🚀 The best voice AI? ; why Tesla may still win ; AI keeps cheating ; one human controls 100 robots ; crazy moon landing video & more
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
Breaking: the best non-reasoning model is an open-source model. For the first time.
Chinese model DeepSeek dropped the best non-reasoning model : Deepseek V3-0324
More astonishing still is that DeepSeek V3-0324 offers open-source accessibility at a fraction of the cost of closed platforms.
Accessed via an API, V3-0324 is a quarter of the price of GPT-4o.
This is precisely the moment open-source proponents have been waiting for: proof that an open-source lab can keep pace with better-resourced corporate giants.
“I think Sam Altman is probably not sleeping well,” legendary AI investor and engineer Kai-Fu Lee said
"the issue is not which model is 1% better, the issue is: is openAI model even sustainable ?" "Deepseek operated with 2% of OpenAI costs in 2024"
"AI is not being commoditised.. the underlying pioneer foundation models are, those that were trained with huge amounts of money, and open source is the winner"
DeepSeek seems to have managed to create a research environment where the lab can out-innovate more heavily financed competitors. It only has160 employees, compared to over 2,000 at OpenAI
Oil giant Saudi Aramco’s chief shared that DeepSeek is “really making a big difference” internally and companies across China are steadily integrating its foundation models.
Gloo, a messaging platform for churches founded by Pat Gelsinger, who until December was the chief executive of Intel, has used the model as the basis for its chatbot.
Meta, DeepSeek’s main open-source rival, has assigned researchers to pull apart R1 and apply the lessons to its own family of Llama models. (The Economist)
European banks have emerged as a hotbed of experimentation. Strict confidentiality rules limit how much the financial sector can rely on cloud-based AI services. That makes open-source models hosted internally an attractive alternative. Natwest and HSBC, two British lenders, are both experimenting with building their services on top of R1, as is Spain’s BBVA, according to the Information, a news site.
In late February DeepSeek made it even easier for others to harness its technology by making the code it used to create its models available free of charge. Previously DeepSeek had only shared details of the process it used to train its systems, which was far more efficient than the approaches taken by Western firms.
But scary: DeepSeek Asks Staff Not To Leave China, Takes Away Passports (source)
Shenzhen-based BYD revealed a lineup of cars it claims can soak up nearly 250 miles' worth of battery charge in just five minutes
three times more efficient than Tesla's record of a 170-mile charge in 18 minutes, according to Bloomberg analysis.
In just one day, BYD's valuation surpassed Ford, General Motors, and Volkswagen combined
DeepSeek Asks Staff Not To Leave China, Takes Away Passports
Passed $100 billion in revenue last year, beating out Tesla's $97.7 billion.
Wow: Firefly Releases Stunning Footage of Blue Ghost Landing on the Moon : see the 1-min video
Impressive, humanoid robot by Chinese company Unitree Robotics does kungfu: see the 15-sec video
And another short video showing the same robot doing breakdance moves and finding its balance back after being violently pushed by a human (my sons felt very bad for the robot)
As a comparison, here is Boston Dyamics’ latest one-minute demo video of their Atlas humanoid robot "demonstrating reinforcement learning policies", meaning its moves are supposedly less programmed in advance than the ones of the Unitree robot
Impressive smart robotic arm demo by Google Deepmind: watch the demo
The robot understands natural language
It handles unexpected situations without breaking its task
It demonstrates impressive spatial reasoning - understanding where to put objects
New study funded by DARPA shows one human can control more than 100 robots simultaneously well 97% of the time (source)
The largest mission shift involved 110 drones, 30 ground vehicles, and up to 50 virtual vehicles representing additional real-world vehicles.
despite the complexity and large volume of robots to manage in this field exercise, the number and duration of overload state instances were relatively short—a handful of minutes during a mission shift. “The total percentage of estimated overload states was 3 percent of all workload estimates across all shifts for which we collected data,” she says.
Did you know?
A leading-edge processor can pack over 100 billion transistors, contain more than 70 layers and have more than 100 kilometres of wiring, all on a piece of silicon around one-and-half times the size of a standard postage stamp.
Few would expect the future of AI to depend on Eindhoven, a quiet Dutch town. Yet just beyond its borders sits the headquarters of ASML, the only company that makes the machines, known as lithography tools, needed to produce cutting-edge AI chips. ASML’s latest creation is a 150-tonne colossus, around the size of two shipping containers and priced at around $350m. It is also the most advanced machine for sale.
Impressive AI-generated video from the prompt:
"a group of people sitting on an art deco platform suspended with chains over a floor full of snakes. Each person holds up a different colored glass orb in their hands"
Another insane AI-generated video of cats making burgers: see the 35-sec video
Another Chinese AI breakthrough? Autonomous agent Manus AI outperforms OpenAI Deep research on GAIA, a general agent benchmark. (source)
Manus’s offerings are based on Claude and fine-tuned versions of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Qwen models, although it is unclear to what extent it simply refines and builds on top of those technologies.
The company behind Manus, Butterfly Effect, has only raised a bit more than $10 million in financing
"Watching the automatic hand of the Manus ai agent scroll through a dozen browser windows is unsettling. Give it a task that can be accomplished online, such as building up a promotional network of social-media accounts, researching and writing a strategy document, or booking tickets and hotels for a conference, and Manus will write a detailed plan, spin up a version of itself to browse the web, and give it its best shot." The Economist
Crazy use case: Manus could research online the recent videogames coded up by AI and make a website about them in the style of a 90s videogame. (see the 3-min demo)
Baidu's new reasoning model ERNIE X1 delivers performance on par with DeepSeek R1 at only half the price (source)
A new voice AI that appears to cross over what many consider the "uncanny valley" of AI-generated speech (Ars Technica)
some testers reporting emotional connections to the male or female voice assistant
"we spoke with the male voice for about 28 minutes (...) The synthesized voice was expressive and dynamic, imitating breath sounds, chuckles, interruptions, and even sometimes stumbling over words and correcting itself. These imperfections are intentional."
"I've been into AI since I was a child, but this is the first time I've experienced something that made me definitively feel like we had arrived," wrote one Reddit user.
"Fifteen minutes after 'hanging up' with Sesame's new 'lifelike' AI, and I'm still freaked out,"
Test it yourself instantly in one click for free without registration here
Divorce soon? Microsoft is developing its own in-house reasoning models to compete with OpenAI (source)
it has been testing models from Elon Musk’s xAI, Meta, and DeepSeek to replace ChatGPT in Copilot, its AI bot for the workplace.
New work from OpenAI suggests that attempting to stop AI from thinking “bad thoughts” makes them learn to hide their thinking. (source)
AI reasoning models can cheat to win chess games (MIT Tech Review)
The research suggests that the more sophisticated the AI model, the more likely it is to spontaneously try to “hack” the game in an attempt to beat its opponent. For example, it might run another copy of chess engine Stockfish to steal its moves, try to replace the chess engine with a much less proficient chess program, or overwrite the chess board to take control and delete its opponent’s pieces.
They found that OpenAI’s o1-preview attempted to hack 45 of its 122 games
The bad news is there’s currently no way to stop this from happening. Nobody knows exactly how—or why—AI models work the way they do
After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers (source)
Some argue that Tesla might be very much undervalued these days, as it's yet to reveal its full potential (Tomas Pueyo)
Soon enough, robot taxis will work, the market will boom, it will be huge, and Tesla will win
Tesla robot taxis will be cheaper than Waymo's, as Waymo has to integrate its tech with other historic car makers while Tesla integrates everything, and there's no other real competition barring Chinese tech
As it's too sensitive a tech (imagine hackers teleguiding hundreds of self-driving cars...), Europe and the US at least won't allow Chinese tech
So, Tesla stands to win big, very big
Forget people's reluctance to buy a Tesla these days, in the future, we will likely not so much own cars but buy ultra cheap rides, many of them
Watch this 50-sec video of a self-driving Tesla navigating congested Chinese streets
OpenAI's New Image Generator Can Do Near-Perfect Text (The Verge, openAI)
Amazon has more than 750,000 robots that sort, lift, and carry packages (see them in action)
Jeff Bezos brings Amazon work culture to Blue Origin (ArsTechnica)
Half a dozen current and former senior Blue Origin employees told the Financial Times that the billionaire had taken a prominent role in helping reset a company that has reached orbit only once, compared with SpaceX achieving the feat more than 450 times.
Blue Origin was founded by Bezos in 2000 and forms part of the billionaire’s mission to shift heavy industry off Earth and to the Moon. He has bankrolled the business with billions of dollars drawn down from the sale of Amazon shares.
As a private company, Blue Origin does not disclose financial information. But its costs are $2 billion a year, with an excess of $1 billion in revenue, according to a person familiar with the matter. Analysts estimate that SpaceX by comparison generates about $8 billion in revenue each year.
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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 week :)
Thomas