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

Crazy nuclear near-misses & accidents

Bonjour, et bonne année !

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 bas d'email.

Voici donc ma toute dernière sélection !

L’apéro

• A very impressive AI demo: turn your face into George Clooney or any famous person instantly

  • See it for yourself: no need to create any account or pay anything, just give access to your camera and that's it, you move and you see the famous actor mirroring your every move, crazy

  • Insane to think about what's going to happen in the coming months and years with content, deepfakes, impersonation, scams...

• Wow: impressive demo of a robot, developed by Stanford researchers that can many diverse tasks

  • 𝐌𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐋𝐎𝐇𝐀: A low-cost, open-source, mobile manipulator.

  • See it cooking different recipes, with very fine manipulation of ingredients: See the video demo

  • Anther video where it does more tasks: laundry, vacuum, water plants, load and unload a dishwasher, use a coffee machine, obtain drinks from the fridge and open a beer, open doors, throw away trash: see that other crazy video

  • Will we have household robots for cooking and cleaning in less than a decade?

  • "Mobile ALOHA debunks a belief held in the robotics community that it was primarily hardware shortcomings holding back robots’ ability to do such tasks" “The missing piece is AI,” (MIT Tech Review)

• L'AR pour savoir où on n'a pas encore passa l'aspi, funny 15-sec demo

• Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, back from retirement: he was a core contributor on the Gemini technical paper, Alphabet's latest AI model, coding “basically every day” (source)

• Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve a famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics. (MIT Tech Review)

• A new study in Nature shows that AMIE, a Google chatbot, diagnosed heart and lung conditions more accurately than doctors in online healthcare. More surprisingly, the chatbot ranked higher on empathy - a trait considered beyond AI’s reach (shared in Azeem Azhar's ExponentialView)

• Another awesome use of AI! We don’t need risky superintelligence to revolutionize medicine: AI helps discover a new structural class of antibiotics, the last one took 38 years (source)

• Bluffant : à peine 2 ans de progrès du logiciel de générations d'images MidJourney, de Février 2022 à aujourd'hui en 8 photos

  • February 2022

    

  • December 2023

    

  • Voir les photos des 6 versions intermédiaires

• Mmmmh... OpenAI’s Sam Altman says human-level AI is coming but will change world much less than we think (source)

  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said artificial general intelligence, or AGI, could be developed in the “reasonably close-ish future.”

  • "He expects the fuss caused by the first AGI to be short-lived. “The world will have a two-week freakout and then people will go on with their lives,” he told The Economist.

  • Altman said AI isn’t yet replacing jobs at the scale that many economists fear, and that it’s already becoming an “incredible tool for productivity.”

• Isaac Singer’s sewing machine, patented in 1851, meant sewing a shirt went from taking fourteen hours to just one hour.

• Impressive prototype of a transformative flying robot: watch the 30-sec demo

• Chinese carmaker BYD passed Tesla as the best-selling electric vehicle maker in the world

• Europe now creates more startups than America: around 14,000 between January and September 2023, compared with 13,000 across the Atlantic. (The Economist)

• A new type of jet engine could revive supersonic air travel (The Economist)

  • For a long time engineers had lacked the tools to make real progress. That changed with advances in computer modelling, new alloys that can resist extreme temperatures and additive manufacturing, known as 3D printing.

• Bill Gates : "the world is getter better"

  • In manufacturing, we are well on the way to making steel with electricity instead of coal. Buildings are getting greener thanks to a company that has developed a window that is many times more efficient than most windows used today. 

  • In agriculture, one company has developed microbes that provide plants with the fertilizer they need without producing excess greenhouse gases

  • Scientists have bred 160 drought-tolerant and disease-resistant varieties of maize. Farmers in Zimbabwe who planted one of these varieties harvested enough extra maize to feed their families for nine months.

    

• AI Act: "The legislation ultimately included restrictions for foundation models but gave broad exemptions to “open-source models,” which are developed using code that’s freely available for developers to alter for their own products and tools. 

  • The move could benefit open-source AI companies in Europe that lobbied against the law, including France’s Mistral and Germany’s Aleph Alpha, as well as Meta, which released the open-source model LLaMA." (Washington Post)

• NVIDIA's CEO and Founder said "Moore’s law is dead" in 2022. Days later, Intel’s chief Pat Gelsinger reported that Moore’s maxim was, in fact, “alive and well”.

  • Delegates to the International Electron Devices Meeting, a chip-industry conference, were mostly on Mr Gelsinger’s side. Researchers showed off several ideas dedicated to keeping Moore’s law going, from exploiting the third dimension to sandwiching chips  together and even moving beyond silicon, the material from which microchips have been made for the past half-century. (The Economist)

• Powered by rain, this seed carrier could help reforest the most remote areas (CNN)

  • Inspired by nature’s own design, the lab has created an “E-seed” carrier that is intended to be dropped by drones and drill into the soil.

  • it’s made from a material that “self-drills” in response to rain, when wet. The carrier has an “80% drilling success rate on flat land,”

    

  • Click the CNN link to see a cool animation of the seed drilling itself in the ground

• Ultrasonic 3D Printer Could One Day Repair Organs in the Body Without Surgery (source)

• Lol, ChatGPT, when asked to progressively "make a man more muscular." The final result is a croissant!  (source)

  

• Oui, la nature a inventé les engrenages: This insect, a plant hopper, has functioning 'mechanical gears' connecting its hind legs, probably the first ones discovered in nature (voir la vidéo de 15 secondes)

• In a letter to his wife in 1780, John Adams, one of America’s founders, wrote:

  • I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

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À table !

Swedish battery company reveals breakthrough battery technology “the first product ever completely free from critical raw materials” (source)

• Northvolt’s validated cell is more safe, cost-effective, and sustainable than conventional nickel, manganese and cobalt (NMC) or iron phosphate (LFP) chemistries and is produced with minerals such as iron and sodium that are abundant on global markets.

• It holds over 160 watt-hours per kilogram of energy, slightly less than lithium-ion batteries’ 200-300 watt-hours per kilogram. 

• If manufacturing successfully scales, this is a game changer for battery storage and reduces reliance on China which has a stranglehold on many critical battery minerals like cobalt and lithium.

• The low cost and safety at high temperatures make the technology especially attractive for energy storage solutions in upcoming markets including India, the Middle East and Africa.

Meta's massive investment in AI (The Verge)

• Zuckerberg also revealed that they’re developing Llama-3, supported by a massive amount of computing power. He reports that Meta will have 350,000 "H100" GPUs by the end of the year (the H100 GPU is the most powerful GPU chip on the market and is designed for AI by NVIDIA). 

• To put that in perspective, there are only expected to be 2 to 2.5 million H100s in the world by year’s end. Facebook will control 14% of all active H100s, highlighting the increasing concentration of compute power, and huge economic moat for other firms.

• “We have built up the capacity to do this at a scale that may be larger than any other individual company” says Zuckerberg

• “Llama 2 wasn’t an industry-leading model, but it was the best open-source model,” he says. “With Llama 3 and beyond, our ambition is to build things that are at the state of the art and eventually the leading models in the industry.”

Welcome to "Biocomputing": A Ball of Brain Cells on a Chip Can Learn Simple Speech Recognition and Math (source)

• the team didn’t hook living brains to electrodes. Instead, they turned to brain organoids. In just two months, the mini-brains, made from human stem cells, developed into a range of neuron types that connected with each other in electrically active networks.

• The team carefully dropped each mini-brain onto a small chip packed with tiny electrodes that can record the brain cells’ signals. This makes it possible to precisely control stimulation and record the mini-brain’s activity. Using an AI tool, abstract neural outputs are translated into human-friendly responses on a normal computer.

• In a test, Brainoware was pitted against AI on a challenging math task that could help generate stronger passwords. Although slightly less accurate than an AI with short-term memory, Brainoware was much faster. Without human supervision, it reached nearly compatible results in less than 10% of the time it took the AI.

• But there’s the “wetlab “problem. Unlike a computer processor, mini-brains can only tolerate a narrow range of temperature and oxygen levels, while constantly at risk of disease-causing microbe infections. This means they have to be carefully grown inside a nutrient broth using specialized equipment. The energy required to maintain these cultures may offset gains from the hybrid computing system.

•  The harder question isn’t about technical challenges; rather, it’s about what’s acceptable when using human brains as a computing element. AI and neuroscience are rapidly pushing boundaries, and brain-AI models will likely become even more sophisticated.

Incroyable : About nuclear threat (excerpts from the book The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI)

• Accidents are legion. In 1961, for example, a B-52 in the skies above North Carolina developed a fuel leak. The crew ejected from the ailing aircraft, leaving it and its payload to plummet to the ground. In the process, a live hydrogen bomb’s safety switch flicked to “armed” as it crashed into a field. Of its four safety mechanisms, just one was left in place, and an explosion was miraculously avoided. 

• In 2003 the British Ministry of Defence disclosed more than 110 near misses and accidents in the history of its nuclear weapons program. 

• Even the Kremlin, hardly a model of openness, has admitted 15 serious nuclear accidents between 2000 and 2010.

•  Tiny hardware malfunctions can produce outsized risks. In 1980 a single faulty computer chip costing forty-six cents almost triggered a major nuclear incident over the Pacific.

• And in perhaps the most well-known case, nuclear catastrophe was only avoided during the Cuban missile crisis when one man, the acting Russian commodore, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to give an order to fire nuclear torpedoes.

• Plenty of nuclear material is unaccounted for, from hospitals, businesses, militaries, even recently from Chernobyl. 

• In 2018, plutonium and cesium were stolen from a Department of Energy official’s car in San Antonio, Texas, while they slept in a nearby hotel. 

• The nightmare scenario is a loose warhead, stolen in transit or even somehow missed in an accounting exercise. It may sound fanciful, but the United States has in fact lost at least three nuclear weapons.

• J'ai résumé son livre "The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma" au format audio sur le podcast Parlons Futur (Google, Apple, Spotify)

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

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• Les précédentes

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Quelques mots sur le cuistot

• J'ai écrit plus de 50 articles ces dernières années, à retrouver ici, dont une bonne partie publiés dans des médias comme le Journal du Net (mes chroniques ici), le Huffington Post, L'Express, Les Échos.

• Je suis CEO et co-fondateur de l'agence digitale KRDS, nous avons des bureaux dans 6 pays entre la France et l'Asie, ainsi que de Yelda, “A voice assistant to answer every call” (notre itw sur BFM Business “À la mairie de Plaisir, c'est l'intelligence artificielle qui répond au téléphone”), une des Future 40 startups de Station F, notre étude de cas vidéo bluffante d’1 minute avec Best Western.

• Retrouvez ici mon podcast Parlons Futur (ou taper "Parlons Futur" dans votre appli de podcast favorite), vous y trouverez entre autres des interviews et des résumés de livres (j’ai notamment pu mener un entretien avec Jacques Attali, un autre avec Pierre Bellanger, fondateur et CEO du groupe Skyrock sur Apple Podcast et Spotify).

• Je suis basé à Singapour (mon Linkedin, mon Twitter), également membre du think tank NXU.

Merci, et à bientôt !

Thomas