🚀 Ce qu'il faut savoir sur l'IA text-to-video d'OpenAI; Robots now fighting robots; Evidence of Alien Spacecraft?

Wearable drone parachutes, private submersible superyacht & more

Bonjour,

Vous recevez la newsletter Parlons Futur : une fois par semaine au plus, une sélection de news, mêlant sources anglophones et francophones, résumées en bullet points sur des sujets tech 🤖, science 🔬, éco 💰, géopolitique 🌏 et défense ⚔️ pour mieux appréhender le futur 🔮.

Je m'appelle Thomas, plus d'infos sur moi en cliquant ici.

Vous allez trouver plus bas l’apéro, accessible à tous, et ensuite le résumé de ces articles, accessible seulement des abonnés (les résumés sont dans la langue de la source, le plus souvent en anglais) :

• Plus d’infos sur Sora, et notamment les critiques de personnes clefs de l’IA

• Ce professeur réputé d’université américaine présente les preuves possibles d’une technologie extra-terrestre et fait taire les critiques

• Pourquoi la recherche à l’université peine à stimuler la croissance économique

• Les 5 tâches avancées que ce professeur de business d’une université américaine à fait faire à l’IA en moins d’une minute

• Non, les Large Language Models ne sont pas de simples “perroquets stochastiques” qui recrachent ce qu’ils ont appris à l’entraînement

• Pourquoi Sam Altman d’OpenAI voudrait lever 7,000 milliards de dollars

• Qu’est-ce que les millions de drones ukrainiens signifient pour l’avenir de la guerre ?

• La startup chinoise qui semble partie pour gagner la course de l’IA open source

L’apéro

• The new text-to-video AI model by OpenAI, named Sora ("sky" in Japanese)

  • pour planter le décor : Here are 2 videos: AI video generation 10 months ago vs. today

  • quelques vidéos générées de toute pièce par Sora qui m'ont bluffé

    • "Welcome to bling zoo!" watch, amazing

    • "A bicycle race on ocean with different animals as athletes riding the bicycles with drone camera view" watch

    • “A movie trailer featuring the adventures of the 30 year old space man wearing a red wool knitted motorcycle helmet, blue sky, salt desert, cinematic style, shot on 35mm film, vivid colors.” Watch

    • "Ce gros plan d'un berger allemand cybernétique futuriste met en valeur sa fourrure brune et noire saisissante..." Watch

    • "Un personnage marchant fait d'eau fait le tour d'une galerie d'art avec de nombreuses belles œuvres d'art de styles différents" Watch

    • "Vidéo réaliste de gens se détendant sur la plage, puis un requin saute hors de l'eau à mi-chemin et surprend tout le monde" mal faite en fait, fait flipper

    • "a wizard wearing a pointed hat and a blue robe with white stars casting a spell that shoots lightning from his hand and holding an old tome in his other hand" watch

    • d'autres exemples de vidéos de Sora d'OpenAI

    • More key insights from leading experts further down below

• Wow: SpaceX seeks to launch its new gigantic rocket Starship “at least” 9 times in 2024 (source)

• Who Saved the Most Lives in History

  • 1 Carl Bosch - Synthetic Nitrogen Fertilizer Engineered: 2,3 billions

  • 1 Fritz Haber - Synthetic Nitrogen Fertilizer Method: 2,3 billions

  • 3 Karl Landsteiner - Blood Groups Leading to Blood Transfusions: 1,1 billion

  • 4  Richard Lewisohn - Blood Storage Leading to Blood Transfurions: 1,1 billion

  • 5  Norman Borlaug - Green Revolution - High Yield Wheat:  245 millions

  • See the following 95

• Wearable drone ‘parachutes’ for construction industry, working at heights: see the video

• ChatGPT’ will test memory persistence across multiple chats (OpenAI).

  • The service will remember personal details about a ChatGPT user even if they don’t make a custom instruction or tell the chatbot directly to remember something; it just picks up and stores details as conversations roll on. 

  • OpenAI says ChatGPT’s Memory is opt-in by default, which means a user has to actively turn it off. 

  • The Memory can be wiped at any point, either in settings or by simply instructing the bot to wipe it.

  • You can of course still use Temporary Chats when you don’t want chatGPT to remember stuff.

• Google introduced Gemini Pro 1.5 - A new model with insane context window and performance. (source)

  • it is multimodal from the ground up—understands images, video, and audio natively.

  • This new model can have up to 10M tokens in its context window. The big hype feature.

  • = 1 hour video = 11 hours of audio = 30k lines of code = 700k words

  • Context window means how long your prompt to an AI model can be and if you’re working with long-form content like business PDFs, books etc. you want all you can get.

  • For comparison, the GPT-4 Turbo’s context window is only 128,000 tokens

  • 3 examples

    • They fed the model a 402-page transcript of the Apollo moon landing mission. Then they showed Gemini a hand-drawn sketch of a boot, and asked it to identify the moment in the transcript that the drawing represents. “This is the moment Neil Armstrong landed on the moon,” the chatbot responded correctly. The model was also able to identify moments of humor.

    • In another demonstration, the team uploaded a 44-minute silent film featuring Buster Keaton and asked the AI to identify what information was on a piece of paper that, at some point in the movie, is removed from a character’s pocket. In less than a minute, the model found the scene and correctly recalled the text written on the paper.

    • One example highlighted Gemini learning to translate from English to Kalamang by simply copying a language manual into its context window.

• About China

  • In absolute terms China's gap in living standards relative to the U.S. is actually larger than it was in 1990.

  • China is only at 28% of U.S. per capita GDP. (Noah Smith)

  • China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases by far but it's also playing a key role in solving the problem: it makes the cheapest solar panels and electric vehicles at scale. In 2023 alone, China added more solar panels than the U.S. has ever deployed.

• That startup has created flying autonomous robots that can scan tree canopies and pick ripe apples and stone fruits around the clock (Bill Gates)

• Musk signaled his respect for his rivals: “The Chinese car companies are the most competitive car companies in the world,” he said. “If there are not trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish all other car companies in the world. They're extremely good.” (Wired)

• Un entrepreneur américain s’attaque à Tesla avec une publicité lors du Super Bowl : voir la pub vidéo de 30 secondes (plus d'infos)

• AI-generated audio went viral in because it deep faked the voice of a New York politician slamming another colleague (Politico)

• IMF Says AI Will Upend Jobs and Boost Inequality. MIT AI Lab Says Not Fast. (source)

  • They focused on computer vision, as cost models are more developed for this branch of AI. They found that the large upfront cost of deploying AI meant that only 23% of work supposedly “exposed” to AI would actually make sense to automate. 

  • While that’s not insignificant, they say it would translate to a much slower rollout of the technology than others have predicted, suggesting that job displacement will be gradual and easier to deal with.

• AI holds tantalising promise for the emerging world (The Economist)

  • India is combining large language models with speech-recognition software to enable illiterate farmers to ask a bot how to apply for government loans. 

  • Pupils in Kenya will soon be asking a chatbot questions about their homework, and the chatbot will be tweaking and improving its lessons in response. 

  • Researchers in Brazil are testing a medical AI that helps undertrained primary-care workers treat patients. Medical data collected worldwide and fed into AIs could help improve diagnosis. 

  • If AI can make people in poorer countries healthier and better educated, it should in time also help them catch up with the rich world.

• Et maintenant : private submersible superyacht (source)

  

  • Length overall: 165.8 m / Range: approx. 15.000 km / Submerged duration: approx. 4 weeks / Depth: approx. 250 m

• Robots Are Fighting Robots in Russia’s War in Ukraine (Wired)

  • Near the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, a boxy robot zips along the rocky, cracked road. Snaking from side to side, the robot—a four-wheeled machine, around knee height—carries cargo and ammunition for Russian troops.

  • However, it’s being watched. Hovering above the road, tracking the movements of the robot, is a Ukrainian drone. Suddenly, another drone smashes into the robot, blowing it to pieces.

  • The attack, which happened in early December, is one of a small but growing number of incidents where unsophisticated robots have been used against other robots in Russia’s war in Ukraine

•  Research shows one person can supervise 'swarm' of 100 unmanned autonomous ground and aerial robots

  • without subjecting the individual to an undue workload. (source)

• Starlab commercial space station will launch on SpaceX's Starship rocket (Ars Technica)

  • a large station with a habitable volume equivalent to half the pressurized volume of the International Space Station and will launch the new station no earlier than 2028

  •  While it took 37 space shuttle flights to assemble and outfit the International Space Station, Starlab will launch on a single Starship flight.

• Hackers steal $25 million by deepfaking finance boss (source)

  • Scammers are believed to have used publicly available footage to create deepfake representations of the staff. Some of the fake video calls apparently only had a single human on the line, with the rest being deepfakes created by the hackers.

  • Despite at first being doubtful, the employee attended a group video call that featured the deepfake versions of the company's CFO, as well as other staff — who reportedly looked and sounded like their real-life counterparts.

• Bidenomics, definition: 5 elements stand out (The Economist)

  • 1. a desire to boost workers, mostly through unions. 

  • 2. more social spending, especially on early-childhood education. 

  • 3. tougher competition policy to restrain big business. 

  • 4. a wave of investment intended to make America both greener and more productive. 

  • 5. Mr Biden wants to tax large firms and the wealthy to pay for much of this.

• The Rise of Batteries in Six Charts and Not Too Many Numbers: see the 6 charts

  • Battery sales are growing exponentially up S-curves

  • Battery costs keep falling while quality rises

• Prosthetic limbs need not look like real ones (The Economist)

  • the possibility of augmenting existing bodies with new capabilities, making prosthetics “a technology that could be of use to everybody, not just amputees”. 

  • To that end she has designed the “Third Thumb”, a small and robust prosthetic digit that does exactly what it says. 

    

  • Controlled, like Ms Knox’s vine-arm, by pressure sensors in a pair of shoes, the thumb can be used to replace a missing one. But it can also be added to an intact hand on the opposite side from its existing, biological thumb.

• Fascinating and creepy video examples of real people falling for AI deepfakes created for fraud: watch

• Google Pauses AI Image Generator After It Made "Racially Diverse Nazis" (source)

  

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Les dernières newsletters :

• Impressive AI & robot demos ; what's biocomputing? ; Yann LeCun and Sam Altman on AGI & more

• Entretien exclusif ; humanity's first space battle ; impressive bionic hand ; buy this flying car in 2024 ; AI you can wear & more

• Impact de l'IA sur les consultants : les chiffres ; Startup bordelaise pique 200 millions € à SpaceX & more

• N’en déplaise à Jean-Marc Jancovici, l’abondance énergétique neutre en carbone dès 2050, c’est possible !

• Les précédentes

Et maintenant la section À table ! avec les résumés de ces articles pour les abonnés :)

• Plus d’infos sur Sora, et notamment les critiques de personnes clefs de l’IA

• Ce professeur réputé d’université américaine présente les preuves possibles d’une technologie extra-terrestre et fait taire les critiques

• Pourquoi la recherche à l’université peine à stimuler la croissance économique

• Les 5 tâches avancées que ce professeur de business d’une université américaine à fait faire à l’IA en moins d’une minute

• Non, les Large Language Models ne sont pas de simples “perroquets stochastiques” qui recrachent ce qu’ils ont appris à l’entraînement

• Pourquoi Sam Altman d’OpenAI voudrait lever 7,000 milliards de dollars

• Qu’est-ce que les millions de drones ukrainiens signifient pour l’avenir de la guerre ?

• La startup chinoise qui semble partie pour gagner la course de l’IA open source

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