🚀 This AI may find the next football star; first 3D-printed bio implant; human embryo created without egg of sperm; & 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:
What to think of Apple new mixed-reality headset? (The Economist)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman led people to think in April 2023 that "the age of giant AI Models is already over”, but not quite!
Synthetic human embryos created in groundbreaking advance
Access to OpenAI's models for third-party developers is getting cheaper and cheaper
AI helping spot the next football stars (Wired)
Highlights of the long interview Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, gave to Wire, about AI and other things.
Small Bites
SpaceX has now successfully flown the Falcon more than 9 200 times in a row. The company's last failure was in September 2016. The Falcon 9 now holds the record for consecutive successes by a factor of two,
SpaceX also now has more consecutive successful Falcon 9 first-stage landings than any other rocket has launches
Midjourney used to animate an antic statue, really cool video
Cool art project : a lensless "camera" that uses location data and various AI tools to generate imagery, instead of light (see the 27-sec demo)
Putin’s deepfake as seen on Russian television
Head of NASA on competition with China on the moon (source)
"I think the United States will get [to the Moon] first. What worries me more is that both they and we are going to land at the South Pole, where we think there is water."
"Water is important because it is composed of oxygen and hydrogen, and that's oxygen to breathe and hydrogen for rocket fuel," he added. "We want to preserve those potential reserves for the international community, and prevent China from coming in and saying that the water is theirs, as they have done with the Spratly Islands."
First 3D-printed ear implanted on a patient (source)
The ear was made using cartilage cells harvested from her left ear, which were then multiplied into billions of copies, and finally output by a bioprinter
Paul McCartney says 'final' Beatles song coming thanks to artificial intelligence (CNN)
Humbling: In 1934 Albert Einstein said, “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.”
Mercedes Becomes the First Automaker to Sell Level 3 Self-Driving Vehicles in California (available later this year) (source)
“Drive Pilot will allow Mercedes-Benz drivers to takes their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel, then do other non-driving activities like watching videos and texting. If the rules for use are followed, Mercedes (and not the driver) will be legally responsible for any accident that happens.”
A robot pizza delivery startup that raised almost half a billion dollars has shut down after a series of technological setbacks (Bloomberg)
According to Bloomberg, the company struggled to physically keep melting cheese from sliding off pies that were being baked in its moving trucks.
Finding this interesting? Share it on Whatsapp, just click here ❤️
If yes, feel free to take 3 seconds to forward that newsletter to one person, or share it on Whatsapp clicking here, 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!
What to think of Apple new mixed-reality headset? (The Economist)
The presentation was both jaw-droppingly impressive and oddly underwhelming. The Vision is stuffed with innovations that eclipse every other headset on the market. Clunky joysticks are out, hand gestures and eyeball tracking are in. Instead of legless avatars, users get photorealistic likenesses, whose eyes also appear on the outside of the glasses to make wearing them less antisocial. The product is dusted with Apple’s user-friendly design magic.
Yet the company had strangely uninspiring suggestions for what to do with its miraculous device. Look at your photos—but bigger! Use Microsoft Teams—but on a virtual screen! Make FaceTime video calls—but with your friend’s window in space, not the palm of your hand!
Apple’s vision mainly seemed to involve taking 2D apps and projecting them onto virtual screens (while charging $3,499 for the privilege). Is that it?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman led people to think in April 2023 that "the age of giant AI Models is already over”, but not quite!
When meeting entrepreneurs late in May, Sam Altman clarified:
OpenAI’s internal data suggests the scaling laws for model performance continue to hold and making models larger will continue to yield performance.
The rate of scaling can’t be maintained because OpenAI had made models millions of times bigger in just a few years and doing that going forward won’t be sustainable. That doesn’t mean that OpenAI won't continue to try to make the models bigger, it just means they will likely double or triple in size each year rather than increasing by many orders of magnitude.
About the roadmap: Longer context windows — Context windows as high as 1 million tokens are plausible in the near future.
today, openAI offers up to 32,000 tokens for the context window, while competitor Anthropic AI offers 100,000 (the length of a book)
a token is a unit of information for Large Language Models, can be a word, or the beginning or the ending of a word, or a punctuation mark.
the context window is the number of tokens in a prompt that a model can “keep in mind” to answer subsequent questions
Synthetic human embryos created in groundbreaking advance (source)
Scientists have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells, in a groundbreaking advance that sidesteps the need for eggs or sperm.
embryos were cultivated to a stage just beyond the equivalent of 14 days of development for a natural embryo
There is also a significant unanswered question on whether these structures, in theory, have the potential to grow into a living creature.
The synthetic embryos grown from mouse cells were reported to appear almost identical to natural embryos. But when they were implanted into the wombs of female mice, they did not develop into live animals.
In April, researchers in China created synthetic embryos from monkey cells and implanted them into the wombs of adult monkeys, a few of which showed the initial signs of pregnancy, but none of which continued to develop beyond a few days.
Scientists say it is not clear whether the barrier to more advanced development is merely technical, or has a more fundamental biological cause.
Access to OpenAI's models for third-party developers is getting cheaper and cheaper (source)
The new GPT-3.5-turbo offers four times the context window (16,000 tokens) of the vanilla GPT-3.5-turbo at twice the price
Their model for text search, text similarity, and code search sees a 75% reduction in cost from the previous price
OpenAI says the reduction was made possible by increased efficiency in its systems — a key area of focus for the startup, no doubt, as it spends hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D and infrastructure.
AI helping spot the next football stars (Wired)
Spotting a future Premier League superstar typically involves club scouts spending long hours on the road, traveling to half-empty community grounds and mud-caked Sunday League pitches.
Odeku hadn’t been spotted in the traditional way. Weeks before, in the mud of his local park in East London, he'd docked his phone, hit Record, and begun doing as many push-ups as he could in 30 seconds. As parents and dog walkers strolled by, he sprinted 10 meters, launched into standing jumps, and completed a chest-thumping set of explosive lateral rebound hops.
Watching it all was AiSCOUT, a platform that enables footballers to go through virtual trials. Players perform athletic and technical drills on the app, then are rated via an AI scoring system built by data specialists and leading scouts from the game. It’s these talent spotters who decide which few prodigies will fulfill their childhood dream of becoming a professional footballer and which won’t end up having a football career at all.
“While there is much data collection in the senior professional game, there isn’t the same infrastructure in youth football—even at the elite level.”
Following seven months of live testing, and the analysis of millions of data points, AiSCOUT machine learning is now able to measure players’ biomechanics, technique, and athletic prowess down to the minutiae; feedback is automated and delivered via the app within the hour. After players perform core athletic drills, the best are invited to show off their on-the-ball skills: Odeku’s virtual Burnley trial included an agility dribble and seven-cone weave in the park; his blistering speed and ball control earned the teenager an invite to the club’s training center.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, on AI (long interview with Wired)
Will we reach Artificial General Intelligence?
"I'm much more focused on the benefits to all of us. I am haunted by the fact that the industrial revolution didn't touch the parts of the world where I grew up until much later. So I am looking for the thing that may be even bigger than the industrial revolution, and really doing what the industrial revolution did for the West, for everyone in the world. So I'm not at all worried about AGI showing up, or showing up fast. Great, right? That means 8 billion people have abundance. That's a fantastic world to live in."
"As for getting AI to all 8 billion people, I was in India in January and saw an amazing demo. The government has a program called Digital Public Goods, and one is a text-to-speech system. In the demo, a rural farmer was using the system to ask about a subsidy program he saw on the news. It told him about the program and the forms he could fill out to apply.
"Normally, it would tell him where to get the forms. But one developer in India had trained GPT on all the Indian government documents, so the system filled it out for him automatically, in a different language."
"Something created a few months earlier on the West Coast, United States, had made its way to a developer in India, who then wrote a mod that allows a rural Indian farmer to get the benefits of that technology on a WhatsApp bot on a mobile phone. My dream is that every one of Earth's 8 billion people can have an AI tutor, an AI doctor, a programmer, maybe a consultant!"
"We did not launch Sydney (the code name of their chatbot) with GPT-4 the first day I saw it, because we had to do a lot of work to build a safety harness. But we also knew we couldn't do all the alignment in the lab. To align an AI model with the world, you have to align it in the world and not in some simulation."
What about the metaverse?
"I still am a believer in [virtual] presence. In 2016 I wrote about three things I was excited about: mixed reality, quantum, and AI. I remain excited about the same three things. Today we are talking about AI, but I think presence is the ultimate killer app. And then, of course, quantum accelerates everything."
Previous newsletters:
See what that AI did after reading fMRI scans; why humanoid robots are coming of age
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 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 weekend :)
Thomas