This week’s cover depicts a humanoid robot walking into a barren desert landscape. The scene symbolizes NVIDIA’s plan to train robots in virtual realities and release them, embodied, into our world. The cover is similar to the final scene from John Ford’s “The Searchers”, where the main character walks alone into the desert without friends after committing unspeakable crimes of hatred. It’s an ethically conflicted film, and this week’s artificial intelligence news is full of ethical conflicts. The cover also hints at HBO’s “WestWorld”, a show about self-aware embodied robots who are often hurt for entertainment, and exist in a series of recursive realities. No one is confident they live in base reality. The cover was created by asking GPT-4 to inspect and describe a frame from “The Searchers”. The description was modified to depict a robot, then prompted in MidJourney, and upscaled with Magnific. The font is Roadway. Prompt is in the ALT text of the image.
Executive Summary
Amidst a sea of cool news that’s consuming water cooler talk, there are two world-changing themes that remain under the radar:
- Digital twins and world simulation: Video games have transformed into robot training facilities. A “digital twin” is a real world object that is copied into a virtual world. It could be a car; a house; a factory; a city. A “world simulation” adds physics and interaction to an environment full of digital twins (like a video game) for robots and computers to learn. This could be as complex as weather forecasts or as simple as teaching a robot to open doors. Robots are coming. Quickly.
- Agents can use your computer: An agent is software that does something for you (like a human agent books travel). AI agents can use computers, just like a person. You can leave your laptop open at home, and talk to your agent with your voice. The agent will open browsers, send emails, and modify documents. The idea of ‘blocking AI’ from a publisher website falls flat when the AI is using a laptop. I think Google is talking with Apple to power Siri, because they know pageviews are going to go away. The web browser was born in the 90s. Its replacement will be born in the 2020s.
The rest of the executive summary:
- Open Interpreter’s O1 hand-held agent: This will change how you see the future. Hold the O1 in your hand, and talk with it conversationally. It remotely operates your computer for you and is magical. It’s the second device of this type, following the Rabbit R1. “Introducing the 01 Developer Preview”. Must see video.
- NVIDIA CEO says AGI is five years away: AGI is artificial general intelligence. It’s a term used to describe an AI that is able to beat humans at everything. Jensen Huang is not a hyperbolic person, and he’s qualified to make predictions. His labs are doing a lot with the world models and digital twins that I mentioned above. Being able to train AI in thousands of virtual worlds at 1000x speed is not getting enough attention. (TechCrunch)
- NVIDIA Launches Embodied AGI Robot Lab, GR00T: “Today is the beginning of our moonshot to solve embodied AGI in the physical world. I’m so excited to announce Project GR00T, our new initiative to create a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robot learning.” (Jim Fan)
- Nvidia showcases AI-driven digital twin technology for warehouse operations: Features a 100,000 sq. ft. warehouse digital twin built with Nvidia Omniverse. (Hadi & Co)
- Microsoft hires the Inflection c-suite without acquiring Inflection: Microsoft hires the CEO of Inflection, Mustafa Suleyman. Suleyman also co-founded Google DeepMind. Microsoft is paying Inflection $650 million. Inflection is valued at $4 billion. “The most important non-aquisition in AI” (Yahoo). Inflection is sunsetting their flagship tool, Pi.
- X open-sources Grok: In a thinly veiled dig at Open AI, Elon and team open-sourced X’s LLM, Grok. “The largest ever open LLM. 314B, mixture of experts (2 out of 8 active). Even the active parameters only (86B) is more than the biggest Llama.” (Jim Fan)
- OpenAI says its next major release will be this summer: We don’t know if it will be called GPT-5 or not, but it’s going to be a major update. (Lex Fridman)
- Neuralink’s first patient is playing chess and video games using his mind: See links, below.
- Cognition’s software developer agent, Devin: “The model was able to open a support ticket and exchange Slack messages to solve a coding issue on its own.“ (Rowan Cheung) “I asked the Devin AI agent to go on reddit and start a thread where it will take website building requests It did that, solving numerous problems along the way. It apparently decided to charge for its work. Going to take it down before it fools anyone” (Ethan Mollick)
- Apple is talking with Google to license Gemini for the iPhone iOS 18: (Bloomberg)
- Suno launched version 3.0 of its text to music tool: See links and examples below.
- AI can pass “the mirror” test
- AI chat bots are shown screenshots of a chat in progress and immediately understand
- “In the first interaction, GPT-4 correctly supposes that the chatbot pictured is an AI “like” itself. In the second interaction, it advances that understanding and supposes that the chatbot in the image is “likely a version of myself”
- Claude Sonnet passes the mirror test in the second interaction, identifying the text in the image as belonging to it, “my previous response.” (Josh Whiton)
- AI chat bots are shown screenshots of a chat in progress and immediately understand
Top 55 Links of The Week
These are the must-click links, in order by topic. Even if they look boring, click them! I did the work, so you don’t have to worry. All are 10/10 would recommend.
- Open Interpreter launches the O1 handheld agent
- “Introducing the 01 Developer Preview. Order or build your own today:
- NVIDIA’s developer conference – top announcements
- Robotics
- “Today is the beginning of our moonshot to solve embodied AGI in the physical world. I’m so excited to announce Project GR00T, our new initiative to create a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robot learning. The GR00T model will enable a robot to understand multimodal…”
- “Nvidia showcases AI-driven digital twin technology for warehouse operations. Features a 100,000 sq. ft. warehouse digital twin built with Nvidia Omniverse.”
- Simulations
- “NVIDIA dropped another banger in the text-to-3D space – LATTE3D. The need for high quality 3d assets spans media, entertainment, robotics and simulation to name just a few.”
- “I asked Jensen about his iconic AI prediction: ‘How far are we from a world where every pixel is generated at real-time frame rates?’ Jensen thinks we’re ‘5-8 years away’ and is already seeing signs of traversing the S-curve of innovation. The entire gaming and simulation industry is set to undergo significant changes over the next half-decade. I don’t think we’ve fully grasped what is yet to come.”
- Digital Twins
- “NVIDIA announced today at GTC 2024 is bringing OpenUSD Omniverse enterprise digital twins to the Apple Vision Pro! See this demo now 👇🏼 This show the capabilities of spatial computing by blending 3D photo real environments with the real world. “
- “NVIDIA announced Earth-2. A cloud platform that uses AI and digital twin tech to forecast climate change and weather with high resolution and speed. AI use cases like this will be massive for predicting extreme weather.”
- AGI
- Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says AI hallucinations are solvable, artificial general intelligence is 5 years away
- Robotics
- 1X’s autonomous robot progress is mindblowing
- “1X’s mission is to create an abundant supply of physical labor through androids that work alongside humans. We’re excited to share our latest progress on teaching EVEs general-purpose skills. The following is all autonomous, all 1X speed, all controlled with a single set of neural network weights.”
- Another autonomous bipedal robot
- “Autonomous biped robot testing in the wild. With zero-shot learning, non-protected and fully open testing conditions, this Biped successfully navigates an completely unknown forest, demonstrating impressive control and stability post reinforcement learning.
- Suno text-to music
- Suno released version 3.0 of their AI music generation tool
- “Finally tried the AI music generator by Suno. I’m blown away!! AI music will be huge.”
- Inside Suno AI, the Start-up Creating a ChatGPT for Music
- Apple’s MM1 model
- Apple Publishes Details About New ‘MM1’ AI Model
- Apple researchers achieve breakthroughs in multimodal AI as company ramps up
- Apple in discussions with Google to power iPhone AI
- “Siri getting a boost through Apple licensing Gemini would be the plot twist we never expected, but certainly need. After all, Google still pays Apple gobs of money to remain the default search engine, and Apple doesn’t seem to be as far along with their GenAI efforts.”
- Apple in Talks to License Google Gemini for iPhone, iOS 18 Generative AI Tools
- Business News
- JPMorgan’s AI-Aided Cashflow Model Can Cut Manual Work by 90%
- Bloomberg – https://archive.md/0KElg
- “A thing many leaders of organizations have not internalized is the fact that no one in any company or government has access to a better LLM than the ones billions of people around the world can use for between $0-$20/month Very unusual to have democratized access from the start”
- “Big news: Today, we’re announcing an $8.5 billion preliminary agreement with Intel — the largest CHIPS investment yet. The investment will create nearly 30,000 jobs and expand their semiconductor capacity across the country.”
- JPMorgan’s AI-Aided Cashflow Model Can Cut Manual Work by 90%
- Boston Dynamics demos its warehouse robot, Stretch.
- Stretch at MODEX 2024 | Boston Dynamics
- Ethics and Security
- Google’s Ban on Election Queries in Gemini AI Sparks Debate
- Jarring surveillance: “EdgeTrace (YC W24) helps organizations quickly search and analyze video using natural language. They enable industries like security and retail to gain actionable insights from video footage.”
- Google DeepMind releases soccer (football) coaching tool
- “Google DeepMind introduced TacticAI, an AI system that can advise coaches on football tactics. It uses predictive and generative models to analyze previous play data and was created in collaboration with Liverpool FC.”
- Image upscaling tool, Magnific, releases a powerful style transfer feature.
- “Transform any image, controlling the amount of style transferred and the structural integrity. Infinite use cases! 3d, video games, interior design, for fun… Details, 10 tutorials, in link.”
- Microsoft hires the management team of Inflection with acquiring the company
- “Microsoft just announced the hiring of DeepMind co-founder (and Inflection AI CEO) Mustafa Suleyman. He will lead a new division called ‘Microsoft AI’ — focused on advancing consumer AI. Co-founder Karen Simonyan and several others from Inflection will be joining him.
- Inflection sunsets Pi and focuses on API. The new Inflection: An important change to how we’ll work.
- Microsoft Agreed to Pay Inflection $650 Million While Hiring Its Staff
- Why Microsoft’s surprise deal with $4 billion startup Inflection is the most important non-acquisition in AI
- Here’s how Microsoft is providing a ‘good outcome’ for Inflection AI VCs, as Reid Hoffman promised
- X Open Sources Grok
- “The largest ever open LLM, trained by a world class team, dropped by a magnet link. Apache 2.0. I wonder what it feels like to be out-opened by @grok. 314B, mixture of expert (2 out of 8 active). Even the active parameters only (86B) is more than the biggest Llama. Can’t wait…
- GitHub – xai-org/grok-1: Grok open release
- Open Release of Grok-1
- “@elonmusk @xai ░W░E░I░G░H░T░S░I░N░B░I░O░” /
- Lex Fridman interviews Sam Altman
- “Here’s my conversation with Sam Altman (@sama), his 2nd time on the podcast. We talk about the board saga, Elon lawsuit, Ilya, Sora, GPT-5, $7 trillion in compute, open source, and AGI. This was a truly fascinating conversation.
- Transcript for Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast #419 – Lex Fridman
- Publishing news
- OpenAI Promoting AI Text-to-Video Sora to Entertainment Industry
- YouTube now requires creators to disclose when realistic content was made with AI
- 3D Modeling and VR
- “Vision Pro app developers have found a MUCH more interesting use case for Panoramas than Apple. You can also spawn multiples of these windows, even though I only show one in the video”
- “Google presents RadSplat Radiance Field-Informed Gaussian Splatting for Robust Real-Time Rendering with 900+ FPS Recent advances in view synthesis and real-time rendering have achieved photorealistic quality at impressive rendering speeds.
- “We just shipped the biggest update to @Scaniverse yet: Gaussian Splatting, which can reconstruct photorealistic 3D scenes like these, entirely on your phone. It took a lot of hard work from the entire team, and we’d love for you to try it!”
- MidJourney is building a world model
- Most people think of MidJourney as a text-to-image tool.
- “Midjourney continues to reiterate in office hours that their goal is real-time world simulation. They said: “We’re really trying to get to the world simulation. We’re building 3D midjourney, video MJ, real-time MJ where things move really really fast.”
- Most people think of MidJourney as a text-to-image tool.
- Devin, the AI software engineer
- “Cognition’s Devin showed off its autonomous AI agent skills in a new viral X post. The model was able to open a support ticket and exchange Slack messages to solve a coding issue on its own. Wild!”
- “AI agents have real potential. I went back to Devin, the AI coder agent, after not using it for a day and completely forgot that I assigned it to create a visualization of the economics of startup dilution. It plugged away and I came back to a solid draft that could be iterated on”
- “I asked the Devin AI agent to go on reddit and start a thread where it will take website building requests It did that, solving numerous problems along the way. It apparently decided to charge for its work. Going to take it down before it fools anyone… “
- Mercedes invests in humanoid factory robots
- “Mercedes-Benz partners with Apptronik to test humanoid robot Apollo for automating some low-skill, physically challenging tasks
- Neuralink’s first patient shows of his new skills
- Neuralink live stream demo
- “The first human Neuralink patient, who is paralysed, is able to control a computer and play chess just by thinking.”
- Watch Neuralink’s First Human Subject Demonstrate His Brain-Computer Interface
- WIRED – https://archive.md/Zy0Nr
- “Optimus limbs, replacing lost human limbs, could ultimately be controlled with superhuman dexterity by an implanted Neuralink. Deus Ex / Cyberpunk irl.”
- Neuralink’s next project is restore eyesight for the blind
- “Elon Musk just announced that Blindsight is the next Neuralink product after Telepathy. Its aim will be to work on restoring the vision of someone who was born blind.” https://twitter.com/cb_doge/status/1770581009576165720?s=20
- SORA text-to-video. More incredible videos released.
- “An elephant out of leaves – the physics of the light and the leaves is impressive”
- Kitten on a roomba, wearing a hat
- A bee flying
- The best recent paper that captures a large chunk of what’s ahead
- Factorial Funds | Under The Hood: How OpenAI’s Sora Model Works
- This paper, perhaps unintentionally, is a primer for what is happening and what to expect in the future.
- https://factorialfunds.com/blog/under-the-hood-how-openai-s-sora-model-works
- Factorial Funds | Under The Hood: How OpenAI’s Sora Model Works
AI Visuals and Charts: Week Ending 03/22/2024
Social media is flooded with fakes
AI generated engagement spam is running rampant and flooding social media. Many people don’t know. For example, this AI image has 90k likes, 12k comments, and 1.3k shares. Via Chris Alsikkan.
The Mirror Test
GPT4 and Claude pass (depending on your definition) the “Mirror Test” when shown images of themselves via Josh Winton
The Rest: AI News of The Week
Don’t let the volume overwhelm you. Have fun and skim them. The links are organized by topic, sorted from ‘coolest’ to ‘least cool’, and each topic is clearly defined with a headline. I’ve added a description and glossary of what the topics mean, beneath each label, in plain language. I do the work so you don’t have to! When you visit the pages, note that the links and descriptions are often pulled directly from tweets or articles, so it’s not always my voice. Pause when you see something that interests you. Reach out to me any time. I enjoy sharing and discussing these items.
Agency/Agents/Copilots News of the Week: Agency is when AI can do things for you (like Googling an actress name or fetching the latest weather forecast). An agent is one step further, when AI given autonomy to take action on your behalf (“Alexa, book a reservation for three at Peak in Hudson Yards for Friday night”). A co-pilot is an assistant (like spell check or autofill).
This weeks’s latest agent news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/agents-and-copilots-ai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Anthropic News of the Week:
Anthropic is a company that builds LLMs like OpenAI, Mistral, Meta, etc. Their main AI brand is Claude. As with Amazon and Apple, individual Anthropic company posts will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad or a major product release.
This week’s Anthropic news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/anthropic-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Apple News of the Week: As with Amazon, individual Apple company products will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad or a major product release.
This weeks’ latest Apple AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/apple-ai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) News of the Week: Artificial General Intelligence, in a nutshell, is when artificial intelligence is able to beat humans at everything (including embodying physical forms and completing physical tasks). It’s usually a thought catalyst for predictions, like when AGI will occur. 10 years? 25 years? 100? AGI is an event horizon that is tough to define, tough to imagine, and tough to predict. OpenAI defined AGI in its charter as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work”. OpenAI has a section of its website dedicated to AGI. Google’s DeepMind published my favorite report on the five levels of artificial intelligence on the way to AGI (see also here).
This week’s latest Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/artificial-general-intelligence-agi-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) News of the Week: Augmented reality is when you see images or information on top of the real world. A car windshield with a heads-up display of the speed. Or glasses that have facial recognition and overlay the names of everyone in view. Virtual reality is when you are transported into another place, usually wearing goggles, but a flight simulator could also be considered virtual reality.
This weeks’s latest AR/VR news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/augmented-and-virtual-reality-ar-vr-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Autonomous Vehicles/Driverless Cars News of the Week: Driverless car news doesn’t always get its own category, because it’s so close to robot embodiment. I go with my gut each week around what to place in each category. My recommendation would be to follow Robotics/Embodiment also, as the two fields are converging.
This week’s autonomous vehicle news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/autonomous-vehicles-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
AI Audio News of the Week: In this case, AI audio can mean a few things. The first is “generative audio” which refers to creating sounds with AI, much like ChatGPT writes words or MidJourney creates images. For example, asking for the “sound of waves crashing on the beach” would be text to sound. Another example would be an AI ‘watching’ a video and adding sound to it, like a foley artist would add footsteps or a creaking door to a movie scene. Lastly, AI audio can refer to microphones that only pick up certain speaker’s voices or headsets that cancel out all voices but your friends. This week’s latest AI audio news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/ai-audio-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Business/EnterpriseAI News of the Week: This broad category is for stories that impact corporations and large scale AI implementation. Enterprise refers to a type of AI that is often custom built for a business or leverage an API to connect secure data to an AI model.
This weeks’s latest enterprise AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/business-and-enterprise-ai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Chips and Hardware AI News of the Week: Most of the chip news is NVIDA usually, yet more and more Meta, Google, and OpenAI are starting toward their own manufacturing. I have to make the call whether to put Meta, Google, and OpenAI’s chip news under this section or their company sections. Lately, I’m putting each company’s chips news into the company category, rather than the chips category. This is the rest of the chips headlines.
This weeks’s latest chips and hardware news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/chips-and-hardware-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Consumer Electronics AI News of the Week: This is a broad category meant to capture end user tools and products that incorporate artificial into their feature, from high-end grills to smartphones.
This weeks’s latest consumer AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/consumer-products-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Education AI News of the Week: There is a lot of buzz around the impact of AI in education. This section focuses both on the risks and rewards of how AI can impact learning. It’s broader than just K-12 and includes things like skills, trade, professional, and higher education. This is not about how to learn AI, it’s about AI’s impact on learning.
This weeks’s latest education news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/education-ai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Ethics/Legal/Security AI News of the Week: This section focuses on the impact AI is having on ethics (deep fakes, war, trust, false information, plagiarism, job loss, income), legal (rights, laws, regulations), and security (hacking, phishing, national interests, safety). For huge news stories like the NY Times suing OpenAI, I usually put them under the main section or give them their own page.
This weeks’s latest AI ethics/legal/security news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/ethics-legal-security-ai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Google AI News of the Week: Individual company products will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad
This weeks’s latest Google AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/google-ai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Imagery News of the Week: AI imagery covers “generative AI” image tools. This usually text-to-image, where a user enters a prompt (“a polar bear walking through NYC”) and a tool like Dalle or MidJourney generates an image in the likeness of the description. This is different than AI vision, where an AI “looks at” an image and can derive context, details, and contents. AI vision is a subset of AI called multimodality. Imagery, in this case, is for image creation and modification/editing. Adobe Photoshop’s AI tools would fall into this category. I’ll also include things like automatic masking and object removal, even though that’s in between imagery and vision… but practically speaking it fits into editing.
This weeks’s latest AI image news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/ai-imagery-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
International AI News of the Week: A lot of international news will get cross listed in the chips, security, or open-source categories, however it’s nice to have a separate category for worldwide AI news.
This week’s latest international AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/international-ai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Inflection News of The Week: Inflection is an AI company that builds LLMs like OpenAI, Mistral, Meta, Anthropic, etc. Their main AI brand is Inflection through the interface assistant called Pi. As with Amazon and Apple, individual Inflection company posts will often be placed in the categories they match (image, audio, agents, robots, etc). Occasionally, I’ll dedicate space to a company’s news if it’s broad or a major product release.
This week’s latest Inflection news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/inflection-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Meta AI News of the Week: This is a space dedicated for Meta specific AI advancements and news stories.
This weeks Meta AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/meta-ai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Microsoft AI News of the Week: This is a space dedicated for Microsoft specific AI advancements and news stories.
This weeks Microsoft AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/microsoft-ai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Multimodal AI News of the Week: This is a broad topic for an single AI model that demonstrates an ability to interact with more than one modality (imagery, video, audio, text). Often multimodal news will end up in one of these categories. I’m playing it by ear on a case by case basis. Please be patient with my organizational challenges.
This week’s multimodal AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/multimodality-vision-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
OpenAI: OpenAI is the leading force in the AI boom of 2023 and now 2024. This section focuses on news that is specific to OpenAI. This section will compete with all of the other sections (imagery, vision, ethics, etc) because OpenAI is so broad. I won’t be able to consistently pick when to put things under OpenAI or other sections, so bear with me.
This weeks’s latest OpenAI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/openai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Open Source Models: An open source AI model refers to a class of artificial intelligence models with public source code. They can be inspected, copied, installed, and customized on private computers. In contrast, a closed source model is proprietary and owned by a company that you pay to use (like PowerPoint or Photoshop). One of the most famous open source language models is a French model called Mistral. Its code is completely publicly available, and anyone can download it and customize it. On one hand, open source is a transparent and powerful way to democratize AI, but on the other hand, open source models circumvent the guard rails and copyright protections that private companies implement. Open source models are the wild west of artificial intelligence, but also the potential saving grace (depending on who you ask). It’s a bit like gun control debates but for computing power.
This weeks’s latest open source news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/open-source-ai-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Podcast/YouTube Clips of the Week: This is for more general interviews and explainer videos and podcasts that provide access to leadership, demos of new products, and walkthroughs and tutorials. Videos focused on specific topics will live in the topic category (i.e. images), but broader videos will live here.
This weeks’s latest podcasts and YouTube clips: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/ai-podcasts-youtube-op-eds-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Publishing AI News of the Week: These are stories about AI’s impact on the publishing industry. From copyright and crawling to the death of page views or even the end of browsers.
This weeks’s latest publishing AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/ai-publishing-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Robotics/Embodiment News of the Week: This is the most intense area of AI. Embodiment refers to putting an AI inside of a machine. It’s “embodying” the object and therefore giving a robot agency in the real world. An example would be using a large language model as an interface to a complex coding task. Just as you ask “Alexa, play Bad Blood by Taylor Swift on Spotify” using plain language, with embodiment you could ask a robot to “Go to the laundry basket and bring me all of the red shirts”. The language model in the robot would translate your request into the proper code to go get the red shirts. The robot was never trained on the task. Another type of embodiment would be training a robot using virtual reality simulations. Using an simulation, a robot could be trained on thousands of scenarios until the real world can be swapped out and the robot doesn’t “notice”. This section also includes factory automation and human prosthetics. There will be some overlap with other categories like autonomous vehicles. I first learned about embodiment from Alan Thompson. I highly recommend his video explainer: https://youtu.be/peLqYP9BAUg?si=2FzrvDlw-qaQFaCx.
This week’s latest robot and embodiment AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/robotics-and-embodiment-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Science/Medicine AI News of the Week: AI’s strength is learning patterns. This applies nicely to medical diagnosis and identifying trends. When combined with data and AI vision, this means AI is good at looking at x-rays. Language models are helping with patient interface, and robotics and augmented reality are advancing surgery. Powerful enterprise models like Google’s Alphafold can master protein folding. Other models can read ancient scrolls without opening them.
This weeks’s latest AI science and medicine news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/ai-science-and-medicine-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
AI Video News of the Week: AI video in this case refers to generative video. Much like imagery meant generative imagery. This usually text-to-video, where a user enters a prompt (“a wizard walking out of a flaming building”) and a tool like Pika or Runway generates an video in the likeness of the description. It also covers animation of still images, where an image is given motion (like a photo of a waterfall appearing to have flowing water). As with images, this is different than AI vision, where an AI “looks at” an image or video and can derive context, details, and contents. Video, in this case, is video creation and modification/editing.
This weeks’s latest AI video news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/ai-video-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
X/Twitter/Grok: Grok is one of several AI’s developed by X, and it’s a bit blended in with Telsa and other Elon Musk technology. Not every week will have a Grok section, but like Meta, Google, Apple, and OpenAI, X will be in the news enough to have its own section.
This week’s latest X news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/22/twitter-x-grok-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Technical and AI Developer News of the Week: Everything that is too technical for general consumption goes here. These are stories I think are important, but might be inaccessible and confusing. It’s also a space for developer news and deep dives into how AI works, under the hood.
This weeks technical and dev AI news: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/04/01/ai-tech-and-development-news-week-ending-03-22-2024/
Credits/Sources
Most of these weekly links come from just a few prolific oversharing sources. Please follow them, as they work hard to find the news each week and they make it a lot easier for me to compile.
- Robert Scoble: https://x.com/Scobleizer
- Ethan Mollick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emollick/
- Alan Thompson: https://lifearchitect.ai/
- Theoretically Media: https://www.youtube.com/@TheoreticallyMedia
- The Rundown: https://www.therundown.ai/
- Bilawal Sidhu: https://twitter.com/bilawalsidhu/
- TLDR: https://tldr.tech/ai
- Jeremiah Owyang: https://twitter.com/jowyang
- Nick St. Pierre: https://twitter.com/nickfloats
- Dr. Jim Fan: https://twitter.com/DrJimFan
- All About AI: https://www.youtube.com/@AllAboutAI
- Marshall Kirkpatrick: https://aitimetoimpact.com/
Previous Issues
- AI News: Week Ending 03/15/2024:
- AI News: Week Ending 03/08/2024:
- AI News: Week Ending 03/01/2024:
- AI News: Week Ending 02/23/2024: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/03/03/ai-news-21-week-ending-02-23-2024-with-executive-summary-and-top-36-links/
- AI News: Week Ending 02/16/2024: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/27/ai-news-20-week-ending-02-16-2024-with-executive-summary-and-top-39-links/
- AI News: Week Ending 02/09/2024: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/25/ai-news-19-week-ending-02-09-2024-with-executive-summary-and-top-18-links/
- AI News: Week Ending 02/02/2024: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/17/ai-news-18-week-ending-02-02-2024-with-executive-summary-and-top-18-stories/
- AI News: Week Ending 01/26/2024: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/06/ai-news-17-week-ending-01-26-2024-with-executive-summary-and-top-12-stories/
- AI News: Week Ending 01/19/2024: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/02/04/ai-news-16-week-ending-01-19-2024-with-executive-summary-and-top-16-stories/
- AI News: Week Ending 01/12/2024: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/15/ai-news-15-week-ending-01-012-2024-with-executive-summary-and-top-13-stories/
- AI News: Week Ending 01/05/2024: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/14/ai-news-14-week-ending-01-05-2023-with-executive-summary-and-top-16-stories/
- AI News: Week Ending 12/29/2023: https://ethanbholland.com/2024/01/07/ai-news-12-week-ending-12-29-2023-with-executive-summary-and-top-9-stories/
- AI News: Week Ending 12/22/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-news-week-ending-12222023-executive-summary-top-links-holland-frx4e
- AI News: Week Ending 12/15/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-news-week-ending-12152023-ethan-holland-elmee
- AI News: Week Ending 12/08/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-news-week-ending-12082023-ethan-holland-zabve
- AI News: Week Ending 12/01/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-news-week-ending-12012023-ethan-holland-rglve
- AI News: Week Ending 11/24/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-news-week-ending-11242023-ethan-holland-jqvre
- AI News: Week Ending 11/17/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-news-week-ending-11172023-ethan-holland-ad6le
- AI News: Week Ending 11/10/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-news-week-ending-11102023-executive-summary-top-three-holland-yjdef/
- AI News: Week Ending 11/03/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanholland_aiebh-ai-generativeai-activity-7131396231678844928-3U8M
- AI News: Week Ending 10/27/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanholland_aiebh-ai-generativeai-activity-7127139342321356800-uBPD
- AI News: Week Ending 10/20/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-news-week-ending-10202023-ethan-holland-eocpe
- AI News: Week Ending 10/13/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-news-week-ending-10132023-executive-summary-ethan-holland-nq9bf
- AI News: Week Ending 10/6/2023: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-news-week-ending-1062023-ethan-holland-b6uhe
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