White House A.I. and Crypto Czar David Sacks discusses the ‘Winning the AI Race’ summit, how the U.S. can be the leader on the technology and the signing of the GENIUS Act into law.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 16
The AI arms race with China demands scale. The West must think bigger
Size matters. Economists have long known that; economies of scale are among the building blocks of their science. In the digital era, it quickly became apparent that value was directly proportional to the size of the network (the number of users linked by a particular technology or system).
The race to create scale is critical amid the sizzling geopolitical competition over leadership in new technologies. It has assumed even greater urgency in Western capitals in the wake of China’s success in that race. They’ve had to reconceptualize scale to overcome the advantages China has a result of the size of its economy and its population. It’s a work in progress and the results are mixed, at best.
For those who’ve forgotten their introductory economics, economies of scale are cost advantages created by expanding operations. As companies build more products, they become more efficient, reducing cost per unit. This allows them to produce even more of that product, reinforcing their competitive advantage and keep the virtuous circle turning.
Inside Trump’s Long-Awaited AI Strategy
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President Trump will deliver a major speech on Wednesday at an event in Washington, D.C., titled “Winning the AI Race,” where he is expected to unveil his long-awaited AI action plan. The 20-page, high-level document will focus on three main areas, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. It will come as a mixture of directives to federal agencies, with some grant programs. “It’s mostly carrots, not sticks,” the person said.
AI vision, reinvented: Vision-language models gain clearer sight through synthetic training data
In the race to develop AI that understands complex images like financial forecasts, medical diagrams and nutrition labels—essential for AI to operate independently in everyday settings—closed-source systems like ChatGPT and Claude currently set the pace. But no one outside their makers knows how those models were trained or what data they used, leaving open-source alternatives scrambling to catch up.
Now, researchers at Penn Engineering and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) have developed a new approach to train open-source models: using AI to create scientific figures, charts and tables that teach other AI systems how to interpret complex visual information.
Their tool, CoSyn (short for Code-Guided Synthesis), taps open-source AI models’ coding skills to render text-rich images and generate relevant questions and answers, giving other AI systems the data they need to learn how to “see” and understand scientific figures.
What The Last Century Of Cybersecurity Can Teach Us About What Comes Next In The Age Of AI
Now, with the introduction of AI systems trained on years of real-world data, many of those tasks can be automated at scale—in most cases, with greater speed and consistency than a human working alone. The business impact is immediate and measurable.
To use AI effectively in frontline defense, it must do more than process data. It has to understand how your organization assesses risk and learn to make decisions that protect both security and business continuity. We’re seeing that this is especially valuable for clients with high customer activity, where security teams are flooded with alerts that demand fast, accurate decisions to maintain service levels.
New scrubbing robot could contribute to automation of household chores
While the advent of robotic systems that can complete household chores has been widely anticipated, those commercially released so far are primarily robot vacuums that autonomously clean the floor. In contrast, robots that can reliably clean surfaces, tidy up, cook or perform other tasks in home environments are either too expensive or have not yet reached the market.
Researchers at Northeastern University recently developed SCCRUB, a soft robotic arm that can complete a chore beyond hoovering and mopping, which many people find tedious, namely scrubbing surfaces clean. The new robotic arm, introduced in a paper on the arXiv preprint server, was found to successfully clean dirty, burnt and greasy surfaces, removing over 99.% of residue adhered to them.
“Our recent study builds on one of our earlier papers published in Science Robotics,” Jeffrey Lipton, senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “We knew we had a new type of robot arm that could deliver the power of a drill through a soft robotic arm. We wanted to show what else we could do with this new platform.”