🚀 Wearable robotic tail; robot fait du ping-pong, du patin à glace, conquiert territoire & autres news du futur

Bonjour,

Vous recevez la version gratuite de 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 🌏, défense ⚔️ et espace 🚀 pour mieux appréhender le futur 🔮.

Je m’appelle Thomas, plus d’infos sur moi en cliquant ici.

🎙️ Mes derniers podcasts

• Poutine et la guerre à l’Europe : le scénario catastrophe du front atlantique

  • Entretien exceptionnel (Spotify, Apple, Youtube) avec Stéphane Audrand, consultant indépendant en risques internationaux, historien et officier de réserve dans la Marine. Il est l’auteur remarqué de l’article “Poutine et la guerre à l’Europe : le scénario du front atlantique” publié dans le Grand Continent.

• Vivons-nous dans une simulation ? (Youtube)

• 🌍Entretien exclusif avec Philippe Bihouix, co-auteur de la BD à succès “Ressources : Un défi pour l’humanité” (Youtube, Spotify, Apple)

Et voici donc ma toute dernière sélection !

• Dola, a chatbot developed by ByteDance, the creator of TikTok, is hugely popular in Mexico, the Philippines and Britain, where it ranks above Google’s Gemini in Apple’s app store. (The Economist)

• Sony’s Table-Tennis Robot Beat Elite Human Players With Unorthodox Moves (see the video)

• Crazy video of humanoid robots roller-skating and ice-skating, by Chinese robot maker Unitree Robotics (see the video)

• Nice : a wearable robotic tail prototype to provide balance for the elderly

  

• Le robot du fabricant chinois Honor a couru un semi-marathon en 50min 26s, dépassant toutes les performances humaines (le record “humain” est à 57min 20s). (voir la vidéo)

  • Un an plus tôt, il lui fallait encore plus de 2h40.

• Cyberpunk stuff: Drone show with more than 22,000 drones in China, see them fly back to their base (see the video)

  • Now imagine they’re equipped with explosives and good enough AI to crash on determined targets...

• Ukraine and drones : a lot to say !

  • Incredible footage of Ukrainian soldiers shooting down Russian drones in prop planes with shotguns (see the video)

    • Not AI, came from an official Ukrainian account and verified by the WSJ

  • Ukraine went from producing 2,000 drones a year to 4 million in two years. (CBS)

    • Soit 11,000/jour

    • The feedback loop from frontline use to redesigned hardware is now one week. The program is the clearest proof of concept for institutional speed I’ve seen recently.

  • On April 13th Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said the army had passed a milestone by capturing a Russian position using only Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and drones, without any human troops. (The Economist)

    • Drone production has surged from 800,000 3 years ago to a planned 7m this year. Ukraine currently enjoys a 1.3 to 1 advantage over Russia in FPV drones, a Ukrainian official claimed earlier this month.

  • Unmanned Systems Forces make up just 2% of Ukraine’s military but these days Robert Brovdi, Ukraine’s drone commander, says they account for 33% of all targets destroyed. (BBC)

    • Their own casualty rate, he tells me, is no secret: less than 1% per year.

    • His crews are under direct orders to kill more enemy soldiers each month than Russia can recruit. That’s over 30,000 men a month.

    • He says they’ve met their target for four months in a row.

  • In the Gulf, Ukraine flaunts its skill at intercepting drones (The Economist)

    • Ukraine’s defence firms have honed the mass production of interceptors that cost $2,000-5,000 each.

    • These are now taking out up to 90% of the $50,000 Russian Geran-2 drones (an improved version of the Iranian Shaheds) that are launched at Ukrainian cities.

    • The cost differential is critical. The Gulf states have extensive air defences, but it is absurd to shoot down slow-moving Shaheds with Patriot interceptors costing $4m each or $500,000 air-launched aim-9x Sidewinders. These should be reserved, respectively, for taking out ballistic and cruise missiles, which move too fast for drones to hit

• Well... SpaceX itself says unproven AI space data centers may not be commercially viable, its IPO filing shows (Reuters)

• Wow: GPT 2 Image can create full Lego sets! With actual Bricklink IDs so you can order the parts and build it. (source)

  

  • Whole new business opportunity here for the taking!

• Scary! Millions of Americans Are Talking to AI Instead of Going to the Doctor, and It’s Giving Them Horrendously Flawed Medical Advice more than not (source)

  • The AIs’ failure rates exceeded 80 percent when provided with given ambiguous symptoms that could match more than one condition, and for more straightforward cases that included including physical exam findings and lab results, they still failed 40 percent of the time.

  • The researchers also found that unlike human clinicians, the “LLMs collapse prematurely onto single answers,” resulting in “weak performance” across all models.

• Des dizaines de robotaxis IA Baidu se figent en pleine circulation à Wuhan et provoquent un chaos routier (source)

• Congrats! Anthropic Has Surged to a Trillion-Dollar Valuation on Secondary Markets, Overtaking OpenAI (Business Insiders)

  • “Desperate buyers are in a race to secure a dwindling supply of secondary shares in Anthropic, driving the AI company’s valuation on some sites to $1 trillion, a price that would have seemed unthinkable even a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, traders Business Insider spoke with are seeing slumping demand for OpenAI, which is now trading at a discount to Anthropic, despite OpenAI being valued at $852 billion, more than twice Anthropic’s valuation in their most recent funding rounds.”

• Important new finding on human intelligence! (Steven Pinker and source)

  • For decades there’s been abundant evidence for the existence, importance, & heritability of “general intelligence” aka “g”.

  • That is: if you’re above average in verbal skills, you’re likelier to be above average in math, memory, spatial reasoning, & everything else, & genes are a major (though not the only) reason.

  • BUT massive new meta-analysis now says specific cognitive abilities (verbal, math, etc., separate from “g”) are also heritable.

  • Reassuring to those of us who always doubted that “intelligence” is a coherent cognitive mechanism, and consistent with mild versions of specialization, modularity, even “multiple intelligences”

• “Super Bizarre” – Neuroscientists Discover That Adult Brain Is Filled With Millions of “Silent Synapses” (source)

  • These silent junctions act as a massive reservoir of untapped learning potential, allowing the brain to continuously acquire new information without overwriting existing knowledge.

  • This breakthrough suggests that the adult brain is much more flexible and “plastic” than previously thought, functioning similarly to a developing brain.

• Wow : En 2100, il y aura 900 millions d’Indiens de plus que de Chinois (1500 contre 600 millions)

• How surprising!! Norway’s classroom iPad experiment backfired

  • Reading performance weakened, around 500,000 Norwegians struggle with basic literacy (The Times)

    

• Scientists Grow Electronics Inside the Brains of Living Mice (source)

  • The technology harnesses the brain’s own blood chemistry to assemble soft, light-controlled electrodes around neurons.

  • The resulting “living electronics” are responsive to near-infrared light. This allows researchers to manipulate brain activity from outside the skull.

  • Why This Matters : Biocompatibility, Targeted Precision and Medical Potential

• Sperm Whales Speak With a Complex Alphabet and Even Have ‘Vowels’ (source)

  • “Sperm whales (les cachalots): They’re just like us. An international team of researchers, including marine biologists and linguists, reports that it has detected signs of a ‘highly complex’ phonetic alphabet in the calls of sperm whales—including ‘vowels’ deployed in patterns akin to their use in human languages like Mandarin, Latin, and Slovenian.”

• Ceux qui défendent la théorie de La Simulation ne sont pas des complotistes qui pensent que la terre est plate” (JDN, par l’auteur du livre-enquête La Simulation)

  • On parle d’individus qui sont astrophysiciens à la NASA, chercheurs en intelligence artificielle à Berkeley, mathématiciens à Caltech, philosophes de l’esprit

  • Pour prouver que nous vivons bien dans une simulation, il faut trouver la fameuse anomalie : le glitch ! Ces gens à qui je parle dans le livre ont toutes sortes de suggestions pour y parvenir. Certains cherchent à regarder dans le fond diffus du cosmos s’il n’y aurait pas des bizarreries dans la façon dont la lumière se propage, un peu comme si l’on allait au bout de la carte dans un jeu vidéo, et que l’on essayait de trouver l’endroit où la couture craque, où le bras du joueur passe à travers, parce que l’on se trouve à l’endroit où le jeu arrive à sa limite. Nous ne sommes toutefois pas technologiquement en capacité de le faire.

• L’intelligence artificielle permet désormais de déclencher plus de la moitié des contrôles fiscaux en France (source)

• More than half of NYT readers preferred AI-generated prose to human writing in a blind test (NYT)

• Industries Most Exposed to AI Are Not Only Seeing Productivity Gains but Jobs and Wage Growth Too, new study shows

  • Those patterns suggest that, at least so far, AI has acted as a productivity-enhancing tool that boosts employment and wages rather than a simple substitute for labor.

• Claude Cowork vs OpenClaw : comparatif des agents IA personnels (JDN)

• A typical data center creates 1,000-10,000 construction jobs but only 50-300 permanent roles. The gains are real but temporary. (source)

• Anthropic alerte les responsables américains sur les capacités de cyberattaque à grande échelle de son futur modèle Mythos (Axios)

• Parlons Passé : Amazing video 3-min video : From Celtic village to world capital: how Paris became Paris

• Parlons Passé : Ancient Southern Levant was ultra-violent, with 25% of skeletons showing cranial trauma (source)

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• 🔒 Why Jensen Huang believes Google’s TPUs can’t compete with NVDIA’s GPUS

• 🔒 Why having “humans in the loop” in an AI war is an illusion

• 🔒 Sam Altman Proposes a New Economic System for the AI Era: what you need to know

• 🔒 See how AI Models Lie, Cheat, and Steal to Protect Other Models From Being Deleted

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Merci, et à bientôt !

Thomas