🚀 Voyez ce que cette IA a fait après avoir analysé notre activité cérébrale; faire un appel silencieux avec ce masque & plus

AI discovers new antibiotic, French rocket startup

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 bas d'email.

Voici donc ma dernière sélection !

L’apéro

• Mistral AI, la start-up française d'intelligence artificielle, va lever 100 millions d'euros (Figaro)

  • lancée par des Français qui travaillaient notamment chez Facebook et Google Deepmind

• Démo vidéo d'une minute des nouvelles fonctionnalités IA de Photoshop

• Nouvel outil incroyable : déformer qq ou qq chose sur une photo en l’étirant avec la souris (source)

  

• People fooled by ChatGPT : “One of my favorite examples here: people are walking into libraries asking to check out books that don’t exist because they’ve asked for a list of books.”

• Skyted, une startup française basée à Toulouse, développe un masque permettant à chacun de passer des appels et visios silencieux, sécurisés et confidentiels en tous lieux. (source)

  

  • une sorte de masque devant la bouche qui, grâce à des technologies de pointe en acoustique, absorbe la voix et permet à chaque personne de créer ainsi autour d’elle "bulle de son"

• Meta’s new AI models can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages, and understand 3000 more! (MIT Tech Review)

  • Meta says it halves the error rate of OpenAI’s Whisper

  • They trained it on two new datasets: one that contains audio recordings of the New Testament Bible and its corresponding text taken from the internet in 1,107 languages, and another containing unlabeled New Testament audio recordings in 3,809 languages. 

• Meta open-sources multisensory AI model that combines 6 types of data (source)

  • You could describe a rainforest with text and it’d be able to visualise it, create the sound of rain, understand its depth, map thermal imaging, and appreciate motion readings. 

  • In a blog post, Meta notes that other stream of sensory input could be added to future models, including “touch, speech, smell, and brain fMRI signals.

• China Overtakes Japan As The World’s Biggest Exporter Of Passenger Cars (source)

• Europe is more economically exposed to China than America is. Some 8% of publicly listed European firms’ revenues are from China, compared with 4% for American ones (The Economist)

• British Telecom to cut 55,000 jobs with up to 20% replaced by AI (BBC)

  • "Whenever you get new technologies you can get big changes," said CEO Philip Jansen.

  • CEO said "generative AI" tools such as ChatGPT - which can write essays, scripts, poems, and solve computer coding in a human-like way - "gives us confidence we can go even further".

• Be polite with AI, just in case, you know... ;)

  

• Petit chef d'oeuvre, la dernière pub de Coca-Cola boostée à l'IA générative

• Scientists use AI to discover new antibiotic to treat deadly superbug (The Guardian)

  • Researchers used an AI algorithm to screen thousands of antibacterial molecules in an attempt to predict new structural classes. As a result of the AI screening, researchers were able to identify a new antibacterial compound 

  • “Using AI, we can rapidly explore vast regions of chemical space, significantly increasing the chances of discovering fundamentally new antibacterial molecules,” he said.

  • AI methods afford us the opportunity to vastly increase the rate at which we discover new antibiotics, and we can do it at a reduced cost. 

Partagez cette newsletter par Whatsapp en cliquant ici ❤️

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

  • Partagez la version 100% en anglais de la newsletter avec vos amis non-francophones en cliquant ici

• Et si on vous a partagé cet email, vous pouvez cliquer ici pour vous inscrire et ne pas manquer les prochains

• Pourriez-vous me dire en retour d’email si vous seriez plus enclin à partager cette newsletter si elle était traduite entièrement en français ?

À table !

French rocket launch company Latitude goes on a hiring spree (source)

• Et oui, il existe une startup française qui veut lancer des fusées ! Fondée en 2020, basée à Reims !

• it has initiated a "significant recruitment campaign" to support the development of its Zephyr smallsat rocket. 

• The campaign aims to fill 100 new positions across a range of fields such as propulsion engineering, systems, avionics, systems integration, finance, sales, communications, HR, or project management.

• It is now working toward more engine tests this year with the aim of making a debut launch attempt next year. 

• The rocket will have a payload capacity of 100 kg to low-Earth orbit and may launch from SaxaVord, in the Shetland Islands, and Kourou, in French Guiana.

---

The most powerful new tech took time in the past to change an economy (The Economist)

• James Watt patented his steam engine in 1769, but steam power did not overtake water as a source of industrial horsepower until the 1830s in Britain and 1860s in America.

• In the case of electrification, the key technical advances had all been accomplished before 1880, but American productivity growth actually slowed from 1888 to 1907.

• Nearly three decades after the first silicon integrated circuits Robert Solow, a Nobel-prize winning economist, was still observing that the computer age could be seen everywhere but in the productivity statistics. It was not until the mid-1990s that a computer-powered productivity boom eventually emerged in America.

---

Par curiosité : découvrez la puce électronique star qui permet d'entraîner les modèles d'IA

• La star du moment, la puce (chip en anglais) A100 de Nvidia, en photo ci-dessus

• Mesure 26,7cm de long, 11,1cm de large

• Elle coûte $10,000 l'unité

• UBS analysts estimate an earlier version of ChatGPT required about 10,000 such chips. (10,000*$10,000=100 millions de $)

• The A100 also has the distinction of being one of only a few chips to have export controls placed on it because of national defense reasons. (CNBC)

• The AI Boom Runs on Chips, but It Can’t Get Enough : ‘It’s like toilet paper during the pandemic.’ Startups, investors scrounge for computational firepower. (WSJ)

---

Good news: solar and battery manufacturing capacity is expanding so fast, now on track to meet the 2030 milestones set out in the IEA’s scenario for net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. (Bloomberg)

• If we consider "Installed and announced manufacturing capacity" in terms of %age of "2030 levels needed in IEA net zero scenario":

  • Solar Photovoltaics went from 29% in 2021 of the target for 2030 to 165% at end of Q1 2023

  • Batteries went from 6% to 97% over same period

  • Electrolyzers (that can split water in O2 and hydrogen using electricity) : from 4% to 57%

  • Heat pumps (les pompes à chaleur qui permettent de chauffer/refroidir une pièce grâce à de l'électricité) : from 25% to 42%

  • Wind (éoliennes) : from 24% to 29%

• Planners, policymakers and project developers should also have some confidence that manufacturing can scale to meet net zero’s 2030 milestones

---

How the best language-based AI tool compare (Wharton professor Ethan Mollick)

• Your AI connected to the Internet is going to be Microsoft’s Bing in Creative Mode (the purple screen lets you know it is in creative mode) which is GPT-4, but free and connected to the internet. 

  • It is also weird. It has a personality and some other constraints that might make it harder to work with (again, like some people you might know). 

• So you will probably want an offline, less opinionated AI to work with on longer projects or exchanges. There are 2 good options. 

  • You can use GPT-4 (which you can get through ChatGPT Plus, for a fee), which is the most powerful model available and has a fairly calm, neutral personality. 

  • Or else you can use Anthropic’s Claude, which is not quite as powerful, but has a longer memory and a remarkably pleasant personality (yes, this sounds weird, but trust me, you will know it when you see it). 

• Google’s Bard is very hit-or-miss, even after its updates, so I would skip it for now, though hopefully that will chang

---

Humanoid Robots Are Coming of Age (Wired)

• There are already plenty of warehouse and manufacturing robots out there that use wheels rather than legs. And warehouses can be designed to make clever use of more conventional automation like conveyor belts.

• But Melonee Wise, Agility’s CTO, says there are many situations where legs are far superior, especially at companies that cannot afford to entirely remake their operations around automation.

• Why now?

  • More advanced computer vision, made possible through developments in machine learning over the past decade, has made it a lot easier for machines to navigate complex environments and do tasks like climbing stairs and grasping objects. 

  • More power-dense batteries, produced as a result of electric vehicle development, have also made it possible to pack sufficient juice into a humanoid robot for it to move its legs quickly enough to balance dynamically—that is, to steady itself when it slips or misjudges a step, as humans can. 

• Humanoid robots can more easily navigate stairs, ramps, and unsteady ground; squeeze into tight spaces; and bend down or reach up as they work, Wise says. She’s a recent convert to team humanoid, and was until recently CEO of Fetch Robotics, which makes wheeled warehouse robots.

• Brett Adcock, Figure’s CEO, reckons it should be possible to build humanoids at the same cost of making a car, providing there is enough demand to ramp up production.

---

Presque que toutes les grandes sommités de l'IA signent un texte s'alarmant du risque d'extinction de l'humanité par l'IA

• La déclaration est très brève : « La réduction du risque d'extinction dû à l'IA devrait être une priorité mondiale, au même titre que d'autres risques à l'échelle sociétale tels que les pandémies et la guerre nucléaire. »

• Signés notamment par :

  • 2 des 3 parrains du deep learning : l'aîné Geoffrey Hinton, qui a démissionné il y a peu de Google, et le benjamin Yoshua Bengio

  • les fondateurs de Deepmind dont le CEO Demis Hassabis

  • le CEO d'Open AI Sam Altman et son Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, l'architecte derrière les prouesses de ChatGPT

• Signés aussi par plus de 300 chercheurs et personnalités, dont beaucoup de professeurs, pas que des acteurs du privé

• Les grands absents ?

  • Yann LeCun, le troisième parrain du deep learning et directeur de la recherche sur l'IA chez Meta/Facebook, qui est en complet désaccord :

    • I disagree. AI amplifies human intelligence, which is an intrinsically Good Thing, unlike nuclear weapons and deadly pathogens. 

    • We don't even have a credible blueprint to come anywhere close to human-level AI. Once we do, we will come up with ways to make it safe.

  • Andrew Ng, cofondateur de Google Brain, qui a dit en réponse :

    • When I think of existential risks to large parts of humanity: * The next pandemic * Climate change→massive depopulation * Another asteroid

    • AI will be a key part of our solution. So if you want humanity to survive & thrive the next 1000 years, lets make AI go faster, not slower.

  • Juergen Schmidhuber, reconnu par certains comme le "père" de l'IA moderne who said earlier that says his life’s work won't lead to dystopia.

• Alors faut-il s'inquiéter de ce risque ? Difficile à dire, la meilleure façon d'analyse ce débat que j'ai pu trouver :

  • The anti-doom argument is:

    • “We will design/engineer AGI to be safe; we will test it, monitor it, install safeguards; we will have multiple AGIs and they will police each other, etc.”

    • “Believing doom = believing all of these will fail = conjunction of many special arguments.”

  • The doom argument is:

    • “You can't engineer safe AGI; it will outsmart you, trick you, evade your safeguards; if you have multiple AGIs they will collude against you, etc.”

    • “Believing non-doom = believing you will succeed at all of these = conjunction of many special arguments.”

  • Each side believes that the *other* side has a weird conjunction of many dubious arguments, so each side thinks that their position is the normal default thing and that the *other* side has made an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence.

---

Les incroyables similarités entre le fonctionnement de notre cerveau et celui des réseaux de neurones artificiels ! (The Economist)

• Bien sûr, les réseaux artificiels de neurones ne sont qu'une émulation très imparfaite, très simplifiée du fonctionnement de notre cerveau, et pourtant, dans leur fonctionnement les chercheurs ont identifié des parallèles assez stupéfiants, voyez donc !

• The seminal study comparing brains and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) was published in 2014.

  • The researchers compared what was going on inside the electronic network to what was happening inside the brains of macaque monkeys that had been set the same task of picking out objects from photographs, and whose brains had been wired with electrodes.

  • They found arresting parallels between how the monkeys represented images and how the computers did.

  • “The paper was a game-changer,” says another professor at MIT, “The [artificial] network was not in any way designed to fit the brain. It was just designed to solve the problem and yet we see this incredible fit.”

• A paper published in 2022 found that an ANN trained on image-recognition tasks produced a group of artificial neurons devoted to classifying foodstuffs specifically. 

  •  When the paper was published there was, as far as anyone knew, no analogous area of the human visual system.

  • But the following year researchers from the same laboratory announced that they had discovered a region of the human brain that does indeed contain neurons that fire more often when a person is shown pictures of food.

• In another experiment from 2022, a pair of neuroscientists fed an ANN trained to recognise images with data recorded by an MRI scanner examining human brains (Imagerie par résonance magnétique).

  • The idea was to try to let the ANN “see” through human eyes. 

  • Sure enough, the ANN was able to interpret data from any of the hierarchical layers of the biological visual system—though it did best with data from the higher levels, which had already been partly processed by the brain in question. 

  • If the computer model was shown brain activity from a human that was looking at a picture of a particular dog, for example, then it would say that it was looking at that particular dog—as opposed to some other object—almost 70% of the time.

  • The fact that a silicon brain can happily accept half-chewed data from a biological one suggests that, on some level, the two systems are performing the same sort of cognitive task.

  •  That insight might prove useful for brain-computer interfaces

    •  An ANN linked up to a camera, for instance, might be used to feed partly processed visual information into the brain. 

    • That might help treat some forms of blindness caused by damage to the brain’s visual system.

• In a paper published in May 2023, other researchers used an ANN to monitor brain signals from participants in an MRI scanner. 

  • Using just data from the MRI, the ANN could produce a rough summary of a story that the test subject was listening to, a description of a film they were watching, or the gist of a sentence they were imagining. 

• And even more recently, an AI Recreated Videos People Watched Based on Their Brain Activity (source, scientific paper with examples of videos)

  

  • The resulting system was able to take fresh fMRI scans it hadn’t seen before and generate videos that broadly resembled the clips human subjects had been watching at the time. 

  • While far from a perfect match, the AI’s output was generally pretty close to the original video, accurately recreating crowd scenes or herds of horses and often matching the color palette.

---

Les dernières newsletters :

• Influenceuse vend son clone IA vocal 1$/min : ça dégénère; Days of legal work done in seconds; Exosquelette-pieuvre

• Ordi piloté avec langue; perroquet fait appel vidéo; machine lit nos pensées sans implant; selfie de Cléopâtre; liquid tree

• Starship : success or not?; Crazy story from OpenAI early days; Smart glasses tell you what to say on dates

• Mouse has 2 biological dads; GPT4 saved this dog; Bing writes winning caption for New Yorker's cartoon; AI creates 3D scene from 1 pic

• See what happened to rat after human mini-brain implant ; why China didn’t invent ChatGPT; crazy Biden audio deepfake

• Les précédentes

---

L’addition ?

Cette newsletter est gratuite, si vous souhaitez m'encourager à continuer ce modeste travail de curation et de synthèse, vous pouvez prendre quelques secondes pour :

• transférer cet email à un(e) ami(e) ou partager par whatsapp

  • et ici pour la version 100% en anglais

• étoiler cet email dans votre boîte mail

• cliquer sur le coeur en bas d’email

Un grand merci d'avance ! 🙏

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

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.

• 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).

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

Merci, et bon weekend !

Thomas