🚀"The best computer interface I’ve ever used"; Musk Vs LeCun Twitter fight & more
Chinese gun-carrying robot dogs, Perfect product-market fit
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
In case you missed it, the craziest demos OpenAI shared about their new voicebot GPT-4o
o stands for omni, because it can deal with text, audio, and video in real time.
can perform real-time audio discussions. You can interrupt without lag, and the model can hear and respond to your emotions and breathing with its own emotion (1-min video, bluffant)
2 such AIs talking to one another, one of them commenting in real time what the phone camera is filming (5-min)
OpenAI GPT-4o for education, watch that "socratic" math lesson demo by the Khan Academy, mixing shared screens and audio (3-min video)
Dad jokes 44sec ; Leading a meeting with humans 2min ; real-time translation 1min ; asking AI to talk to customer service 2 min ; AI helping friends play rock paper scissors and acting as the referee using the camera 1min ;
The new voice (and video) mode is the best computer interface I’ve ever used. It feels like AI from the movies; and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real. Getting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change.
Talking to a computer has never felt really natural for me; now it does. As we add (optional) personalization, access to your information, the ability to take actions on your behalf, and more, I can really see an exciting future where we are able to use computers to do much more than ever before.
I don’t think anyone, including OpenAI, has a full sense of all of the implications of this shift, and what it will mean for all of us.
Best AI-experimenter and professor Ethan Mollick on the latest GPT-4 updates (source)
The Homework Apocalypse will reach its final stages. GPT-4 can do almost all the homework on Earth. And it writes much better than GPT-3.5, with a lot more style and a lot less noticeably “AI” tone. Cheating will become ubiquitous, as will universal high-end tutoring, creating an interesting time for education.
If an AI that seems to reason like a human being can see and interact and plan like a human being, then it can have influence in the human world.
New York Times' take on these updates (NYT)
the real killer feature was the way ChatGPT’s voice itself changed. One moment, it was a sing-songy soprano. The next, it shifted into a lilting contralto. It paused for effect, giggled at its own jokes and added filler phrases like “hmm” and “let’s see” for extra realism. It sounded more humanlike than some humans I know.
It also seemed to have a sense of humor. At one point during a demo, an OpenAI employee breathed in a heavy, exaggerated pant. ChatGPT heard him and responded, “Mark, you’re not a vacuum cleaner.”
a big problem with today’s A.I. voice models until now was speed. It’s hard to forget you’re talking to a robot when every answer has a three-second delay.
The most telling detail of Monday’s demo, in my view, was the way that OpenAI’s own employees have started talking to ChatGPT.
These are seasoned A.I. experts, who know full well that they are summoning statistical predictions from a neural network, not talking to a sentient being. And some of it may be showmanship. But if OpenAI’s own employees can’t resist treating ChatGPT as a human, is it any mystery whether the rest of us will?
Elon Musk will build a Gigafactory of Compute, creating a computing powerhouse four times larger than any existing AI cluster.
This AI Gigafactory will power Elon Musk's AI projects (Grok and xAI’s other projects.)
xAI, launched very recently, is now valued at almost 1/3rd of OpenAI, an 8-year-old AI company.
Yann LeCun and Elon Musk fought on Twitter (source)
Yann LeCun
Join xAI if you can stand a boss who:
- claims that what you are working on will be solved next year (no pressure).
- claims that what you are working on will kill everyone and must be stopped or paused (yay, vacation for 6 months!).
- claims to want a "maximally rigorous pursuit of the truth" but spews crazy-ass conspiracy theories on his own social platform.I like his cars, his rockets, his solar panels, and his satellite network.
I very much dislike his vengeful politics, his conspiracy theories, and his hype.
Someone: "why don’t you start your own AI company and try to do good? Staying at Meta and telling others they are wrong is a bit odd, no?"
Yann LeCun: "I'm a scientist, not a business or product person."
Elon Musk: "What “science” have you done in the past 5 years?"
Yann LeCun: "Over 80 technical papers published since January 2022. What about you?"
Elon Musk: "That’s nothing, you’re going soft. Try harder!"
Yann LeCun:
Now you're acting as if you were my boss 😂😂😂
To those who say 'these are *just* papers':
One of these papers introduced convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) in 1989.
Every single driving assistance system today uses ConvNets.
That includes MobilEye (since 2014), Nvidia, Tesla, and just about everyone else.Technological marvels don't just pop out of the vacuum.
They are built on years (sometimes decades) of scientific research that makes them possible.
Research ideas and results are shared through technical papers.
Without this sharing of scientific information, technological progress would slow to a crawl.
Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member, is speaking out. (itw in Spotify podcast, op-ed in The Economist)
She claims the board wasn't informed about ChatGPT by Sam Altman but instead found out through Twitter.
She even accuses Altman of "outright lying" at times, keeping the board in the dark about OpenAI's projects and safety efforts.
Godfather of AI Yann LeCun reiterates: "Large language models that power generative AI products such as ChatGPT will never achieve the ability to reason and plan like humans" (Financial Times)
He said LLMs had “very limited understanding of logic . . . do not understand the physical world, do not have persistent memory, cannot reason in any reasonable definition of the term and cannot plan . . . hierarchically”.
LeCun runs a team of about 500 staff at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (Fair) lab. They are working towards creating AI that can develop common sense and learn how the world works in similar ways to humans, in an approach known as “world modelling”.
One idea: LeCun’s team is feeding systems with hours of video and deliberately leaving out frames, then getting the AI to predict what will happen next. This is to mimic how children learn from passively observing the world around them.
Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton Says There's an Expert Consensus AI Will Soon Exceed Human Intelligence
"Very few of the experts are in doubt about that," Hinton told the BBC. "Almost everybody I know who is an expert on AI believes that they will exceed human intelligence — it's just a question of when."
"I think there's a chance they'll take control. And it's a significant chance — it's not like one percent, it's much more," he added. "Whether AI goes rogue and tries to take over, is something we may be able to control or we may not, we don't know."
"What I'm most concerned about is when these [AIs] can autonomously make the decision to kill people," he told the BBC, admonishing world governments for their lack of willingness to regulate this area.
Security researcher argues, unoriginally I find, that AI is not an existential threat, it's what we do with it that could be (source)
The historical reference is more interesting though:
"The thermonuclear bomb would never have been invented had it not been for an innovation in computing called the Von Neumann architecture whereby a computer could store data and run a program in memory. To successfully achieve that innovation, a single mathematical operation on a computer named MANIAC at Los Alamos National Laboratory ran non-stop for 60 days. "
"Which, then, was the weapon of mass destruction, or existential threat, the thermonuclear bomb, or the innovation in computing that brought it into existence?"
Waymo says its robotaxis are now making 50,000 paid trips every week (source)
Funny: AI bots getting stuck (The Economist)
AIs can also get tangled up. In a problem-solving experiment (...), two agents repeatedly bid each other a cheerful farewell. Even after one agent commented that “it seems like we are stuck in a loop”, they could not break free.
The list of hardware entrepreneurs who have ever built something comparable to even one of Elon’s business is very short indeed – Henry Kaiser sometimes comes to mind.
Henry John Kaiser (1882 – 1967), son of ethnic German immigrants, was an American industrialist who became known for his shipbuilding and construction projects, then later for his involvement in fostering modern American health care. Prior to World War II, Kaiser was involved in the construction industry; his company was one of those that built the Hoover Dam. He established the Kaiser Shipyards, which built Liberty ships during World War II (Wikipedia)
Agriculture and AI: A number of new pesticide-spraying methods employing AI are being commercialised, promising to cut the amount of pesticides a farmer needs to spray by a colossal 90%. (The Economist)
43 Bisons Can Help Capture CO2 From Over 40,000 Cars, Scientists Find (The Guardian)
"Bison influence grassland and forest ecosystems by grazing (paître) grasslands evenly, recycling nutrients to fertilize the soil and all of its life, dispersing seeds to enrich the ecosystem, and compacting the soil to prevent stored carbon from being released,"
China has released video footage of its gun-carrying robot dogs (see the 30-sec video)
Of course, the US military itself is experimenting with weaponized robodogs
Journalist Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Says "Western Automakers Are Cooked" (source)
Artificial intelligence is taking over drug development (The Economist)
The system’s predictions are tested at a large scale by means of experiments run with automated lab systems.
The results of those experiments are then used to retrain the AI and enhance its accuracy.
Recursion (...) says it can use automated laboratory robotics to conduct 2.2m experiments each week.
The US Is Cracking Down on Synthetic DNA (Wired)
The White House has issued new rules aimed at companies that manufacture synthetic DNA after years of warnings that a pathogen made with mail-order genetic material could accidentally or intentionally spark the next pandemic.
Synthesizing DNA has been possible for decades, but it’s become increasingly easier, cheaper, and faster to do so in recent years thanks to new technology that can “print” custom gene sequences.
It’s conceivable that a bad actor could make a dangerous virus from scratch by ordering its genetic building blocks and assembling them into a whole pathogen. In 2017, Canadian researchers revealed they had reconstructed the extinct horsepox virus for $100,000 using mail-order DNA, raising the possibility that the same could be done for smallpox, a deadly disease that was eradicated in 1980.
Medical AIs with human faces are on their way (The Economist)
A researcher found that people seem to find it easier to disclose their sexual history to a chatbot than to a nurse.
At least one study has found that ChatGPT’s responses to real-world health questions were preferred over those of licensed professionals both for their quality and empathy.
Perfect product-market fit: Dan Bricklin built VisiCalc in 1979, the first successful computer spreadsheet, and when he showed it to accountants it blew their minds: they could do a week’s work in an afternoon. An Apple II to run VisiCalc cost at least $12,000* adjusted for inflation, but even so, people reached for their cheque-books the moment they saw it: computer spreadsheets changed the world, for accountants. (Ben Evans)
In Portugal, a comet shot through the sky and illuminated the whole sky turquoise — and one lucky girl captured the entire extravaganza on camera.
Scientists Identify Seven Star Systems That May Be Hosting Alien Megastructures (probably not, but possible, we'll know soon) (source)
SpaceX is planning to make history this summer by enabling the first entirely commercial spacewalk.
One of the 3 Moon rover designs chosen by NASA : Flex, by company Astrolab (Ars Technica)
the most striking thing about FLEX is that astronauts are standing up rather than sitting down. This is for several reasons. Standing up provides a better view of the terrain, and it is much easier to get aboard the vehicle in a cumbersome spacesuit, Matthews said. Additionally, in the lower-gravity environment of the Moon, standing is as comfortable as sitting.
The two other teams had large traditional contractors on board Astrolab, by contrast, was small and new.
of Astrolab's 30 employees, more than 80 percent have SpaceX backgrounds
China Reaffirmed its 2030 Crewed Lunar Landing
China's crewed lunar mission involves two launches: one carrying the crewed module and the other carrying the lander. The two spacecraft will rendezvous in lunar orbit to transfer the taikonauts before the crew of two descends to the lunar surface for a short 6-hour mission.
Two Chinese astronauts set a new spacewalking record for the country, spent about 8.5 hours working outside the Tiangong space station on May 28 (Space.com)
New trend in China: deepfake videos of Russian women (The Economist)
The women—with names like Natasha and Sofia—speak fluent Mandarin. They complain that Russian men are drunk and lazy, while praising Chinese society and technology. For a Chinese husband, the (mostly blonde) beauties say they would be delighted to cook, wash clothes and bear children.
Used to hawk products or simply to glorify China.
There are 300,000 Chinese students in the US and 800 American students in China today (The Economist)
At biotech firm Moderna, OpenAI’s GPTs Are Changing Almost Everything (WSJ)
The CEO said he’s been obsessed with ChatGPT since Christmas of 2022, and it’s one of four apps at the bottom of his iPhone, along with the apps for phone, text and internet. His goal is for employees to use it no fewer than 20 times a day, and so far, they’re keen, he said.
Of the 750 dedicated models built using ChatGPT until now, one uses years of previous research and medical knowledge to predict the optimal dose of a drug for clinical trials. Dose optimization is a huge challenge, and choosing the wrong dose can result in products being killed in the clinical-trial stage.
Another GPT combs through swaths of research to draft answers to questions from regulators—turning what used to be a weeks-long process into something that can happen in minutes, Bancel said.
Another one, on the drug manufacturing side, is helping predict the structure of new enzymes that will enable manufacturing processes with better yield and reduced waste.
Sam Altman says helpful agents are poised to become AI’s killer function (MIT Tech Review)
Altman, who was visiting Cambridge for a series of events hosted by Harvard and the venture capital firm Xfund, described the killer app for AI as a “super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had, but doesn’t feel like an extension.” It could tackle some tasks instantly, he said, and for more complex ones it could go off and make an attempt, but come back with questions for you if it needs to.
Immigration is surging (The Economist)
The rich world is in the midst of an unprecedented migration boom. Last year 3.3m more people moved to America than left, almost four times typical levels in the 2010s. Canada took in 1.9m immigrants. Britain welcomed 1.2m people and Australia 740,000. In each country the number was greater than ever before. For Australia and Canada net migration is more than double pre-covid levels. In Britain the intake is 3.5 times that of 2019.
Retired United States Navy admiral James Stavridis on impact of AI on warfare (CNN):
Logistics and maintenance: AI will help predict when and where to do maintenance, helping ensure spare parts are available at the right place at the right time
Real time advice: Whisper to commander best actions to take based on all previous battles
Swarm of AI drones: By mid century, it will be the most important aspect of warfare. Current battleships are ok for anothezer 10-15 years, vutvery vulnerable beyond that horizon
China's share of world GDP actually went down between 2021 and 2023, from 18.4% to 17%
Total workforce is actually decreasing of 7 million people per year
101 real-world gen AI use cases from the world's leading organizations (3 lines/use case, collated by Google Cloud)
Funny quote: “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.” — Jim Barksdale
More to chew!
China: high-profile crackdowns mask the symbiotic relationship between tech companies and the government. (MIT Tech Review)
Previous newsletters:
Latest cool robot videos, Zuck's & Musk's last thoughts on AI
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
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:
transfer this to one curious friend, or share it on Whatsapp clicking here
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.
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