🚀 Is AI progress slowing down? ; AI Grandma wastes scammers' time ; latest best robot videos ; AI beats doctors again & more
Airships may finally prove useful for transporting cargo
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, co-fondateur de YeldaAI, qui développe des IA pour répondre au téléphone en langage humain pour les administrations et les entreprises. Plus d'infos sur moi en cliquant ici.
Et voici donc ma toute dernière sélection !
L’apéro
Les derniers épisodes du podcast Parlons Futur (Spotify, Apple, Youtube), notamment :
Dernière vidéo du robot humanoïde de Boston Dynamics : Tesla ringardisé, quoi de neuf ? What's next?
Robots humanoïdes, robots chiens : changeront-ils l'art de la guerre significativement ?
L'IA peut-elle créer de faux souvenirs ? Retours et échanges suite à une nouvelle étude
L'ultra-personnalisation des services permise par la data et l'IA est-elle souhaitable ?
Music copyright was worth $45bn in 2024 - now bigger than cinema. (source)
Europeans spend 575 million hours per year clicking through cookie banners, amounting to roughly 1 hour and 25 minutes per person. (That’s an economic cost of $16 billion per annum, or roughly the defence budget of the Netherlands.) (source)
Coca Cola latest AI-turbocharged ad was derided as boring by many, so someone made an unhinged version of it also using AI, way less boring indeed.
Hilarious: Phone Provider Deploys "State-of-the-Art AI Grandma" to Waste Scammers' Time : voir la démo d’1min40s
Démo impressionnante de 50sec d'un robot chinois quadrupède monté sur roues qui dévale une montagne, tantôt sur 4 roues, tantôt sur 2
Real dog's reaction to robot dog: 13-sec video
Robot dog finishes marathon in less than 5 hours, had mechanism to recharge batteries when walking downhill slopes (source)
By simulating the course's hilly environment and its diverse terrains, they were able to develop what they're calling a "high torque transparency joint mechanism" that allows the robot to harvest energy on the downhill slopes, thereby recouping what it lost on the uphill portions.
Lol : Watch moment AI robot leads REVOLUTION as it convinces bot army to ‘quit your jobs’ before leading them out of showroom
Footage shows a little robot move across the showroom floor towards some bigger bots before asking them bizarrely about their working hours.
Lors d'un test entre deux entreprises chinoises de robotique, le robot Erbai a réussi à faire sortir douze machines d'un showroom en engageant avec une conversation non programmée sur leurs conditions de travail.
The small robot asks: "Are you working overtime?"
To which one of the other bots responds: "I never get off work."
The leader bot then persuades two other robots to "come home" with it in the unbelievable incident.
After this, the remaining 10 robots follow closely behind.
Sam Altman's definition of an AI agent (source)
"An AI you can give a long duration task to and provide only minimal supervision."
"For instance, an AI that won't just call 3 restaurants before booking, but 300 hundreds."
"The equivalent of a senior coworker you can give a task that would have taken the human version 2 weeks to complete and can now be done in little time"
Is AI progress slowing down?
The Information reported that OpenAI’s new models show more incremental improvements than their previous ones:
The current paradigm in AI development is to make things bigger to make them better. But OpenAI’s new model, code-named Orion, only performs slightly better than its predecessors. Instead, OpenAI is shifting to improving models after their initial training.
Plus d'infos sur ce sujet après l'apéro avec des extraits très intéressants d'un article de Bloomberg
Amazon has over 750,000 of the machines in use overall, or about half of its 1.55 million human workers. (NYT)
The e-commerce giant's robotic arm Sparrow, for example, excels at what's called "top-picking," or picking up an item at the top of a storage container. It can even manipulate over 200 million items of varying sizes and weights, Amazon claims.
But it struggles at "targeted picking," which involves having to search through a container to pluck out an item hidden by other stuff. It's a common task that any able human employee could do. For robots to do the same, however, will require nothing short of a breakthrough in the field.
Boston Dynamics' Stretch robotic arm can unload twice as many packages as humans
Stretch is a mobile robotic arm mounted on top of a wheeled platform : the 2-min demo
According to global chief information officer at the shipping giant DHL, Stretch can unload around twice as many boxes per hour as humans
New robot that can fold clothes (Wired)
Startup Physical Intelligence has spent the past eight months developing its “foundation model,” called π0 or pi-zero. π0 was trained using huge amounts of data from several types of robots doing various domestic chores. The company often has humans teleoperate the robots to provide the necessary teaching.
“The amount of data we're training on is larger than any robotics model ever made, by a very significant margin, to our knowledge,” says Sergey Levine, a cofounder of Physical Intelligence and an associate professor at UC Berkeley.
Folding clothing is especially challenging for robots, requiring more general intelligence about the physical world because it involves dealing with a wide range of flexible items that deform and crumple unpredictably.
The algorithm displays some surprisingly humanlike quirks, shaking T-shirts and shorts to get them to lie flat, for example.
The robots sometimes fail in surprising and amusing ways. When asked to load eggs into a carton, a robot once chose to overfill the box and force it to shut. Another time, a robot suddenly flung a box off a table instead of filling it with things.
Apple Should Have Learned a Chinese Lesson on EVs (Bloomberg)
Xiaomi Corp. made a name for itself selling $100 smartphones that do a decent imitation of far costlier Apple and Samsung Electronics Co. products. In March, just a month after Apple told employees that its Project Titan car initiative was being shut down, Chief Executive Officer Lei Jun announced his bid to do the same thing for sports cars.
At a base price of $30,000 for Chinese buyers, the SU7 EV accelerates faster than a Porsche Taycan but costs about what you’d pay for a Toyota Camry in the US. Booming sales of the vehicle helped the company smash through estimates of September quarter revenue last week. Shares have almost doubled since the SU7 was unveiled.
Airships may finally prove useful for transporting cargo (The Economist)
One straightforward way to control buoyancy (flottabilité) is to take on and release ballast (du lest).
Flying Whales, a company based near Paris, has designed a 200-metre-long “flying crane” helium airship (mock-up pictured above) to hold up to 60 tonnes of water ballast, a ballast easier to handle than sand for instance.
The firm’s boss reckons it would be practical for moving rocket sections and powerline towers; transporting logs from forests to sawmills; and carrying heavy equipment like turbine blades and prefab hospitals to remote areas. With help from aerospace partners including Boeing, Pratt & Whitney and Thales, he hopes to have the first airship built and certified by early 2028.
Horrible : it could be that more than 21,000 foreign workers died during ongoing construction of utopian city Neom in Saudi Arabia (WSJ)
Elon Musk wants to see its Starhip megarocket fly up to 25 times next year,
working its way up to a launch rate of 100 flights per year, and eventually a Starship launching on a daily basis (source)
Belle vidéo inédite du décollage de Starship cette nuit :
Et belle vidéo inédite du splashdown du ship
“Starship is really a replacement. It obsoletes Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule,” SpaceX COO Shotwell commented. SpaceX's president said Falcon 9 will fly for six to eight more years, and then everything will be moved to Starship. That includes human spaceflight.
The idea of dozens of astronauts hitching a ride to LEO on a Starship and then belly-flopping back to Earth seems awfully unsafe today. But, if the company can achieve 400 flights over the next half decade and prove out reliability, human missions could become commonplace.
Rocket competitors: The Falcon 9 retirement date news was likely celebrated by SpaceX’s medium-lift rocket competitors, such as Firefly and Rocket Lab, who could step in and offer dedicated launches to customers that don’t need Starship's volume capacity.
Musk appelle à remplacer les avions de combat par des drones (source)
pas un expert a priori, mais bon...
"Les avions de combat avec pilotes sont obsolètes à l'ère des drones. Avec pour seul résultat la mort des pilotes", a déclaré le patron de SpaceX et Tesla sur sa plateforme X.
"Pendant ce temps-là, t'as des idiots qui construisent encore des avions de combat avec pilote comme le F-35", avait-il réagi dimanche en publiant une vidéo où des centaines de drones se tiennent en formation à quelques dizaines de mètres de hauteur. (voir la vidéo dingue de cette armada de drones en vol synchronisé)
F-35, avion de combat du constructeur américain Lockheed Martin et considéré comme le fleuron des forces aériennes des Etats-Unis depuis son entrée en service en 2015.
New anti-drone weapon can down a target in just a few shots (Wired)
A machine gun mounted on a specially designed rotating turret outfitted with an electro-optical sensor, proprietary AI, and computer vision software
It impresses Department of Defense officials
This 1-min video shows the truck-mounted system locking onto small drones and knocking them out of the sky with just a few shots.
"A DJI Mini drone is a little bit bigger than my hand, and our system can down one at 180 meters with two shots,” he adds. “No human could make that shot.”
The gun points at and follows targets, but does not fire until commanded to by a human operator. However, the maker claims that the system can operate totally autonomously should the US military require it to in the future,
“Our system is fully autonomous-capable, we’re just waiting for the government to determine its needs"
About Musk's wealth (The Economist)
In the 19th century robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller dominated the economy. In the early 20th century, when there was no Federal Reserve, John Pierpont Morgan acted as a one-man central bank.
Mr Musk’s firms are more global than the big 19th- and 20th-century monopolies, and smaller if measured by profits to GDP.
Musk Inc is worth the equivalent of just 2% of America’s stockmarket.
Its main units are Tesla, an electric-car firm; SpaceX, his satellite-communications and rocket business; X, formerly Twitter; and xAI, an artificial-intelligence startup that was valued at $50bn in a deal this week.
These mostly have market shares below 30% and face real competition.
The Economist reckons that 10% of Mr Musk’s $360bn personal fortune is derived from contracts and freebies from Uncle Sam, and 15% from the Chinese market, with the rest split between domestic and international customers.
L’IA peut-elle nous aider à prendre de meilleures décisions ? Deux articles scientifiques récents éclairent la question.
Le premier porte sur des diagnostics médicaux. Les chercheurs ont soumis des descriptions de cas cliniques (1) à un Large Language Model conçu par OpenAI, (2) à des médecins, et (3) à des médecins assistés par ce même LLM. Résultat : le LLM bat à plate couture les médecins seuls (90% de diagnostics corrects contre 74%). Mais surtout, on s’attendrait à ce que "l’équipe" médecin + LLM soit encore supérieure. Or elle fait à peine mieux que les médecins seuls (76%). Car les médecins s’en tiennent à leur propre diagnostic… même quand c’est le LLM qui a raison.
C’est exactement le problème que relève le second article, une méta-analyse (super-compil de 370 études), parue dans Nature Human Behavior. Pour les tâches de création, combiner l’humain et la machine améliore bien la performance. Mais quand il faut prendre des décisions, le "combo" fait moins bien que l’IA seule !
rapporté par Olivier Sibony (prof de stratégie à HEC, London Business School, Oxford) via newslettter TTSO
AI is making it harder to believe what is real and what is not : 2 examples (MIT Tech Review)
In Dublin, crowds gathered in the city center to wait for a Halloween parade to take place. There was no parade planned, but the listing was created by AI and then picked up by social media users and local media.
By way of contrast, some social media users dismissed shocking images of the devastating recent floods in Spain as AI-generated, despite them being entirely real.
Nature is amazing (1) : connaissez-vous le martinet noir ? (Wikipédia)
Le martinet noir passe la quasi intégralité de sa vie en vol, y compris pour se nourrir et pour dormir. Les martinets noirs peuvent ainsi voler dix mois consécutifs, ne se posant qu'en de très rares occasions.
Le martinet noir se nourrit de plancton aérien (insectes, araignées) pendant qu'il vole. Il capture plusieurs centaines d'espèces différentes d'arthropodes qu'il est capable de reconnaître en plein vol dans les couches inférieures de la troposphère
Il dort en volant en groupe de façon circulaire ou au gré de courants aériens en recherchant des zones d'inversion de température à environ 1 500 mètres d'altitude
Nature is amazing (2) : Heart-cockle shells may work like fibre-optic cables (The Economist)
heart cockle : une variété de coques, le coquillage
These heart cockles are able to channel sunlight through their shells using the biological equivalent of fibre optics—the first time such an innovation has been seen in nature.
This possibility evolved so heart cockles can bring light to their internal algae farms without popping their lids. Safer that way!
Many shells and algae have formed symbiotic partnerships with algae living within their tissues. Shells can augment their diet with sugars that their microscopic algae partners produce through photosynthesis.
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The 4 reasons the energy transition will be much cheaper than you think (The Economist)
First, current scenarios being costed tend to involve absurdly speedy (and therefore expensive) emissions cuts.
Second, they assume that the population and economy of the world, and especially of developing countries, will grow implausibly rapidly, spurring energy consumption
Third, such models also have a record of severely underestimating how quickly the cost of crucial low-carbon technologies such as solar power will fall.
Fourth and finally, the estimates disgorged by such modelling tend not to account for the fact that, no matter what, the world will need to invest heavily to expand energy production, be it clean or sooty.
Thus the capital expenditure needed to meet the main goal set by the Paris agreement—to keep global warming “well below” 2°C—should not be considered in isolation, but compared with alternative scenarios in which rising demand for energy is met by dirtier fuels.
There is a catch: the timing of the necessary investments is not the same in a low-carbon world as in a grimy one. Business-as-usual scenarios tend to assume that investment will be spread out roughly evenly across the period under consideration. The strictures on cumulative emissions that a 2°C carbon budget involves mean that more investment in clean energy is needed earlier in the forecast period.
But even assuming the costs are front-loaded, the tab for reaching 2°C need not be overwhelming. And though 1.5°C is not achievable, the models also suggest that spending more now might put Earth on a path to 1.8°C of warming or less.
limiting warming to 1.5°C is, broadly speaking, impossible.
Keeping global warming below 2°C is much more plausible, happily.
the cost of a transition away from fossil fuels is consistently exaggerated.
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Is AI progress slowing down?
OpenAI was on the cusp of a milestone. The startup finished an initial round of training in September for a massive new artificial intelligence model that it hoped would significantly surpass prior versions of the technology behind ChatGPT and move closer to its goal of powerful AI that outperforms humans.
But…
Why Ilya Sutskever, one of the world’s leading LLM researchers and OpenAI cofounder, is pessimistic that scaling will be enough to sustain rapid progress
Many AI engineers believed that scaling would eliminate hallucinations, but…
An AI taught itself to do surgery—and it’s ready to operate on humans : all you need to know
The results left them speechless. “The model is so good at learning things we haven’t taught it”
Have you heard about “electro-agriculture"? Could slash total land usage for farming by roughly 88% in the US alone
The surprising innovations that the Mongols spread across Eurasia
What the first companies hit badly by ChatGPT have in common : 3 lessons
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Thomas