đ Worldâs largest aircraft ; crazy speech-to-speech, text-to-video, text-to-music AIs demos & more
Nuclear escalation triggered by AI & 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 đ¤ summarized as bullet points to help you save time and anticipate the future đŽ.
First, you'll find small bites about many different news, and then further down these summaries:
The Effect of AI on the music industry, as explained by The Economist
See how Google DeepMindâs new AI tool helped create more than 700 new materials, could supercharge technological breakthroughs. (âItâs very impressive,â said Dr. Andrew Rosen at Princeton University, who was not involved in the work.)
Find out what is the worldâs largest aircraft, it's backed by Sergey Brin, Googleâs co-founder
Small Bites
Wow:Â Generating one image takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to the study from researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University.
Cool new AI service: Pika, the idea-to-video tool: create or edit videos using words: see the 1-min demo
And another very cool AI tool by Meta: speech-to-speech translation that preserves the voice, the tone, and the expression. (listen to the 15-sec example from 1:00 to 1:15)
Metaâs AI chief Yann LeCun thinks current AI systems are decades away from reaching some semblance of sentience, and is skeptical on quantum computing (source)
âText is a very poor source of information,â âThereâs a lot of really basic things about the world that they just donât get through this kind of training,â
Unlike Google, Microsoft and other tech giants, Meta is not making a big bet on quantum computing.
âThe number of problems you can solve with quantum computing, you can solve way more efficiently with classical computers,â LeCun said.
âQuantum computing is a fascinating scientific topic,â LeCun said. Itâs less clear about the âpractical relevance and the possibility of actually fabricating quantum computers that are actually useful.â
Lyria, by Google DeepMind: the world's most sophisticated AI music generation system (source)
Astonishing examples!
Building a track with just a hum: 45-sec video
Transforming beatboxing into a drum loop: 20-sec video
Transforming singing into an orchestral score: 20-sec video (wow)
Transforming chords from a MIDI keyboard into a realistic vocal choir: 40-sec video
Lyria can also produce compelling music & vocals from just a text prompt
Amazing demo: this AI analyses your behavior and generate real time narration by David Attenborough : watch the 1-min video!
"We observe the sophisticated Homo sapiens engaging in the ritual of hydration."
Using AI to help read medical exams led to the finding of 13% more breast cancers. Of 30 extra cancers detected, 83% were invasive types that wouldâve been missed without AI. (source)
How do you see your orgasms? Here's what they look like according to artificial intelligenceÂ
Musk says a new Starship will be ready to fly again before the end of the year !!
Successes from last flight in November :
All 33 Raptor engines worked. (At least six hadnât worked properly during the April test flight.)Â
Starship then successfully separated from the Super Heavy booster (see picture above). âThis was the first time this technique has been done successfully with a vehicle of this size,â SpaceX officials wrote in their post.
The vehicle reached an altitude of about 150 kilometers, âbecoming the first Starship to reach outer space and nearly completing its full-duration burn.â
âJust inspected the Starship launch pad and it is in great condition! No refurbishment needed to the water-cooled steel plate for next launch,â Musk wrote
The time between the first and second Starship flights took seven months. Next one possibly before the end of 2023 or early 2024!
Wow: 40%Â of a top scientistâs time is spent on things other than research, such as looking for money (The Economist)
The best explanation of what happened at OpenAI (Ben Evans): the people who think we should slow down and be careful mounted a coup against the people who think we should speed up and be careful.Â
Note that Sutskever moved to work on âalignmentâ (trying to work out how to make an AGI be nice to us) this summer.
The problem, and the conflict at OpenAI, is that no one knows about the AI risk. We donât have a clear and accepted theoretical model for what intelligence is, nor how we would plot our own intelligence within that as compared to, say, dogs, nor where LLMs are in relation to that, nor how quickly they might converge. We donât know. And so every conversation descends to argument by analogy, or from authority, or to a long list of other logical fallacies. Yes, Geoff Hinton is worried, but heâs worried because he doesnât know, not because he does, which is an odd kind of argument from authority. No-one knows.Â
âThe board can fire me, I think thatâs important,â Altman told Bloomberg in June.
âIt turns out that they couldnât fire him, and that was bad,â says Toby Ord, senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford University, and a prominent voice among people who warn AI could pose an existential risk to humanity. (Wired)
Also:Â OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say (Reuters)
Amazing Nissan LEAF1-min video ad "Gas Powered Everything" - I'm not sponsored ;)
When Bell Labs announced the transistor â arguably the most important invention of the modern age â the New York Times buried the story on page 46.
Bill Gates : "AI Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. Theyâre also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons." (source)
"Science is the only news." (Whole Earth Discipline, by Stewart Brand)
" When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science."
"Human nature doesnât change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly."
Spinal Implant Helps a Man With Severe Parkinsonâs Walk With Ease Again (source)
To personalize his implant, the team captured hours of video of his walking patterns. They then built a model of his muscles, skeleton, and several joints, such as the hips and knees. Using the model, they trained software to compensate for any dysfunctionâallowing it to decipher the userâs intent and translate it into electrical zaps in the spinal cord to support the movement.
Noise-canceling headphones could let you pick and choose the sounds you want to hear (MIT Tech Review)
Future versions of the technology could let users opt back in to certain sounds theyâd like to hear, such as babies crying, birds tweeting, or alarms ringing.Â
Cool demo:Â Two 19-year-old students have developed a pair of gloves that convert sign language to speech or text. (50-sec video)
8-min Short-movie depicting a nuclear escalation triggered by AI
This work of fiction seeks to depict key drivers that could result in a global Al catastrophe:
- Accidental conflict escalation at machine speeds;
- Al integrated too deeply into high-stakes functions;
- Humans giving away too much control to Al;
- Humans unable to tell what is real and what is fake, and;
- An arms race that ultimately has only losers.The sequel to this video:Â How would a nuclear war between Russia and the US affect you personally? (4-min video)
The First Small-Scale Nuclear Plant in the US Died Before It Could Live (Wired)
The utilities backing the plant were spooked late last year by a 50% increase in the projected costs for the projectâeven after factoring in substantial funds from the Inflation Reduction Act.Â
âOne of the stories theyâve kept telling people was that the SMR was going to be a lot cheaper than large-scale nuclear,â David Schlissel, an analyst at the nonprofit Institute for Energy Economics and Fiscal Analysis, told WIRED last month. âIt isnât true.â
UA new trend in Silicon Valley: Effective accelerationism, or E/acc (NYT)
âEffective accelerationism aims to follow the âwill of the universeâ: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe,â and âE/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism.â
How mining could be disrupted before 2050 (Casey Handmer, founder of Terraform Industries, whom I interviewed here about his revolutionary startup and more)
Thereâs no reason that our pursuit of valuable minerals in the crust needs to start by destroying large swaths of the upper few feet that are so critical to life. Instead, we will see the commercialization of integrated tunnel boring machines of enormous size that will extract valuable minerals at depth before extruding a narrow, fast-moving wire of any desired alloy through a small, surface-mounted âwellâ. Ordinarily, these machines will back-fill their tunnels with the dross but could also carve out enormous underground caverns for any desired use, be it high speed trains, vertical farming, nuclear reactors, underground rivers, or secret realms.Â
By 2050 it may be the case that solar panels and chemistry give us the ability to make most of our food with 0.1% of the land we currently use for farming (Casey Handmer)
Early studies today are finding ways to electrically synthesize starches, proteins, and fats from water and air. By 2050 it may be the case that solar panels and chemistry give us the ability to make most of our food with 0.1% of the land, reducing the enormous and catastrophic environmental impact of our civilization farming literally 40% of the Earthâs entire land surface area, while reducing food costs and improving food security.
Mind-blowing drone show in China (1-min video)
ReelShort is the latest Chinese export to conquer America (The Economist)
American viewers can tune in to dozens of similar rapid-fire dramas, with titles such as âThe Double Life of My Billionaire Husbandâ and âSon-in-Lawâs Revengeâ, on an app called ReelShort.
If it all seems a bit foreign, then that is because it is. ReelShort is owned by COL Group, a digital publisher based in Beijing. Some of its shows are adapted by Chinese teams at COLâs Californian subsidiary, Crazy Maple Studio, from Chinese scripts that were first written and produced for audiences in China.
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More to chew!
Effect of AI on the music industry (The Economist)
Spotify now adds more than 100,000 new tracks every day, many of them AI-made.Â
In 2017 artists who are signed to record labels accounted for 87% of the streams on Spotify. Last year their share was only 75%.
Amid an explosion in online content on platforms from YouTube to TikTok, fans have flocked as never before to the biggest acts. It has been a good time to be an amateur creator, but an even better time to be a superstar.Â
 At the same time, data from Spotify show that between 2017 and 2022, as the platform was flooded with tens of millions of amateur tracks, the number of artists making at least $1,000 a year in royalties increased by 155%, the number making $5m or more increased by 165%, and the handful of headliners making $10m or more increased by 425%.
Those who have done least well are middling-to-big artists, who face more competition from entertainmentâs long tail but have been unable to break into the elite group at the top.
Google DeepMindâs new AI tool helped create more than 700 new materials (MIT Tech Review)
From EV batteries to solar cells to microchips, new materials can supercharge technological breakthroughs.Â
But discovering them usually takes months or even years of trial-and-error research.Â
A new tool from Google DeepMind uses deep learning to dramatically speed up the process of discovering new materials.
The technology has already been used to predict structures for 2.2 million new materials and 380,000 new stable materialsâmany counter to human intuition, of which more than 700 have gone on to be created in the lab and are now being tested.Â
Thanks to that tool named GNoME, the total number of stable materials known to us has grown almost tenfold, to 421,000
Berkeley Labâs new autonomous laboratory, named the A-Lab, has been using GNoMEâs discoveries, integrating robotics with machine learning to optimize the development of such materials.
The lab is capable of making its own decisions about how to make a proposed material and creates up to five initial formulations. These formulations are generated by a machine-learning model trained on existing scientific literature. After each experiment, the lab uses the results to adjust the recipes.
Researchers at Berkeley Lab say that A-Lab was able to perform 355 experiments over 17 days and successfully synthesized 41 out of 58 proposed compounds. This works out to two successful syntheses a day.
In a typical, human-led lab, it takes much longer to make materials. âIf youâre unlucky, it can take months or even years,â
Researchers at DeepMind and Berkeley Lab say these new AI tools can help accelerate hardware innovation in energy, computing, and many other sectors.
Together, the collaboration could launch a new era of materials science. âItâs very impressive,â said Dr. Andrew Rosen at Princeton University, who was not involved in the work.
The worldâs largest aircraft breaks cover in Silicon Valley, it's backed by Sergey Brin and is an airship (Techcrunch)
At 124.5 meters long, Pathfinder 1 dwarfs the current Goodyear airships and even the massive Stratolaunch plane designed to launch orbital rockets. Itâs the largest aircraft to take to the skies since the gargantuan Hindenburg airship of the 1930s.Â
LTAâs airship uses stable helium rather than flammable hydrogen as a lifting gas
Can go up to 120km/h, can carry about four tons of cargo in addition to its crew
The CEO: âI canât see airships replacing aircraft,â he said. âBut I do see a niche for airships to be part of the transportation architecture that reduces the carbon footprint of air travel.â Another important niche could be responding to natural disasters like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and hurricanes.Â
Previous newsletters:
Essay: Green, On-Demand, Abundant Energy by 2050 is Definitely Possible: Here's the Plan
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
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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)
Iâm 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:
Iâve 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