, “they should be”.
That may not happen for a while, however. Moreover, AI could make legal services cheaper and thus more widely available, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses that currently often struggle to afford them. Ambitious law-school graduates may find that ai provides an easier path to starting a solo practice. If so, then AI could actually lead to an increase in the overall number of lawyers, as well as changing the sort of tasks they perform
Previous newsletters:
Essay: Green, On-Demand, Abundant Energy by 2050 is Definitely Possible: Here's the Plan
How a missing gene in our DNA affected the Battle of Trafalgar and gave birth to the Mafia
See what that AI did after reading fMRI scans; why humanoid robots are coming of age
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 launched 2 sister agencies:
OhMyBot.net, dedicated to designing and building chatbots (watch the video case study for a chatbot campaign we ideated and developed for Clean & Clear: The Teen Skin Expert)
The WeChat Agency for the Chinese market (the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation is a client)
I also write op-eds and do podcasts at times. Here are my latest articles and podcasts
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.
This newsletter has a French version with slightly different content: Parlons Futur
Have a great weekend :)
Thomas