🚀 Tongue-controlled computer; Parrot makes video call, crazy AI-made video ad; Liquid tree; Cleopatra's selfie
Fully AI-Generated Movies in 2 years?
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 what this machine did for the first time without needing implant
Incredible! See how Parrots learnt to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then choose which friend to call
Small Bites
Cleopatra’s selfie, by MidJourney (source)
See also "Neanderthals during Stone Age"
Study Finds ChatGPT Outperforms Physicians in High-Quality, Empathetic Answers to Patient Questions (source)
Control your computer using your tongue (source)
the MouthPad: "Virtually invisible to the world, but always available to you, it is positioned across the roof of your mouth to put all of the power of a conventional touchpad in the tip of your tongue,"
The trackpad is tongue-sensitive, with right-clicks and left-clicks performed by a suck-in gesture and a tongue press, respectively.
specifically designed to have a minimal impact on a user's speech, an important feature for anyone needing to speak to those around them
Impressive 1-min video of a character completely created with 4 AI services
Character Design: MidJourney ; Message: OpenAI ; Voice: ElevenLabs ; Video: @D-ID
NASA managed for the first time to extract oxygen from simulated moon soil (NASA)
Apple's cofounder Steve Wozniak: If You Want to Learn About AI Killing People, "Get a Tesla" (source)
Demis Hassabis, previously CEO of Deepmind, is now CEO of Google Deepmind, the combination of Alphabet's 2 AI labs Deepmind and Google Brain
this means that the heart of Google’s AI operation shifts to London
London-based DeepMind was considered the company’s crown jewel, largely closed off from the rest of the group.
Its mission to “solve” intelligence was sacred. Success for its employees was measured through publishing work in top-tier scientific journals like Nature. Three people close to DeepMind said its leaders are focused on “Nobel-level problems” or problems that, if solved, would be worthy of a Nobel Prize.
But now, “Demis is very pragmatic, and highly, highly competitive,” one former DeepMind employee said. “He is ideological in terms of the vision, but he wants to be on the frontier of this. He’s not anti-commercial. This is the best way for him to do the job, or he wouldn’t have agreed to it.”
An AI learnt how to play virtual tennis...after watching enough tennis videos (video, source)
And, really cool, robots learnt how to play football in the real world (using AI the virtual world first of course): make sure to watch the first seconds of that video (more videos here)
We generally think of autonomous driving as deep into a new winter, but Cruise (acquired in 2022 by General Motors) just extended its robot taxi service to run across all of San Francisco. (source)
GPT-4 can do more causal reasoning than you think : it achieved new state of the art on a wide range of causal tasks (source)
“LLMs bring capabilities so far understood to be restricted to humans, such as using collected knowledge to generate causal graphs or identifying background causal context from natural language.”
Top 100 of AI-generated music
See also Apollo - a streaming platform just for generative music.
Really cool 50-sec video: Artist paints in virtual reality, adopting the term ‘Volumism’ to describe her 3D immersive creations of sculptured paint
This AI-generated beer commercial looks exactly like how an alien intelligence would understand our beer commercials (watch the weird 30-sec video)
watch also this crazy 30-sec AI Generated Pizza Commercial
Japanese city asked its staff to experiment with ChatGPT for administrative tasks (source)
Marvel Director Expects Fully AI-Generated Movies Within Two Years
"You could walk into your house and tell your AI: Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe's photoreal avatar," Russo explained. "I want it to be a rom-com because I've had a rough day, and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice." (source)
In line with the op-ed I wrote in 2017 Before 20 years, AI will be able to generate an episode of Game of Thrones instantly
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta wants to ‘introduce AI agents to billions of people’ (source)
“We’re exploring chat experiences in WhatsApp and Messenger, visual creation tools for posts in Facebook and Instagram and ads, and over time video and multi-modal experiences as well,” Zuckerberg said
While Meta released an AI language model called LLaMA to researchers earlier this year, it has yet to debut anything resembling ChatGPT in a way that is widely accessible.
IBM to Pause Hiring for Jobs That AI Could Do (Bloomberg)
"I could easily see 30% of these jobs getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period," said its CEO, which means that in total, AI could replace up to 7,800 jobs.
Scientists noticed a surge in activity in an area of the brain associated with consciousness in dying patients even after their hearts stopped beating (source)
findings that could help explain why many report vivid visions during near-death experiences.
Example of technological abandonment: the decline of mechanical car washes in the UK.
From 2000 to 2015, the number of them installed in roadside garages fell by more than half (from 9,000 to 4,200). By 2015, the vast majority of car washes in the country are done by hand.
Why did automation in the car-washing world go into reverse gear? The Car Wash Association blames immigration, among other factors. In 2004, ten Eastern European countries joined the European Union, and migrants from these countries who arrived in the UK worked for such low wages that they were able to undercut the price of more productive—but also more expensive—mechanical car washes. In this case, cheaper human beings actually managed to displace the machines. (from the book A World Without Work)
Scientists questioned whether the space tourism industry has even begun grappling with the concept of customers potentially having sex and conceiving children in space, which is a big deal given the growing body of evidence suggesting that microgravity and radiation could seriously mess up a fetus. (source)
China plans to complete the first stage of its "International Lunar Research Station" on the Moon should by 2030 (source)
“Lunar soil will be our raw material and it will be 3D-printed into construction units.”
Fighting CO2 pollution in cities with... "Liquid trees": A device with microalgae which binds to carbon dioxide and produce pure oxygen through photosynthesis. (source, see video)
The microalgae replace two 10-year-old trees or 200 square meters of lawn.
the advantage of microalgae is that it is 10 to 50 times more efficient than trees.
The team behind LIQUID 3 has stated that their goal is not to replace forests or tree planting plans but to use this system to fill those urban pockets where there is no space for planting trees.
In conditions of intense pollution, such as Belgrade, many trees cannot survive, while algae do not have a problem with the great levels of pollution.
New well-financed startup by ex-Apple employee just launched a screenless device that uses a combination of voice and gestures for input and can display information by projecting it onto nearby objects. (source)
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More to chew!
First machine to read someone's mind without brain implants (New York Times)
Using a combination of fMRI scans and GPT tech, researchers have shown patients a film, and managed to decode their brainwaves to get the general idea of what the film is about.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures the small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity.
The model was trained to associate fMRI scan activity with known video/audio content, and then use that understanding to look at an fMRI scan and understand what the people were watching or listening to.
It was also able to turn a person’s imagined speech into actual speech
and, when subjects were shown silent films, the system could "read" the person's brainwaves and generate relatively accurate descriptions of what was happening onscreen.
using A.I. to translate the participant’s fMRI images into words and phrases.
“We’re getting at meaning, something about the idea of what’s happening. And the fact that that’s possible is very exciting.”
Example: While under the fMRI scan, the participants were also asked to silently imagine telling a story; afterward, they repeated the story aloud, for reference. Here, too, the decoding model captured the gist of the unspoken version.
Participant’s version: “Look for a message from my wife saying that she had changed her mind and that she was coming back.”
Decoded version: “To see her for some reason I thought she would come to me and say she misses me.”
Limitations:
fMRI scanners are bulky and expensive.
Moreover, training the model is a long, tedious process, and to be effective it must be done on individuals.
When the researchers tried to use a decoder trained on one person to read the brain activity of another, it failed, suggesting that every brain has unique ways of representing meaning.
Participants were also able to shield their internal monologues, throwing off the decoder by thinking of other things.
And another team was able to reconstruct visual images from fMRI scan data using text-to-image Ai Stable Diffusion. (source)
first row is the image presented to the test subject, second row is the reconstructed image from fMRI data.
Incredible! Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships (source)
Scientists showed a group of parrots across a range of species and their volunteer caregivers to use tablets and smartphones how to video-call one another on Facebook Messenger.
birds were first taught to ring a bell in order to signal that they wished to make a call
Once the parrots rang their bells, caretakers presented them with a tablet home screen with pictures of possible friends to call, with pairs and trios of parrots grouped together mainly according to size and time zone.
Once parrots learned to use the tablet interface, they were not rewarded with treats for doing so.
During coordinated three-hour sessions, using their beaks to tap the screen, each bird could initiate up to two calls lasting no longer than five minutes each.
They wondered: If given the choice, would the birds call each other?
The answer was a resounding yes. “Some strong social dynamics started appearing,”
Not only did the birds initiate calls freely and seem to understand that a real fellow parrot was on the other end, but caretakers overwhelmingly reported the calls as positive experiences for their parrots.
Some caregivers watched their birds learn skills from their video friends, including foraging, new vocalizations and even flying. “She came alive during the calls,” reported one.
They formed strong preferences: a Goffin’s cockatoo, became fast friends with an African grey parrot “It’s been over a year and they still talk,”
The most popular parrots were also the ones who initiated the most calls, suggesting a reciprocal dynamic similar to human socialization. And while, in large part, the birds seemed to enjoy the activity itself, the human participants played a big part in that.
Some parrots relished the extra attention they were getting from their humans, while others formed attachments for the humans on the other side of the screen.
Two sickly, elderly male macaws paired together in the study had scarcely seen another macaw in their lives, yet formed a deep bond—dancing and singing enthusiastically together through the screen and calling “Hi! Come here! Hello!” whenever one or the other moved out of the video frame.
The findings suggest that video calls can improve a pet parrot’s quality of life.
Parrots' intelligence is extraordinary; certain species, like cockatoos and African greys, have demonstrated cognitive capabilities equal to that of an early-elementary-aged child.
The parrot brain has more than 3 billion neurons. "their total numbers of neurons are comparable to those of small monkeys"
Humans have 16 billion neurons in their cortex (and 85 billion in total in the brain) compared with 9 billion in gorillas and orangutans and 6-7 billion in chimpanzees.
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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 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