🚀 See what an AI just beat human at for the 1st time; See that weird remote kissing device; Crazy examples of what Bing AI can do & more
Women's fashion since 1910 in 30 sec using AI
Hi,
This is Thomas, Cofounder and CEO of digital agency KRDS (more about me at the end, see our latest game showreel here).
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:
Check in which key emerging technologies China leads US
Tesla robot update from last Friday
Tesla's "Master Plan 3" to move to a fully sustainable energy world
AI beats human in a landmark combat, check what happened
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick's new nice experiments with Bing AI (he’s been called “currently the top explorer of chatbots" by Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on why they’re planning for when AI is smarter than us
Journalist: "How I Made an AI Clone of Myself"
Small Bites
Women's fashion 1910’s-2010’s in 30 seconds using AI: see the video
LLaMA, the newly released Large Language Model by Meta
in many cases, it performed as well, or better, than DeepMind’s and OpenAI’s best models on some benchmarks.
Meta achieved this with an optimised model with 10% of the parameters of GPT-3.
Further optimisations could see Large Language Models with this kind of performance running on desktop computers. And then the technology will proliferate even faster. (source)
Smart question: when technology is improving very fast: should you start a task now, or do you save time by waiting for better tech? (source)
For interstellar travel & some complex computing, lazy wins.
So, if you are planning a book or a movie, should you wait for AI to improve & help?
Remote kissing device for long-distance lovers
The mouth-shaped module, served as an inducing area for lovers to make the kiss and then it can transfer kiss gesture to the "mouth" on the other side.
Interesting thoughts and predictions on AI from Marc Andreessen, General Partner of VC fund Andreessen Horowitz (from this 1-hour podcast)
"Soon enough books will write themselves as you read them."
"The first breakout success video game all done by AI is 2 years from now."
"We have a machine that can write a poem about your company in old English, but we don't have a machine that can unclog your toilets."
"We long thought that first blue-collar jobs (ouvriers) would be threatened by AI/robots, then white-collar jobs (emplois de bureau), and last creative jobs, but the reverse seem to be happening."
Reminds me of an article I wrote in 2017: Before 20 years, AI will be able to generate an episode of Game of Thrones instantly
Cool: Famous paintings visualized with AI, for instance "American Gothic":
About the past: Nearly 700 galleys took part in the Battle of Ecnomus between Rome and Carthage in 256 B.C.
But only total of around 70 vessels took part in the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805 opposing the British Royal Navy led by Vice Admiral Nelson (who died in the battle) to Napoleon’s Navy.
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More to chew!
China leads US in global competition for key emerging technology, study says (Reuters)
The Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government research body, ranked first or second in most of the 44 technologies tracked, which spanned defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and quantum technology.
"Over the past five years, China generated almost 50% of the world's high-impact research papers into advanced aircraft engines, including hypersonics, and it hosts seven of the world's top 10 research institutions," it said.
In the fields of photonic sensors and quantum communication, China's research strength could result in it "going dark" to the surveillance of western intelligence
China was likely to emerge with a monopoly in 10 fields including synthetic biology, where it produces one-third of all research, as well as electric batteries, 5G, and nano manufacturing.
Tesla robot update from last Friday:
See the video showing 2 robots slowly building another bot — a big step up from the prototype Tesla showed last October at AI Day: watch the first 60 sec from here
Optimus, the robot, is trained using the same AI that trains Tesla’s Autopilot and self-driving tech, and Musk detailed how even much of the hardware for Optimus is taken from Tesla’s cars.
What this means, said Musk, is that Tesla has the tools to bring an actual humanoid robot product to market at scale.
Musk reckons that the ratio of humans to humanoid robots will be greater than one-to-one because the robots can be used at homes, in industrial use cases and more.
Tesla's "Master Plan 3" to move to a fully sustainable energy (Youtube video)
Because burning fossil fuel is highly inefficient (a lot of energy is dissipated as unused heat), we can get as much done in a fully electric economy with half as much primary energy as we use today.
Tesla estimates that moving to a fully sustainable energy economy would cost 10,000 billion USD in total, or 0.5% of world GDP over 20 years.
Need to invest massively in manufacturing and deploying renewable power (solar panels, wind turbines), batteries, electric vehicles, new electric lines, heat pumps, among other things.
Surface area required for a fully sustainable energy world is less than 0.2% of total Earth land area.
Zero insurmountable Resource Challenges ("electrified economy will require less mining than our combustion economy": for getting as much primary energy as today, we would mine 14 billion tons less mineral per year, that's roughly a saving of 20% on total today's overall mining)
Tesla calculates that "building a sustainable energy economy costs less than extending the fossil fuel economy from a year over year investment basis"
AI pilot beats human-piloted plane in landmark real-life close air combat, Chinese military researchers report (source)
"The era of air combat in which artificial intelligence will be the king," they add, "is already on the horizon."
Chinese military researchers have claimed that, for the first time, an AI-powered fighter pilot has bested humans in a real-life, close-range dogfight, winning the contest in an astonishingly short 90 seconds.
According to the report, the dogfight involved 2 small, unmanned, fix-wing aircraft, with the only difference being that one was operated by an onboard AI pilot, while the other was remote-controlled by a human from the ground.
When the fight started, the human made the first move to gain the upper hand. The AI, apparently predicting his intention, outmaneuvered the opponent, made a counter move and stuck close behind its opponent.
When making sharp turns, the machine also did not have to consider human worries, such as blood being drained from the brain by excessive gravitational pull or concerns about being harmed.
Of course, China isn't the only country working on getting functional AI fighter pilots into military hands. The US has been working on its own version of the tech for some time now, with one AI making headlines back in 2020 for defeating a US Air Force pilot five to zero in a ground simulation.
The US military also said last month it had put an AI pilot on a real F-16 fighter jet and conducted numerous test missions, including close-range combat, in December. A human pilot on the modified F-16 oversaw the AI operation, and the “enemies” in these tests were phantom targets created by computers.
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick's new nice experiments with Bing AI (source)
Ethan Mollick has been called "currently the top explorer of chatbots" by Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly
Ethan Mollick:
"I know that Large Language Models like Bing and ChatGPT are basically word prediction engines, but they are capable of startling results that go beyond what I might have expected from that knowledge. Indeed, the most astonishing feats of AI seem to rely on their ability to be creative through “hallucination.”
This tendency of AI to make up facts is troubling in some cases, but it also allows them to provide unique and original replies by connecting unlikely sources of inspiration and finding surprising linkages."
"I was rather blown away at the level of analysis required for Bing to answer the questions below. It had to learn about causes of Rome’s collapse, propose technologies that could help, figure out how a Roman might understand them, and then summarize the results meaningfully. I am sure there are mistakes, but this is pretty impressive."
What four sentences, sent back in time, could save the Roman Empire? Answer
What four hints about science & engineering could we give the Roman Empire, in terms people of the day would understand, that would have helped them survive? Answer
What four objects should I take back in time to Ancient Rome to give the best chance of becoming Emperor? Answer
Other cool and sensical answers made up by Bing AI:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman just published a post on the company website entitled "Planning for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and beyond"
“We seem to have been given lots of gifts relative to what we expected earlier: for example":
"it seems like creating AGI will require huge amounts of compute and thus the world will know who is working on it"
"it seems like the original conception of hyper-evolved Reinforcement Learning agents competing with each other and evolving intelligence in a way we can’t really observe is less likely than it originally seemed"
Reinforcement learning is a machine learning training method based on rewarding desired behaviors and/or punishing undesired ones. In general, a reinforcement learning agent is able to perceive and interpret its environment, take actions and learn through trial and error.
"AGI could happen soon or far in the future; the takeoff speed from the initial AGI to more powerful successor systems could be slow or fast.
"Many of us think the safest is short timelines and slow takeoff speeds
shorter timelines seem more amenable to coordination and more likely to lead to a slower takeoff due to less computing power available worldwide than later in the future
and a slower takeoff gives us more time to figure out empirically how to solve the safety problem and how to adapt."
"Some people in the AI field think the risks of AGI (and successor systems) are fictitious; we would be delighted if they turn out to be right, but we are going to operate as if these risks are existential."
Here Sam Altman is linking to that article AI Could Defeat All Of Us Combined where it is argued that:
"merely human-level" AI could still defeat us all - by quickly coming to rival human civilization in terms of total population and resources (being at least as smart as the smartest humans but way cheaper to sustain)
AIs can be dangerous even without bodies
Even if lots of different companies and governments have access to AI, this won't necessarily create a "balance of power" so that no one actor is able to bring down civilization
We won't necessarily see warning signs of AI takeover and be able to nip it in the bud
"Importantly, we think we often have to make progress on AI safety and capabilities together. It’s a false dichotomy to talk about them separately; they are correlated in many ways. Our best safety work has come from working with our most capable models. That said, it’s important that the ratio of safety progress to capability progress increases."
"We have a clause in our Charter about assisting other organizations to advance safety instead of racing with them in late-stage AGI development."
"We have a cap on the returns our shareholders can earn so that we aren’t incentivized to attempt to capture value without bound and risk deploying something potentially catastrophically dangerous (and of course as a way to share the benefits with society)".
"We have a nonprofit that governs us and lets us operate for the good of humanity (and can override any for-profit interests), including letting us do things like cancel our equity obligations to shareholders if needed for safety and sponsor the world’s most comprehensive Universal Basic Income experiment."
"We think it’s important that efforts like ours submit to independent audits before releasing new systems; we will talk about this in more detail later this year."
"Finally, we think it’s important that major world governments have insight about training runs above a certain scale."
"The first AGI will be just a point along the continuum of intelligence. We think it’s likely that progress will continue from there, possibly sustaining the rate of progress we’ve seen over the past decade for a long period of time. If this is true, the world could become extremely different from how it is today, and the risks could be extraordinary."
"A misaligned superintelligent AGI could cause grievous harm to the world; an autocratic regime with a decisive superintelligence lead could do that too."
"AI that can accelerate science is a special case worth thinking about, and perhaps more impactful than everything else. It’s possible that AGI capable enough to accelerate its own progress could cause major changes to happen surprisingly quick"
"coordination among AGI efforts to slow down at critical junctures will likely be important (even in a world where we don’t need to do this to solve technical alignment problems, slowing down may be important to give society enough time to adapt).
"Successfully transitioning to a world with superintelligence is perhaps the most important—and hopeful, and scary—project in human history. Success is far from guaranteed, and the stakes (boundless downside and boundless upside) will hopefully unite all of us."
Journalist: "How I Made an AI Clone of Myself" (Vice.com)
Synthesia’s online studio offers more than 85 avatars who can speak more than 120 languages. These avatars can be made to say almost anything a user wants them to. And I was going to become one of them.
The Synthesia team first took me to a recording studio, where I was handed a script: 8 pages of lengthy paragraphs that were sorted by tone, such as professional, marketing, instructional, casual, and cheerful. Perhaps appropriately, the scripts were written by ChatGPT, they told me.
Then, the director had me first nod my head in every direction of the clock. I looked directly up at 12 o’clock, then looked slightly to the left at 11 o’clock, and so on. Then, I had to move my eyes in all directions without moving my head. Between takes, the wardrobe stylist would come and smooth out my shirt, remove lint, and tell me to not move my arms too much. It seemed like the team was pretty experienced in directing AI-cloning shoots, even though they were freelancers hired for the project.
Finally, I had to read a script from a teleprompter, where the camera could pick up what I looked like when I talked. The director really emphasized positivity, telling me to smile with teeth before and after I spoke each line. He also told me to move my hands slightly in front of me when I talked, to accentuate my speech in a more animated fashion
After several weeks, I got an email that my clone was ready—but not my voice. I logged into the Synthesia platform and saw a super brightly lit-up profile image of myself as the Avatar. I immediately began testing her out, asking her to say everything from a short intro to rapping some lyrics. I wanted to test the limits of what she was capable of saying and doing and realized that she could do an impressive number of things, including talking in a British accent and speaking in Chinese.
If I wasn’t familiar with my own voice, the AI clone would probably be super convincing, because her mouth moves in a deceivingly natural way. Some coworkers who haven't met me but have seen videos of me before asked if the videos they were shown were actually of me.
I can type a script that I want the AI to say or upload an audio file that the AI will match its lips to say. When I type a script, I can preview the audio for the video and override pronunciations by typing in the correct pronunciation as well as add longer silences between words.
A few weeks later, they synced my voice and my clone was fully ready.
Looking at my AI twin, I find her, as a whole, to be pretty accurate, especially if you don’t know what my real voice sounds like. And she's definitely creepy. I showed my friends videos of her and they immediately knew that it was my AI and not me. Maybe it’s because I wouldn’t bob my head ever so slightly or talk like Siri. I can talk in over 120 languages, so this could be a good way to communicate to people around the world without a translator, and to impress them with my fluent language skills.
Watch a few seconds of the result here
Synthesia told me that some of what its primary clients use the platform for include creating real estate tours and HR training videos for corporations. Companies that have used the platform include Accenture, Reuters, and BBC. Recently, Synthesia has made a number of headlines for people using its platform to create propaganda videos. For example, in January, someone used Synthesia to generate deepfake videos of supposed American "Pan-Africanists" expressing support for the junta in Burkina Faso (see a 33-sec example). The user was shortly banned after. A few weeks ago, a research firm, Graphika, discovered that pro-China campaign videos were generated using Synthesia. This week, Synthesia videos with fabricated content about Venezuela’s economic improvement began trending on YouTube and TikTok.
Using the same tool: see that video from 2021 already of Two Digital Clones Talking About What It's Like to Be an AI (GPT-3)
On that topic as well: Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft, which has a large stake in OpenAI, worried in a paper last year about automated interactive deepfakes capable of carrying out real-time conversation. Whether we’ll know we’re talking to a fake or not, he warned, this capability could power persuasive, persistent influence campaigns: “It is not hard to imagine how the explanatory power of custom-tailored synthetic histories could out-compete the explanatory power of the truthful narratives.” (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 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 week ahead :)
Thomas
Thanks. Loved the small bites.