🚀This week's crazy generative AI videos ; first private spacewalk; first robot dentist ; Humans to Mars in 2028? & 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, 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
Vous pouvez retrouver retrouver mon dernier épisode de podcast Parlons Futur “GPT-4o / la fin des devoirs ? / confier son Tinder à l'IA” sur Spotify, Apple ou votre platforme préférée : un entretien sur ces sujets d’actualité liés à l’IA entre autres
Et au cas où, comme Agathe ne sera malheureusment pas dispo pour continuer, je recherche quelqu’un pour la remplacer et me poser des questions pour les prochains épisodes, si vous connaissez des profils :)
Nice 40-sec Gen AI video : ces peintures s'animent !
This week’s other crazy generative AI video : une band-annonce de film "français", euhh, watch the 1-min video
Démo impressionnante : cet outil crée une vidéo très convaincante à partir d'un audio et d'une photo (source)
Bref, cela fait dire n'importe quoi à n'importe qui en vidéo (y compris une statue, la Joconde, Einstein, etc.)
Pas mal de vidéos de 20 secondes en exemple sur le site du papier
First private spacewalk in history (BBC)
See the 25-second video on Twitter
Billionaire Jared Isaacman has made history on SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission by completing the first privately-funded spacewalk.
To date, only around 260 people have had the privilege to "walk" in space
The 12 minutes he spent outside SpaceX's Dragon capsule will go down as a key milestone in commercial spaceflight. (vue d’artiste plus bas)
Wearing specially adapted spacesuits, Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis took turns floating outside of the spacecraft at an orbit altitude of around 700km, almost twice the height of the International Space Station's usual orbit !
Both of them conducted tests on the mobility of the suits they were wearing, which were equipped with helmet displays and helmet-mounted cameras.
By the time Isaacman and Gillis ventured outside, the pressure inside their suits was a mere 5 psi, just below the summit of Mount Everest.
But even with SpaceX's newfangled extravehicular activities (EVA) suit, Isaacman and Gillis were still fully connected to their Dragon spacecraft via an umbilical, providing them with a steady supply of oxygen and thermal controls.
The suit was designed and built at SpaceX.
"The ultimate goal is that you can put on the spacesuit and go out and get work done anywhere in the solar system and not feel like you're wearing anything more than you normally wear everyday," (3-min SpaceX video on Twitter about the suit)
The crew also made their first bit of space history when they reached an altitude of 1,400.7 kilometers, higher than any other crewed mission since the Apollo program a half-century ago.
And another new record! 19 people are orbiting Earth right now
On 18 March 1965, the USSR achieved another space first – sending the first human outside of a spacecraft to "walk" in space.
Maybe the most impressive "first" (at least to me!) happened in 1984, je ne me lasserai jamais de cette photo :
Until then, astronauts and cosmonauts had remained attached to their spacecraft by tether to keep them from floating off into the vastness of space.
The difference with McCandless was that he did it untethered (non attaché), going as far as 91m from the Space Shuttle Challenger, which is when the picture above was taken.
Fortunately for McCandless, he carried on his back a new nitrogen-propelled device that could be controlled using joysticks. The Manned Manoeuvring Unit (MMU) had 24 nitrogen thrusters that allowed him to remain stable and move around in space.
Google co-founder and ex-Alphabet president Sergey Brin said he’s back working at Google “pretty much every day” (Techcrunch)
because he hasn’t seen anything as exciting as the recent progress in AI — and doesn’t want to miss out.
Demis Hassabis on X : "Advanced mathematical reasoning is a critical capability for modern AI. We announce a major milestone in a longstanding grand challenge: our hybrid AI system attained the equivalent of a silver medal at this year’s International Math Olympiad!"
his bio on X/Twitter: Co-founder & CEO@GoogleDeepMind - working on AGI. Trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality. Also revolutionising drug discovery
A rack of servers needed for AI can use up to 14 times more electricity than a rack of normal servers. (The Economist)
Au rayon robots
Impressive (and disturbing I have to say) 30-sec demo video of NEO Beta, a humanoid robot built for the home
NEO’s body is engineered with muscle-like anatomy instead of rigid hydraulics so they’re strong and gentle like we are.
NEO can walk, jog, climb stairs, and navigate your space naturally. As they move and perform tasks, they get even more efficient.
Great 20-sec video of new electric Atlas humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics doing pushups (their website)
à côté des deux premiers le robot humanoïde de la NASA "Valkyrie" paraît bien rustique
Watch a 50-sec video of a robot peeling vegetables with human-like dexterity
“Pulkit Agrawal at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues have developed a robotic system that can rotate different types of fruit and vegetable using its fingers on one hand, while the other arm is made to peel.”
Fully-automatic robot dentist performs world's first human procedure (source)
The machine's first specialty: preparing a tooth for a dental crown.
Perceptive claims this is generally a two-hour procedure that dentists will normally split into two visits. The robo-dentist knocks it off in closer to 15 minutes.
In Leaked Audio, Amazon Cloud CEO Says Human Developers Will Soon Be a Thing of the Past (Business Insider)
"If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can't exactly predict where it is — it's possible that most developers are not coding,"
Mmmm : Three cofounders leave French AI startup H just three months after raising $220m seed (Sifted)
due to “operational differences”
Due to the background of its founders and the amount of funding it secured, H has been one of the hottest AI startups in France, alongside companies like Mistral and Poolside.
H builds foundational models that it describes as “agentic”, a type of AI that is designed to be able to break down tasks into multiple steps and carry out those sub tasks, rather than just responding to prompts one at a time. The startup says that its models will be more capable of reasoning, planning and collaborating than those of its competitors.
Ilya Sutskever’s new AI startup Safe Superintelligence has raised $1 billion at a valuation of $5 billion. (Reuters)
to help develop safe artificial intelligence systems that far surpass human capabilities
they have 10 employees so far
Musk's xAI Supercharges the AI Race with World's Most Powerful Cluster containing 100,000 Nvidia GPUs (source)
xAI plans to double Colossus to 200,000 GPUs (including 50,000 H200s) in mere months
This exponential leap is incredible when you consider that Grok 2, which recently caught up to GPT-4, was trained on just 15,000 GPUs.
Microsoft Copilot has underwhelmed in both sales and adoption (source)
Chiffre édifiant et terrifiant : en 2008 la zone euro et les États-Unis avaient le même PIB, aujourd'hui les États-Unis nous dépassent de 75%
In the Roman Empire, it took 40 years of labour to make a tonne of copper. Now it only takes 21 days. (source)
Battery prices have fallen by more than half in just 18 months. (source)
New 'structural battery' that could unlock smartphones as thin as credit cards, laptops 50% lighter, and a 70% boost to EV range. (source)
More than half of all new cars sold in China last month were electric vehicles from 7% just 3 years ago (source)
Mars water: Liquid water reservoirs found under Martian crust (BBC)
Elon Musk on going to Mars (Twitter):
Making life multiplanetary is fundamentally a cost per ton to Mars problem.
It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars.
That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.
The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens.
These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years.
Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin (source)
“The primary reason that I left my CEO role at Amazon in 2021 is so I could focus on Blue,”
“Blue is really where I'm putting the vast majority of my productive efforts. And I'm working harder than I ever have.”
a workforce that has ballooned to ~11,000 people, near SpaceX’s ~14,000 employees.
Meta releases the biggest and best open-source AI model yet (The Verge)
Llama 3.1 outperforms OpenAI and other rivals on certain benchmarks. Now, Mark Zuckerberg expects Meta’s AI assistant to surpass ChatGPT’s usage in the coming months.
In a letter published on Meta’s company blog, Zuckerberg argues that open-source AI models will overtake — and are already improving faster than — proprietary models, similar to how Linux became the open-source operating system that powers most phones, servers, and gadgets today.
He compares Meta’s investment in open-source AI to its earlier Open Compute Project, which he says saved the company “billions” by having outside companies like HP help improve and standardize Meta’s data center designs as it was building out its own capacity.
Looking ahead, he expects the same dynamic to play out with AI, writing, “I believe the Llama 3.1 release will be an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source.”
Meta claims that Llama 3.1 costs roughly half that of OpenAI’s GPT-4o to run in production. It’s releasing the model weights so that companies can train it on custom data and tune it to their liking.
Zuckerberg’s prediction: Meta AI will be the most-used chatbot by the end of this year (ChatGPT has over 100 million users)
Cool tool to Train AI easily on any product, style, or mood board to create content: everart.ai
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Mark Zuckerberg and Daniel Ek on Why Europe Should Embrace Open-Source AI and Why It’s Already Missing Out Opportunities
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