🚀Successful pig-to-human kidney transplant, best AI videos, best voice AIs, telepathy chess, the Tesla catastrophe
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 🔮.
First, you'll find small bites about many different news, and then further down these summaries:
How Surgeons Transplanted Pig Kidney Into a Patient, a Medical Milestone, Patient was just discharged (NYT, Nature)
How Xi Jinping plans to overtake America (The Economist)
Small Bites
Nvidia is now powering AI nurses that offer medical advice to patients over video calls in real-time (source, see the 1min demo)
Hippocratic claims its AI nurses outperform human nurses regarding bedside manner, education, and narrowly miss on satisfaction, according to a survey.
Elon Musk's Neuralink introduced the first human subject to receive the company’s brain implant, a 29-year-old man who has been paralyzed from the shoulders down for eight years after a diving accident. (Wired)
In a brief livestream, the man introduced himself as Noland Arbaugh, and said he’s able to play online chess and the video game Civilization using the Neuralink device. “If y'all can see the cursor moving around the screen, that's all me,” he said during the livestream as he moved a digital chess piece. “It's pretty cool, huh?”
Neuralink did not respond to a request for interview, but the company’s website says that the current generation of coin-sized implant called N1 records neural activity through 1024 electrodes distributed across 64 threads that extend into the user’s brain. These are so fine that they need to be installed by a surgical robot.
Sora: OpenAI asked 6 video artists to create short films using Sora, it's well worth a watch to see the state of the art
Et aussi, rattrapage : Les 10 vidéos les plus bluffantes générées par Sora, le modèle d'IA vidéo d'OpenAI (JDN)
Microsoft and OpenAI Reportedly Building $100 Billion Secret Supercomputer to Train Advanced AI (The Information)
to be called ‘Stargate’. For reference, $100bn is roughly the combined annual capex of Google, AWS and Azure last year.
OpenAI holds back wide release of voice-cloning tech due to misuse concerns (OpenAI Blog, with samples)
can clone voices based on a 15-second segment of recorded audio.
but like most of what’s happening in AI, lots of people are working on this and the ‘good enough’ versions will become generic commodities pretty quickly. Presume any voice you hear can be faked (tell your family, and tell your corporate treasury department, said tech analyst Ben Evans
Startup Hume AI shocked Twitter with EVI. Empathic Voice Interface (EVI) is a conversational AI with emotional intelligence. It understands your tone of voice and emotions to tune its own language and speech
First off, you have to try EVI to get a real sense of what capturing emotion from voice looks like.
Here’s how EVI makes interacting with AI using voice much better.
It responds with human-like tones of voice based on your expressions.
Reacts to your expressions with language that addresses your needs and maximizes satisfaction.
EVI knows when to speak because it uses your tone of voice for state-of-the-art end-of-turn detection.
It stops when interrupted, but can always pick up where it left off.
It can notice your reaction to its responses and self-improve over time.
Worrying? After Google’s recent struggles with its Gen AI, here is what Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind : "Hassabis tells me he’s still on the research side and not sitting in product meetings" "“I can do management,” he says, ”but it's not my passion. Put it that way. I always try to optimize for the research and the science.”" (source)
Databricks's new open source LLM, called DBRX, apparently does better than Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral’s Mixtral, and only cost $10 million to train! (Wired)
on several scores DBRX was also shockingly close to GPT-4
“Data quality, data cleaning, data filtering, data prep is all very important,” says Naveen Rao, a vice president at Databricks . “These models are really just a function of that. You can almost think of that as the most important thing for model quality.”
Llama 2 has 70 billion parameters, Mixtral has 45 billion, and Elon Musk's Grok has 314 billion. But DBRX only activates about 36 billion on average to process a typical query.
Two weird things that are going to happen in marketing because of AI (Professor Ethan Mollick):
1) Marketing to AIs, as people increasingly ask AIs for advice, the goal is "persuading" AIs, not people, to prefer a solution
2) Selling AIs on tools. LLM agents decide what tools to use, how do you get them to pick yours?
Paper planes made by a robot fly better than ones made by humans (see the demo, New Scientist)
Tesla:
422,875 cars delivered in Q1 2023
484,507 in Q4 2023
and 387,000 in Q1 2024 (CNN)
"While we were anticipating a bad first quarter, this was an unmitigated disaster that is hard to explain away,” said a previously bullish analyst
Tesla investor Ross Gerber went as far as to call on Musk and his board of directors to resign "Basically Tesla can’t sell its cars due to Elon’s behavior," he added in a follow-up. "Let’s stop blaming the Houthi rebels or German environmental terrorists. Or a recession that never came. Or interest rates." "Only one person responsible for this," he added. (source)
Aviation startup Boom announces successful flight of a demonstrator aircraft, precursor of its future supersonic airliner called Overture (see 1min demo, source)
the demonstrator, called XB-1, is the world’s first independently developed supersonic jet. It didn't pas yet the sound barrier tho
It has an order book including 130 orders and pre-orders from American Airlines, United Airlines, and Japan Airlines.
NASA Testing Snake Robot for Exploring Saturn's Moon
the over 10-meter robot is both autonomous and self-propelled, capable of tackling environments ranging from oceans, sands, rocks, and cliffs thanks to its flexible body made of articulated segments. (source)
There’s a hilarious anecdote in the story about politicians wondering whether/how to regulate AI - Tristan Harris, a lobbyist, tried to make a big thing of getting a generative AI to say things about bioweapons - SCARY! - and then Mark Zuckerberg pulled out his phone and found the same thing in a Google search. (Politico)
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More to chew!
Surgeons Transplanted Pig Kidney Into a Patient, a Medical Milestone, Patient was just discharged (NYT, Nature)
The operation to give Slayman a pig kidney took four hours, happened last month
The kidney came from a miniature pig engineered by the biotech company eGenesis: it had undergone CRISPR–Cas9 genome editing by eGenesis’s scientists to modify 69 of the animal’s genes. In particular they removed three genes involved in potential rejection of the organ. In addition, seven human genes were inserted to enhance human compatibility. Pigs carry retroviruses that may infect humans, and the company also inactivated the pathogens.
The unusual procedure appears to have been a resounding success, with the patient being discharged from the hospital on Wednesday, April 3rd.
The patient, Richard Slayman, had been struggling with kidney disease for over a decade. His previously transplanted human kidney had also shown signs of failure last year.
But Slayman isn't entirely out of the woods just yet. There's still a chance his body's immune system will come to reject the new kidney. We also still don't know if the same procedure will work for other patients.
On the eighth day following the procedure, Slayman's body did show signs of rejection, which were successfully reversed with steroids and other medications — the same treatment some patients receive after getting a donor organ from another human.
If kidneys from genetically modified animals can be transplanted on a large scale, dialysis “will become obsolete,” said a doctor
If the technique can be scaled up, it could allow us to reduce our reliance on extremely expensive kidney disease treatments and put a dent in the long waitlists for human donor kidneys. Currently, over 100,000 Americans are waiting to receive a human donor transplant and only 25,000 kidneys are translated each year. About 12 people die while waiting for a transplant each day in the US.
How Xi Jinping plans to overtake America (The Economist)
In e-commerce, fintech, high-speed trains and renewable energy, China is at or near the technological frontier. The same is strikingly apparent in electric vehicles, success with which helped China last year become the world’s biggest exporter of cars.
In a list of 64 “critical” technologies identified by the Australian Policy Research Institute, a think-tank, China leads the world in all but 11, based on its share of the most influential papers in the fields. The country is number one in 5G and 6Gcommunications, as well as biomanufacturing, nanomanufacturing and additive manufacturing. It is also out in front in drones, radar, robotics and sonar, as well as post-quantum cryptography.
The country’s innovation push now seems split into 3:
It is determined to replicate “chokehold” technologies that the rest of the world might seek to deny it.
A second goal is to invent technologies the rest of the world has yet to create. In January the ministry of science and technology, along with six other ministries, issued a list of “future industries”, many of which are even more pathbreaking than the strategic emerging industries of the past. They include photonic computing, brain-computer interfaces, nuclear fusion and digital twins—digital simulacra of patients that doctors can monitor for illnesses that might arise in their real-life counterparts.
A third objective is to upgrade existing industries. For instance in agriculture: automated planting or selective breeding using big data.
Previous newsletters:
Robots now fighting robots; What that AI experimenter did in 59 seconds; Crazy text-to-video AI
Impressive AI & robot demos; what's biocomputing?; Yann LeCun and Sam Altman on AGI
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