🚀How Perrier water’s sales jumped from $3 to $200 million in 4 years, and what it has to do with AI today

Latest cool robot videos, creating artificial waved in a lake, Zuck's & Musk's last thoughts on AI & more

🔥 Attention: nouveau format, avec du gratuit et du payant.🔥

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, co-fondateur de YeldaAI. Plus d'infos sur moi en cliquant ici.

Vous allez trouver juste ci-dessous la première moitié de l’apéro en version gratuite.

🔥 🔥 🔥 Compte tenu du temps pris pour rédiger cette newsletter, dorénavant, seuls les abonnés payants auront accès plus bas après le paywall à la seconde moitié de l’apéro, ainsi qu'aux résumés d'articles.🔥 🔥 🔥

Pierre Bellanger, fondateur et PDG du groupe Skyrock est un abonné payant, il commente pourquoi : "Parce que c'est exceptionnel."

L’apéro (première moitié libre)

• Boston Dynamics Says Farewell to Its Humanoid Atlas Robot—Then Brings It Back Fully Electric

  • Hydraulic Atlas is retiring... 😢 Watch the video

  • ... say hello to fully electric Atlas... 🤖 Watch the video 

    

  • Old Atlas’ antiquated hydraulics have been jettisoned in favor of electric-powered actuators. Old Atlas moved like a clunky chunky human; the latest iteration swivels and turns like a freaky crab crossed with an unfeasibly double-jointed contortionist.

  • With the Old Atlas, we could comfort ourselves with the notion that clever editing meant Atlas wasn’t as self-righting (se relever tout seul) over rough ground as the original viral videos portrayed. However, the last video might well resurrect any robot overlord fears you may have since suppressed. This thing is scary, and not just because it has a ringlight for a face.

  •  Hyundai—which bought Boston Dynamics in 2020, valuing it at $1 billion—could soon set Atlas to work in its car factories.

• 100 billion, 100 milliards, a symbolic number! 

  • Approximate number of stars in the Milky way, number of neurons in our brain, and number of humans who have ever lived so far

• Bangladesh is more populated than Russia😯 (Twitter)

• China installed 6X more industrial robots than China in 2022 (source)

  • "Production capacity is what wins wars. If US can’t automate faster than China, competing will become rapidly more difficult"

• “China is heavily investing in munitions and acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment 5 to 6 times faster than the U.S." (source)

  • "China is also the world’s largest shipbuilder & has a shipbuilding capacity that is roughly 230 times larger than the U.S.”

• Just a year ago, the average new EV sold in the US commanded a hefty $10k premium over the market average; now, that difference has shrunk to a mere $5k. The total cost of ownership of EVs is close to competitive with or lower than that of Internal Combustion Engine vehicles. 

• Mind Blowing Machine Generating Surfing Waves in  a Lake: watch the short video

• Groundbreaking ‘blended-wing’ demonstrator plane cleared to fly (CNN)

  

  • “the blended wing airframe can deliver 50% lower fuel burn and emissions,”

  • JetZero’s new milestone brings it a little closer to its ambitious goal of putting into service a blended wing aircraft as soon as 2030.

• Eclipse: Earthlings are very lucky, eclipse-wise. Most planets don’t have a big enough moon to create a total solar eclipse.  (source)

  • Not only is our moon big enough, it’s about exactly the size of the sun in our night sky because, by sheer coincidence, the sun is about 400 times farther from us than the moon and also about 400 times bigger than the moon in diameter—making our eclipses especially breathtaking.

  • Prochaine éclipse totale : Aug. 12, 2026, it will be Europe's 1st in 27 years (source)

  • Totale seulement vue depuis l'Islande et l'Espagne du Nord (mais partielle qd même à 92% à Paris, 95% à Nice, 99.96% à Madrid)

  • ... and someday, Earth Will Have a Final Total Solar Eclipse: That’s because the moon is drifting away from Earth, so our nearest celestial neighbor will one day, millions or even billions of years in the future, appear too small in the sky to completely obscure the sun.” (NYT)

• Gabriel Attal annonce le déploiement de l'intelligence artificielle dans les services publics (source)

• Mark Zuckerberg: "Another bias that people tend to have is thinking that intelligence is somehow kind of fundamentally connected to life and it's not actually clear that it is" (youtube)

• Elon Musk: “My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year” (Financial Times)

  • "Within the next five years, the capabilities of AI will probably exceed that of all humans"

• Devin, an AI unlike any other commercially available today. Devin is an “AI software engineer” with access to the internet, and the ability to use it just like a person would. Whereas today’s AIs merely give advice, Devin takes action.

  • At one point in his experimentation, Mollick instructed Devin to figure out how to create an account on Reddit, then offer to answer coding questions. Not only did the AI manage this feat, but it also spontaneously began demanding $50 to $100 an hour for its work, and writing back to real humans (source)

• Anthropic CEO Says That by Next Year, AI Models Could Be Able to “Replicate and Survive in the Wild” (source)

  • Amodei is a serious figure in the space. Back in 2021, he and his sister Daniela left OpenAI over directional differences following the creation of GPT-3 — which the CEO and cofounder helped build — and the company's partnership with Microsoft. Soon after, the siblings founded Anthropic along with other OpenAI expats to continue their responsible scaling efforts.

  • something like AGI is something like 3-24 months away, and will happen almost through scale

• In the meantime, research confirms that AI models routinely made factual mistakes and errors of omission when asked to summarize long documents. (Washington Post)

  • Another recent paper suggested that a claim that AI was better than the vast majority of humans at writing bar exams was exaggerated.

Partagez cette newsletter par Whatsapp en cliquant ici ❤️

• Si vous appréciez cette première moitité de l’apéro gratuite, n’hésitez pas à prendre 3 secondes svp pour l’envoyer à ne serait-ce qu’un contact par Whatsapp en cliquant ici 🙂

🔥 🔥 🔥 Seconde moitité de l’apéro et résumés d’articles accessible aux abonnés, au menu :

• Seconde moitié de l’apéro, teasing:

  • Why “a senior person at a well-known A.I. startup” who truly believes that A.I. has a coin-toss probability of killing him and everyone he loves does continue to build it

  • How text-to-image generation has improved with progressive versions of MidjourneyMidjourney/AI Index 2024 (crazy series of pictures)

  • A Microsoft AI model can create a deepfake video of a person talking or singing with one photo and one audio track : watch some examples

  • A really impressive music generation model you can now play with

  • 15 Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2024 The AI Index tracks the generative AI boom, model costs, and responsible AI use

  • US Air Force Confirms First Successful Dogfight (bataille aérienne) between AI and human: see the details

  • How Ukraine is using AI to fight Russia

• Résumés d’articles en bullet points

  • How "Perrier’s sales jumped from $3 million in 1975 to $200 million in 1979., and what it has to do with AI today

  • Dingue: Two Lifeforms Merge in Once-in-a-Billion-Years Evolutionary Event (it happened only twice in Earth life before)

  • Fascinating!! Why experts declare that Animal intelligence Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness (Quanta Magazine) and what that means

  • Generative AI can turn your most precious memories into photos that never existed (MIT Tech Review)

  • Dérangeant ? How Chinese mourners turn to AI to remember and ‘revive’ loved ones (The Guardian)

  • What could nuclear war look like? (The Economist)

  • Why America is uniquely ill-suited to handle a falling population (The Economist)

Les dernières newsletters listées ici.

Ici pour s’inscrire et recevoir les prochains emails si on vous a transféré celui-ci.

🔥 🔥 🔥 Pour accéder maintenant une première fois à la seconde moitié de l’apéro et ainsi que les résumés d'articles, vous pouvez cliquer sur le bouton “Claim my free post” plus bas.🔥 🔥 🔥

Vous pourrez éventuellement vous abonner ensuite au tarif minimum imposé par Substack, 90 centimes/semaine, comme entre autres Pierre Bellanger, PDG du groupe Skyrock, ce qui me permettra de continuer à faire cette newsletter chronophage sereinement, un grand merci par avance pour ceux qui feront le pas 🙏.

Et vous pouvez aussi obtenir des mois d’accès gratuit en invitant des ami(e)s grâce au lien ci-dessous Refer a friend !