Warp-Speed Wednesdays
Your Must-Read Weekly Tech Updates: AI Advancements... Google's Gemini, NVIDIA's Visual Arts Tools, and the AI-Robot Revolution
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Artificial Intelligence
Google Finally Comes for War: 'AI' Becomes the Battle Cry in a Clash with Microsoft and OpenAI! 📽
Gemini - Google’s Next Frontier: Demis Hassabis teases Gemini, a new foundation model from the newly merged Google DeepMind. Expect unseen multimodal capabilities. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, tweeted the below in response to Google and then OpenAI instantly started releasing their PlugIn tools on ChatGPT. The race is on!!!!
The Universal Lip-Sync: Google is currently testing a translation service so powerful, it can make you bilingual in videos! This Universal Translator not only transcribes and translates your speech, but also does some post-production magic to sync your lips to the new language. But remember, with great power comes great responsibility...and possible misinterpretations.
Peek-a-boo with Google Search: Two new features in Google Search will help you understand context and content better. One, 'About This Image', provides extra info about the images you find. The other, a new markup system, helps identify AI-generated images. Because, apparently, reality wasn't confusing enough!
Beethoven Who?: Google's new MusicLM tool turns your texts into music. This may empower some new creative producers with AI being your studio.
Captioning with Bard: Google's answer to ChatGPT, Bard, is now running on PaLM 2 and can generate captions from images. It's like having an AI poet in your pocket!
AI Invasion in Google Workspace: Google copying Microsoft and giving Bard access to its Workspace suite. Expect auto-generated tables in Sheets and AI-created images in Slides and Meet. It's like having a personal assistant who doesn't take coffee breaks.
Google Maps in 3D: Google will release their 3D immersive maps later this year for select US cities but developers are already having fun with it.
Anthropic turbo-charged Claude to light speed! With their latest upgrade, they've expanded Claude's context window to a colossal 100,000 tokens of text - that's roughly equivalent to a gripping 75,000-word novel!
Now, Claude can gobble up hundreds of pages of materials, digest them, and analyze them in a single gulp. Your chats with Claude can now extend for hours, even days. And as for code generation? Well, let's just say a model with this size context window and code generation may become the John von Neumann of AI programming, processing vast volumes of data like a supercomputer from your favorite sci-fi movie.
Gaming and Animation
NVIDIA, in a hyperspace jump, has unveiled a constellation of new visual arts tools, including the Machine Learning Deformer for Meta Human on the upgraded Unreal Engine 5.2. It's not just any upgrade, folks, but a veritable quantum leap in both visuals and physics simulations. We're reaching a point where reality and simulation are getting very close to indistinguishable. This development signifies an exciting era for robotics research, truly a massive push for the 'sim-to-real' revolution! Google DeepMind already proved sim-to-real is possible on small scale, limited dexterous robots.
Finally, NVIDIA even installed generative AI into their Omniverse environment allowing developers to generate scenes at light speed.
Robotics
We're rapidly stepping into the Robot Renaissance! Tesla is revving up to construct the most colossal humanoid robot business, and boy, am I’m pumped to see their latest strides with the Tesla bot!
Let's talk Tesla Bot: This bad boy can recycle the mighty vision system built for Full-Self Drive (FSD). Tesla bot strategically chose cameras, because cameras are Humans highest bandwidth sensor organ. This philosophy will translate to robotics, and Elon and Karpathy, before he left Tesla, doubled down on this philosophy.
Tesla’s Secret Sauce: Tesla's recipe for success is their manufacturing prowess. Most folks don't get the sheer complexity of large-scale manufacturing, but let me tell you, it's like herding electrons. Tesla's engineers are not just creating a product, oh no, they're crafting a Dreadnought - the machine that births the machine. I will delve deeper into this in my next Hitchhiker’s Handbook, Chapter IV. Tesla didn't just dip their toes into car manufacturing, they dived in headfirst and are now doing the backstroke on a global scale. Now consider this - a humanoid robot requires way less material than a car. If they've conquered cars, imagine what they'll do with robots!
Bottom line: Robotics’ ChatGPT moment is coming quicker than you may think. Google DeepMind has shown the ability to go from simulation to real using reinforcement learning. 📽Tesla has the vision, the engineering prowess, the manufacturing capabilities to truly revolutionize the world with robotics. Elon's calling it now - “A majority of [Tesla’s] long-term value will be Optimus.”
Mark my words, folks - everyone will want one of these! Cost is the only issue once the bot works well.
Sanctuary AI has just revealed their dazzling new humanoid, Phoenix, and I am here for it!
This beauty is powered by their Carbon AI control system.
“Leveraging a blend of symbolic and neural reasoning, our autonomous control system utilizes the best of both approaches to AI while mitigating the weaknesses of each.”
But, look at it! It embodies the future. I am excited for the demos.
Sanctuary is betting big on the reinforcement and generative AI takeoff happening now and going bold with their vision. They're aiming for the stars with a general-purpose approach to both AI and robotics.
Their Carbon™ AI control system supposedly isn't just a fancy name — it's designed to emulate human brain subsystems, including memory, sight, sound, and touch. Paired with their Phoenix™ general-purpose robots, it's as if they've unlocked Pandora's box of limitless possibilities for human tasks. And the best part? Sanctuary's tech can be trained and operated both in our world and the virtual worlds through the Sanctuary World Engine™.
Get ready for a wild ride! “Do you see that Sport Chek right there?” Geordie Rose, Sanctuary AI’s co-founder and CEO, asked. “There’s a robot in there right now.”
Tesla, you have some competent competition.
Introducing JIZAI ARMS - a wearable system complete with six detachable, controllable robot arms (but there is no current way to control them without joysticks). It's like your personal octopus assistant on land. Don't worry, Doc Oc, it's not personal; it's just robotics!
Medicine
The financial landscape of AI drug discovery is going interstellar! In a mere four years, investments in AI drug discovery companies have tripled, reaching a staggering $24.6 billion in 2022. But that's just a taste of the cosmic rollercoaster ride ahead. With AI at the helm, investors believe we are on the precipice of a medical revolution, one that might even unlock the long-dreamed-of fountain of youth but will definitely cure some critical illnesses. Morgan Stanley is forecasting that AI could catalyze the creation of 50 new, groundbreaking therapies in the next decade, translating into a colossal $50 billion in sales. So strap in, because the AI-led medical revolution is set to blast off, and it promises to be an exhilarating journey! More details here.
Space
Get your tinfoil hats ready, folks! NASA has decided it's finally time to spill the tea on all things UAP (or UFOs for those of us who still enjoy a good sci-fi classic)
The press conference is happening on Wednesday, May 31, at 10:30am ET. Apparently, they've rallied 16 of the best and brightest minds in science, data, AI, and aerospace safety to crack the enigma of UAPs. Evans, their spokesperson, promises to 'apply the full focus of science and data to UAP.' Will there be green aliens or just green gas clouds? Stay tuned! After all, transparency, openness, and scientific integrity are NASA's middle names... Right after 'Never Admit Seeing Aliens.'
“In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.”
Carl Sagan
Shout out to the 16 study members:
David Spergel, Study Chair and President of the Simons Foundation
Anamaria Berea, Associate professor of Computational and Data Science at George Mason University
Federica Bianco, Professor at the University of Delaware in the Department of Physics and Astrophysics
Paula Bontempi, Biological Oceanographer and Dean of the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island
Reggie Brothers, Operating Partner at AE Industrial Partners
Jen Buss, CEO of the Potomac Institute of Policy Studies
Nadia Drake, journalist and contributing writer at National Geographic
Mike Gold, Executive VP of Civil Space and External Affairs
David Grinspoon, senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute
Scott Kelly, former NASA astronaut, test pilot, fighter pilot, and retired U.S. Navy captain
Matt Mountain, President of The Association of Universities for Research and Astronomy
Warren Randolph, Deputy Executive Director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Accident Investigation and Prevention for Aviation Safety department
Walter Scott, Executive VP and CTO of Maxar
Joshua Semeter, Professor of electrical and computer engineering as well as the Director of the Center for Space Physics at Boston
Karlin Toner, Executive Director of the FAA’s Office of Aviation Policy and Plans
Shelley Wright, Associate Professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Studies