Also, current LLMs are great at modelling best practices.
Most disease diagnosis, even rare diseases, follows predictable paths. Human doctors would have to have superhuman memories to do as well.
What's more exciting to me is that this knowledge is now free. Free as in beer.
People talk of UBI, but what about universal services that cost nothing?
2025 is likely to have some surprises in store of us with regards to Generative AI's latest and greatest frontier LLMs.
Explore how AI reshapes family, relationships, and ethics, redefining human life and coexistence in a rapidly evolving world.
This is the Mengxi Blue Ocean Photovoltaic Power Station, now China’s largest single-capacity solar power plant. Worth noting is that it's built in the Gobi Desert, an area twice the size of Ukraine. So there's room for plenty more.
Without grid storage, this is priced at about 10% of the cost of new nuclear projects.
Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and University of Zurich have mapped the long-term behavior of stem cells in transplant recipients, analyzing samples taken up to 31 years post-transplant. The study reveals key insights into stem cell survival, donor age impact, and immune system recov...
Thoughts on how AI agents might develop large and resilient rogue populations.
It's a no from me. I suspect as the US gets more deregulated for AI, it will be more no's from people around the world.
Despite 49% surge in shipments, buyers seem unconvinced
“There is a perception that the economy is changing, and workers have to make a drastic decision: to undergo training or to go into retirement because the investment in their own human capital is not worth it,” Giuntella says.
As the world's leading manufacturing nation, it is no surprise that Chinese people are feeling the headwinds of robotic automation first. Mainstream neoliberal economics says AI & robotics will provide more jobs than they take away. Yet, here we see evidence of the contrary.
As goes China today, the rest of the world will soon follow. If robot and AI employees are so cheap to employ, who will buy the expensive goods and services from human-employee businesses?
The recent US election seems more evidence that the neoliberal model of capitalism is crumbling and in decay everywhere. Maybe whatever replaces it will have to honestly face up to the economic realities of AI & robots.
Now that scaling is hitting a wall, it will be interesting to see what methods like this continue AI's progress.
Researchers from Meta FAIR, the University of California, Berkeley, and New York University have introduced Thought Preference Optimization (TPO), a new method aimed at improving the response quality of instruction-fine tuned LLMs.
Trump's plan seem to be to purge the US military of any generals that don't agree with him, and his Secretary of Defence pick, has spoken of the need for using the military against US citizens he sees as leftist.
If this is how things play out, how likely is it some states like California may talk of secession, or armed resistance organizes against the military?
Breakthrough training system utilizing imitation learning opens 'new frontier' in medical robotics
A deep dive into Alibaba’s AI strategy, the company behind the Qwen series
This will be a great way to channel vast sums of money from the American taxpayer to rich elites, for which the taxpayer will see little or nothing in return. Something the US public are about to see a lot more of.
While people usually focus on carbon neutrality, I often think decentralization is renewables' most underappreciated aspect. Everything it touches can happen at the home and community level. The Haber-Bosch process is the epitome of the 20th century large scale heavy industry model. Now here is a solution replacing it at the level of individual farms.
I suspect much of robotics will be decentralized too, and with that, they may decentralize automated manufacturing. In a few decades, it may seem quaint that people shipped so many things halfway around the world.
As frontier models join forces with the Pentagon, corporations and the state are becoming too close.
Thoughts on Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace.”
Now that the new US administration is about to gut AI regulations, this idea gets even worse.
He said it again a few days ago on a Reddit AMA.
Perhaps the most interesting comment from Altman was about the future of AGI - artificial general intelligence. Seen by many as the ‘real’ AI, this is an artificial intelligence model that could rival or even exceed human intelligence. Altman has previously declared that we could have AGI within "a few thousand days".
When asked by a Reddit user whether AGI is achievable with known hardware or it will take something entirely different, Altman replied: “We believe it is achievable with current hardware.”
The argument for current LLM AIs leading to AGI has always been that they would spontaneously develop independent reasoning, through an unknown emergent property that would appear as they scale. It hasn't happened, and there's no sign that it will.
That's a dilemma for the big AI companies. They are burning through billions of dollars every month, and will need further hundreds of billions to scale further - but for what in return?
Current LLMs can still do a lot. They've provided Level 4 self-driving, and seem to be leading to general-purpose robots capable of much useful work. But the headwinds look ominous for the global economy, - tit-for-tat protectionist trade wars, inflation, and a global oil shock due to war with Iran all loom on the horizon for 2025.
If current AI players are about to get wrecked, I doubt it's the end for AI development. Perhaps it will switch to the areas that can actually make money - like Level 4 vehicles and robotics.
Why are they making it so needlessly complicated? They can just use existing highways and vehicles with Level 4 self-driving. They don't need new separate roads.
That said, this points to the future. Even if true Level 5 self-driving is several years off, there is plenty Level 4 can do now. That includes all cargo driving on highways. I doubt most trucker jobs have long to go. Some will say they are needed for last-mile delivery. Some companies are soon going to figure out a profitable system for having human drivers locally for that, but self-driving vehicles for the long stints on highways.
It is hoped ‘innovative’ 24-hour design will also cut carbon emissions, as demand for delivery services soars
Physical Intelligence is bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world.
Why would people be eager to have a place like them joining the fedi?
If BlueSky were federated it would mean you could move to another server and keep the followers you built there. All the Big Tech offerings keep you locked in, and at risk of losing the work you put in at their whim.
Apart from getting funded by crypto-bros, BlueSky promised to allow federation, and hasn't. Seems any time VCs or talk of IPOs happens, the only way is down.
Bluesky has announced a $15M series A raise by a crypto venture capital fund, leading many people to talk about 'enshittification'. But is enshittification the right way to look at things?
Most people seem to hate the idea of AI versions of dead celebrities, but I can't help but be a bit intrigued. I'm a fan of golden-age Hollywood movies from the 1930s to 1950s. Most of that era's stars are dead now, but I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before we see some of their likeness in 'new' versions of old movies. Some people may not like it, but where there are dollars to be made, things tend to happen.
What would 'Casablanca' be like with Spencer Tracy instead of Humphrey Bogart? 'Gone with the Wind' with Vivien Leigh swapped out for Bette Davis. Orson Welles always said his masterpiece would have been 'The Magnificent Ambersons', not 'Citizen Kane', if the former hadn't been destroyed by the studio in editing. Maybe his vision of it can be resurrected by AI versions of the actors recreating scenes from the original script.
"Of the world’s four largest greenhouse gas emitters the EU has made by far the most progress in slashing emissions. A report released last week by the UN Environment Programme calculated that EU emissions fell 7.5 percent last year -- compared to a 1.4-percent drop in the United States, and a jump of 5.2 and 6.1 percent respectively in China and India."
This is largely driven by swapping out coal for renewables, which means the EU is on track for its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050. China and India have growing electricity demand, that even China with its vast renewables manufacturing capability, can't meet from renewables alone. There is talk in the EU about speeding up efforts to try to reach carbon neutrality sooner. Crucially, this can now be tied to a pro-economic growth agenda which will get more right-wing parties in the European Parliament on board.
Researchers have been trying to get robots to autonomously wipe tables and fold towels for years with only very limited success
Yes, this has been true up until now, but I think we are in a phase of rapid advancement. Look here at how DeepMind is using current LLM AI so that robots can train themselves - https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/shaping-the-future-of-advanced-robotics/
I would guess robots capable (perhaps messily at first) of general purpose skills like cleaning aren't far off.
The UBTECH one is definitely not as advanced as the Atlas one. But I would expect, like everything electronic, China will eventually have commoditized versions of robots that are functionally almost as good as more expensive ones, but much cheaper.
https://www.techeblog.com/unitree-g1-humanoid-robot-mass-production/
Customer relationship management software puts its details into structured fields, like many other types of software, a database of sorts. This user is saying that extra step is no longer needed. The AI is capable of extracting, summarizing, and structuring the data from emails, Slack, etc - thus no more need for the software anymore.
I've been wondering when current LLM AIs would start to master this ability. I suspect it will be one of the things it's good at. For many tasks, software usage patterns are relatively predictable and modelable. A trend with current AI, is for competitors and open-source to rapidly follow industry leaders. We can expect AI like this to be widely available in six months.
Many people's knowledge work employment is tied to software skills and experience. That premium is about to start diminishing. People are familiar with the concept of 'macros'; automating repetitive sequences of software usage. It seems all but inevitable AI will be doing something similar, but orders of magnitude greater, and that all the forces in free market economics will be driving it to replace expensive humans.
Yes, I also forgot to mention this tech is a safeguard against supply-side shocks. like with wheat after Russia attacked Ukraine.
Some people's reaction to this proposal might be to wonder why bother? We already have a functional agriculture system using sunlight that's been working for several thousand years. But there is a lot to be said for improving on it.
This approach could grow many foods where they can't currently be grown. Thus we could localize food production, and decentralize it. This could vastly reduce the waste of food transport. Furthermore, pollution from pesticides could be vastly reduced. It also allows us to think about rewilding huge swathes of our environments. Finally, this is an approach amenable to full automation. Ultimately that will reduce the price of food and its availability. Who knows, several decades from now, the standard way to produce food may be via indoor methods tended to by robot farmers.
Yeah, like everything the challenge is to get from the Lab to production. Perovskite solar cells, another type of solar cells that show great theoretical promise, have issues with long-term stability. Solar cells need to survive in tough conditions for many years to be useful. Here I would also wonder about the relative scarcity of gallium being a limiting factor.
That I can help you with.
Without doxxing them, this reddit user campaigns a lot IRL on UBI - their posts/UBI subreddits have loads of stuff - https://www.reddit.com/user/2noame
Also Twitter has load of stuff - search 'UBI' there, scroll down based on 'Top' and there are lots of accounts devoted to UBI news.
BTW - You're welcome to setup https://futurology.today/UBI here too & cross-post/double-post if you want
