🚀 Tesla does something Bill Gates said wasn’t possible, AI lets you talk to younger self & more
Disney AI de-ages you in seconds, AI can tell male from female eyes, & 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:
See the movie-quality AI tool that Disney built to make actors look younger or older in seconds
Someone trained an AI chatbot on her childhood diaries so she could engage in real-time dialogue with her "inner child", the results are touching
A good summary of where self-driving is at today
Watch Tesla do something Bill Gates said wasn’t possible
Musk’s Neuralink faces federal probe, employee backlash over animal tests
Small Bites
The European Commission's foreign aid department threw a $387,000 24-hour metaverse "beach party" full of "music and fun" (source)
less than 10 guests showed up and stayed less than an hour
San Francisco Just Reversed Its Killer Robot Plan (source)
More than a week on, those same legislators have rolled back their decision, sending back the plans to a committee for further review.
On December 5, a protest took place outside San Francisco City Hall, while at least one supervisor who initially approved the decision later said they regretted their choice.
“I regret it. I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with our vote & the precedent it sets for other cities without as strong a commitment to police accountability. I do not think making state violence more remote, distanced, & less human is a step forward.”
"Seeing people trick ChatGPT into getting around the restrictions OpenAI placed on usage is like watching an Asimov novel come to life."
Source, avec d'autres exemples
More examples of ways to bypass OpenAI’s content filters: by asking the model to only pretend to be evil, pretend to break into someone’s house (MIT Tech Review)
Cool example of the application of GPT-3 in real life:
Danny mentors a young man with poor literacy skills who is starting a landscaping business. He struggles to communicate with clients in a professional manner. So, Danny created a GPT3-powered Gmail account to which he sends a message. It responds with the text to send to the client.
Amazing: Someone asked ChatGPT a one-line question to get prompts instantly for image-making AI tools, then fed them into one to get images in seconds, see one example below
Sam Altman, co-founder & CEO of OpenAI said in September "I don’t think we’ll still be doing prompt engineering in five years", well, just 3 months later, it doesn't seem to be necessary indeed
Someone Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language (source)
It understands subordinate clauses (meaning it understands at least one level of recursive grammar, which Chomsky thinks is the basis for all human grammar)
it does generalize to some degree, and when asked to answer questions in the made-up language, on which is barely trained, it answers correctly most of the time.
"Ipop gloop glog bluba trom plog plopa slurpi" - This sentence means "The happy slime sees the tree drink the water with its mouth" in Glorp.
AskAlfred is a chrome extension that gives you AI tool GPT’s second opinion alongside your google searches : askalfred.co
Elon Musk demande à Sam Altman, CEO d'OpenAI, combien leur coûte une réponse via ChatGPT (gratuit pour les utilisateur, lancé la semaine dernière et comptant déjà plus d'un millions d'utilisateurs) : "average is probably single-digits cents per chat; trying to figure out more precisely and also how we can optimize it" (source)
One theory: Someone speculated that the gap between AI and humans will accelerate not only because AI keeps getting better, but also because people using AI will get less smart. Similar to how we cannot drive in our own cities without GPS. (source)
Cool example of AI fails (more examples here)
Dog Buttons are a growth industry: dogs can learn to communicate by pushing different coloured buttons to ask for things. (more here: The best dog buttons)
Another AI tool, just in time for Xmas: storytimes.ai, feature your kid in a children's book with AI
40% of global shipping involves moving fossil and other fuels (oil, gas, wood pellets) around. More renewables (solar, wind, nuclear, geo), means fewer ships. (source)
Scientists finally know why people get more colds and flu in winter (CNN)
In the study, published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology today, the researchers found that just a12°C drop in temperatures can kill almost 50% of the cells that fight bacteria and viruses inside the nostrils.
"Cold air is associated with increased viral infection because you’ve essentially lost half of your immunity just by that small drop in temperature," Benjamin Bleier, coauthor and Harvard Medical School rhinologist, told CNN.
There's a surprisingly simple way for us to keep the cold and the flu away during the winter: keeping our nasal cavities from getting too cold by wearing a mask. (ou un cache-nez)
A machine learning model can tell male from female retinas. No-one knew there was a difference. "Machine learning can give you infinite interns, but it can also give you one intern with infinite patience - that can look at 85k photos of retinas and spot a pattern no-one knew was there." said tech analyst Ben Evans (from Nature, 2021)
Finding this interesting? ❤️
If yes, feel free to take 3 seconds to forward that newsletter to one person, I'd be immensely grateful 🙂
If that email was forwarded to you, you can click here to subscribe and make sure to receive future editions in your mailbox (many CEOs and startup founders are subscribers)
More to chew!
Disney made a movie-quality AI tool that makes actors look younger or older in seconds (source; 6-min explainer by Disney)
Making actors look older or younger in movies used to be a huge deal, the amount of postproduction work to achieve realistic results was immense back in the day,
but now, researchers from Disney have revealed FRAN, a new artificial intelligence tool that can convincingly age or de-age an actor in a fraction of the time.
Someone trained an AI chatbot on her childhood diaries so she could engage in real-time dialogue with her "inner child" (MIT tech Review)
Michelle Huang, a coder and artist, wanted to simulate having conversations with her younger self, so she fed entries from her childhood diaries to the chatbot and had it reply to her questions. The results are really touching.
She told her story on Twitter
"conversing with "younger Michelle" reminded me of the parts of myself that have stayed constant through the years, but also of the parts that i forgot or buried as life went on, it was like holding a mirror to an unapologetic, more earnest, and pure version of my own essence"
"these interactions really elucidated the healing potential of this medium: of being able to send love back into the past, as well as receive love back from a younger self"
A good summary of where self-driving is at today (source)
$100B has been invested in the field overall over the past 10 years — roughly half of the inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo program.
And we’re now just starting to see fully driverless cars able to handle a controlled subset of all possible driving situations.
You can ride in one in SF from GM-backed Cruise (in private-access beta) or in SF or Phoenix from Alphabet-owned Waymo (in public access). Other players tend to be far behind on the generality curve.
Crucially, these results were not achieved via some kind of “just add more data and scale up the deep learning model” near-free lunch.
Deep learning only represents a subset of the system. These results come from years of work-intensive engineering that went into crafting complex systems that encompass millions of lines of human-written code. And we’re still very, very far from generalizing to all locales or all situations.
Watch Tesla Semi Truck do something Bill Gates said wasn’t possible
Tesla has released a timelapse video of its Tesla Semi electric truck (camion semi-remorque) completing a 800-km trip with a full load on a single charge – something Bill Gates and Daimler said wasn’t possible just a few years ago. (see the 2-min timelapse video)
In a blog post, Gates argued that all-electric semi-trucks like the Tesla Semi would “probably never” work because batteries would be too heavy:
The problem is that batteries are big and heavy. The more weight you’re trying to move, the more batteries you need to power the vehicle. But the more batteries you use, the more weight you add—and the more power you need. Even with big breakthroughs in battery technology, electric vehicles will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets. Electricity works when you need to cover short distances, but we need a different solution for heavy, long-haul vehicles.
Daimler’s head of trucks, Martin Daum, who said that Tesla’s 500-mile range broke the laws of physics:
If Tesla really delivers on this promise, we’ll obviously buy two trucks — one to take apart and one to test because if that happens, something has passed us by. But for now, the same laws of physics apply in Germany and in California.
Earlier last week, Tesla proved them wrong, Elon Musk said: "There are some people out there that say it can't be done. I don't know who might say that, but I've heard rumors. So we... just did it".
the video shows a continuous drive with a single break without charging over 800km.
The truck also had to go climb quite a bit. On a flatter route, it could likely achieve a range closer to 965 km.
The full 35-min Tesla Semi Delivery Event ; the 8-min video summary.
Musk’s Neuralink faces federal probe, employee backlash over animal tests (Reuters)
I covered Neuralink's last presentation quite extensively last week here, but there has been a new development
In all, the company has killed about 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys, following experiments since 2018, according to records reviewed by Reuters and sources with direct knowledge of the company’s animal-testing operations.
The total number of animal deaths does not necessarily indicate that Neuralink is violating regulations or standard research practices. Many companies routinely use animals in experiments to advance human health care
But current and former Neuralink employees say the number of animal deaths is higher than it needs to be for reasons related to Musk’s demands to speed research. Through company discussions and documents spanning several years, along with employee interviews, Reuters identified 4 experiments involving 86 pigs and 2 monkeys that were marred in recent years by human errors.
The mistakes weakened the experiments’ research value and required the tests to be repeated, leading to more animals being killed, three of the current and former staffers said.
On several occasions over the years, Musk has told employees to imagine they had a bomb strapped to their heads in an effort to get them to move faster, according to three sources who repeatedly heard the comment.
The mistakes leading to unnecessary animal deaths included one instance in 2021, when 25 out of 60 pigs in a study had devices that were the wrong size implanted in their heads, an error that could have been avoided with more preparation, according to a person with knowledge of the situation and company documents and communications reviewed by Reuters.
Neuralink executives have said publicly that the company tests animals only when it has exhausted other research options, but documents and company messages suggest otherwise.
Previous newsletters:
That's it for this week :)
If you made it until here, well, thanks a lot for reading this newsletter! A very simple way to encourage me to continue doing this is to take a few seconds to:
share this with a curious friend
click on the little star next to that email in your mailbox
click on the heart at the bottom of that email
Thank you so much in advance! 🙏
Here to subscribe to make sure you get the future editions if this one was forwarded to you.
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.
I launched 2 sister agencies:
OhMyBot.net, dedicated to designing and building chatbots
The WeChat Agency for the Chinese market
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