Yes, that is true by many dictionary definitions. But does it matter? If this process of recursive self-improvement has truly started. Is there is a scenario where this continuous improvement in the chips is what brings true AI about, and not human design.

A lot like Uber, in other words. But replicating a ride-hailing network with a 14-year head start will be no easy feat, especially considering the scale Uber has achieved.

I don’t get the logic here. If you have The fleet of robotaxis, it seems the software to run them it’s the easy part. Loads of competitors to Uber have equally good software. The bottle neck here is the supply of robo-taxis. The journalist writing this has also ignored the fact cheap Chinese cars will probably be what will dominate this space ultimately.

I’ve been familiar with his ideas for years, even though intellectually I could see they were true, emotionally I always felt they were science-fiction. Now this is starting to look like science-fact.

Like Covid, it seems humans have to wait until disaster is right on their doorstep, before they pull themselves together to do something about it.

For anyone familiar with the ideas behind what Ray Kurzweil called ‘The Singularity’, this looks awfully like it’s first baby steps.

For those that don’t know, the idea is that when AI gets the ability to improve itself, it will begin to become exponentially more powerful. As each step will make it even better, at designing the next generation of chips to make it more powerful.

The model family is “a new suite of state-of-the-art multimodal models trained solely with next-token prediction,” BAAI writes. “By tokenizing images, text, and videos into a discrete space, we train a single transformer from scratch on a mixture of multimodal sequences”.

Every single time it looks like closed Big Tech AI systems might steal a lead, open source is never far behind snapping at their heels. Now it seems it’s the same story with multi-modal AI.

I wonder what number of these will be robo-taxis in the next 18 months? Uber recently partnered with BYD to introduce 100,000 robo-taxis in Abu Dhabi and Singapore. When it gets to those kind of numbers in the US the wider public will really start to notice the driving job losses. Some day the shoe is going to drop, and people will realize all human driving jobs are on the way out forever.

Is the UK contemplating tariffs on Chinese EVs?, if not that will be one of the few advantages of Brexit, as the EU has just agreed to mandate them.

I’m using it more and more and find it very useful. I do a lot of writing for work, AI voice transcription and AI grammar checks are invaluable, not to mention having an AI voice read my writing back as a form of copy editing.

Also great for visual stuff, and for providing sound for videos.

However the hallucination problem is a real roadblock. I would never want to trust the current models of AI with an important decision.

Cement accounts for 8 to 9 percent of global CO2 emissions. I think it is really under researched, when it comes to looking for climate change solutions.

Most western countries have at least half of their economies ruled by free market principles - civil servants ,the military, healthcare in most countries, etc, etc being non-market parts the economy.

The logic of AI and robotics that can do most jobs for pennies on the hour, is that the free market part of the economy will just devour itself from within. It needs humans with incomes to survive, yet by its own internal logic it will destroy those incomes.

Oh the ladies on “The View” already love her. She’ll have no problems with them.

The View and the Real Housewives franchise are guilty TV pleasures I normally hate admitting to in public.

When I think about this issue, I sometimes think about future scenarios on a scale of 1 - 10, with 10 being ‘most confidence to predict will occur’ and 1 being ‘least able to definitively predict’.

I give UBI a 4 on that scale. It may well occur, but there are different ways of achieving the same goal, so who knows.

One of the few facts I rank at 10, is that the day is coming when AI and robotics will be able to do most work, even the jobs uninvented, but for pennies on the hour.

The logical follow-on is that the day will also have to come, when society realizes that this is happening, understands it, and begins to prepare for its new reality. This is going to seem scary for many people; they will just see the destructive aspects of it, as the old ways of running the world crumble.

This is how I look at what this research is talking about - signs of this awakening becoming more widespread. We badly need politicians who start telling us about what the world is going to be like afterwards, and painting a hopeful vision about it.

I don’t think Sabine Hossenfelder gets everything right, (she should stay away from talking about consciousness), but I love it when she goes on these eviscerating rants about some other physicists. She’s right, much of the field, like economics, is dominated by people who can only say one “correct” version of things to keep their jobs.

In Europe and North America food loss adds up to around 16%

Everywhere in the world hunger and malnutrition are distribution problems, not lack of production problems.

If you are familiar with the idea of AI taking off into the realms of superintelligence, one of the steps that is supposed to accompany that is recursive self-improvement. In other words when AI can write its own code, to improve itself, and thus continuously get more and more powerful. I wonder if examples like this are the tiny first baby steps of that.

I’m surprised drone deliveries haven’t taken off more yet, these guys in Germany look like they are on to a winning solution too.

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/wingcopter-drone-delivery-groceries-germany

Microsoft has cash reserves of $75 billion.

Microsoft - If you really want to convince us that nuclear power is part of the future, why can’t you use some of your own money? Why does every single nuclear suggestion always rely on bailouts from taxpayers? Here’s a thought, if you can’t pay for it yourself - just pick the cheaper option that taxpayers don’t have to pay for - you know renewables and grid storage? The stuff that everybody else, all over the world, is building near 99% of new electricity generation with.

“INBRAIN’s BCI technology was able to differentiate between healthy and cancerous brain tissue with micrometer-scale precision.”

This breakthrough with the surgery is very interesting, but what is even more interesting to me is their wider goals. They wonder if it will be possible to use this approach to treat many brain disorders, including mental health conditions.

This also has the potential for a direct connection between artificial intelligence and our brains. That has long been speculated about in sci-fi. This approach has a chance of starting to make it a reality.

When I look at the potential in current advances in medicine, and the idiocracy that passes for “politics” and “debate”, in some quarters, I wonder when more people are going to wise up.

Training and educating surgeons is the biggest bottleneck in the availability of their skills, and thus the amount of surgeries people can have. Here we have the potential to smash through that. Procedure by procedure, as robots master individual types of surgery, suddenly the only type of bottleneck you have is the amount of robots. A vastly easier and quicker problem to solve than increasing the supply of trained human surgeons.