1. SanctuaryaI unveiled the seventh generation of its general purpose robot Phoenix. The latest generation robot and its AI control system, Carbon™, draw even closer to that of a person, with wide ranging improvements to both the hardware and AI software. The announcement comes less than 12 months after Sanctuary AI’s sixth generation robot.
The changes include:
Increased uptime, making robots more available for training and data capture
Increased build and commissioning speed, allowing us to bring more units online faster
Reduced bill of materials, lowering the cost of manufacture
Significant hardware improvements, increasing range of motion in the wrists, hands, and elbows, and increasing hand durability
Further miniaturized hydraulics, reducing the weight, power consumption, and complexity with increased hardware and software measures that exceed specified safety standards
Improved visual acuity and tactile sensing, leading to higher-fidelity data to train the AI control system
The time it takes for new tasks to be automated has gone from weeks to less than 24 hours, marking a major inflection point in task automation speed and autonomous system capability
2. XAI is close to raising $6 billion at a valuation of $18 billion. Venture Capital Firms like Sequoia are among the investors.
3. Chinese firm SenseTime launched a new LLM. It can beat GPT-4 Turbo across nearly all key benchmarks. The ~600 billion parameter model features a 200k context window and was trained on over 10TB of largely synthetic data.
SCMP – SenseTime’s shares gained as much as 36 per cent after the company launched the latest iteration of its SenseNova large language model.
China now has over 200 domestically made AI models.
There is more AI news roundup at Nextbigfuture.substack.com.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
All UBI recipients will be of major economic value.
No consumers means no economy, nothing.
AI will also be useful in colonizing space:
“Rapid advances in creating “swarms” of interlinked AI-enhanced robots, and in global “cloud robotics” networks that allow them to learn from each other, are remaking the realm of space robotics and its future, Hodges tells me in a series of interviews.”
See:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinholdenplatt/2024/04/27/robot-explorers-futuristic-spacex-starships-set-to-transform-the-moon/
True A.I is many decades or longer away, the recent panic is mostly generated from people whose only knowledge of A.I comes from fictional TV and movies. Givin that the intelligence of the general population seems to be falling, due to technology reducing the need for people to do calculations on their own, and a quick look at world news headlines, is more than enough proof that the emotional maturity of the human race occasionally moves backward, and seems generations away from moving forward. A true A.I is very likely the only thing to save humans from themselves. If that day comes, it’s not an exaggeration at all to expect 10’s of millions of angry people, screaming about the machine taking away their right to destroy themselves, and take everyone else with them. Even today in the U.S some people would do anything to prove their opinion is the only good opinion, even more important to them than being right, is proving others are wrong. Who knows if things will improve, but for now it’s getting worse every day. The world would be a much better place if that first ape who came down from the trees to have a look around, went straight back up and stayed there.
The problem is not the AGI but its definition. If we set it as in 2022, then we have definitely already reached that goal with gemini pro 1.5 capable of analyzing text images audio and video. The problem is that every time the definition expands, and somehow we decided that “AGI is more than that”.
It’s just like the question of whether humanity has passed the Turing test. In my opinion, even GPT 3.5 already did it a long time ago. But for some reason all the time our demands on the AI are increasing
The convergence of robotics and LLMs will make AGI a reality by 2030.
Easily.
I think we’ll have AGI by next year, and ASI by 2030.
Which is why I’m pushing on people that they need to begin to accept this massive change to our way of life now, cause it takes awhile to sink in.
People think I’m smokin’ something when I tell them UBI will be passed by congress, and signed by the President in 2030. It doesn’t matter who the President is, UBI is the ONLY way to stop the destruction of your country. Every country will adopt it, it’s just a question of when.
It’s a cold hard reality, that by 2030, half of all jobs will be gone. Humanoid robotics are great, and will take many jobs, but isn’t even needed for data entry jobs or driving jobs, and those 2 categories will be quickly dissolving, and both currently employ half the workforce.
I can’t wait to be able to stop being an economic slave to the system. So I’m looking forward to seeing headlines about finally getting humanoid robots into mass production.
UBI will not be required, or helpful.
The shape of the machine bears no difference on the effect of displacing workers.
What has happened, will continue to happen, that is growth of the entire economy, particularly the service sector.
The human service sector.
Fact is AI’s current “rapid” pace will die down as new specialized hardware finishes plucking low hanging fruit.
It will be at least 3 decades before we can start churning out human capable/smart robots, as that is about the speed it takes to shrink down entire data centers into a mobile sized device.
Oh and none of today’s massive data centers full of computers is on par with the human brain yet, so add some more time, oh and don’t forget production ramp up, so a decade plus there.
You’re looking at a minimum of 50 years to get to an “I robot” level of adoption.
The singularity might as well refer to the AI bubble that’s growing now when it pops.
I agree, that the current economic system is a slavery system. The faster its demise the better.
I agree, that UBI is inevitable.
My concern is that a large % of people instead of using the time freed up for interesting and useful activities will become unhealthy couch potatoes.
Crazy that you think you will be less of a slave when you are a pure liability on the government balance sheet, of no economic value.
All UBI recipients will be of major economic value.
No consumers means no economy, nothing.
Maybe, but we’re going to run out of low hanging fruit for AI chip architecture on the way.
By 2030 we’ll be on par with conventional silicon improvements so progress will be closer to todays 30% every 2 years.