Lifeboat Foundation

At Microsoft’s AI press event, the company unveiled its latest Surface PCs with new AI Copilot features built-in. Check out all the highlights in our recap from Redmond, WA.

Everything Microsoft Just Announced: Copilot Plus PCs, Surface Pro and Laptop Running on Qualcomm https://bit.ly/3ynj8BQ

Continue reading “Microsoft Surface Copilot + PC Event: Everything Revealed in 13 Minutes” »

From UC berkeley, stanford, carnegie mellon, & google deepmind.

Octo.

An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy.

Continue reading “Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy” »

The International Energy Agency predicts that artificial intelligence will consume 10 times as much energy in 2026 as it did in 2023.

Optical neural networks, which use photons instead of electrons, have advantages over traditional systems. They also face major obstacles.

In a path-breaking study, researchers have created artificial neurological junctions called synapses using a mix of water and salt, paving the way for the development of advanced computers that mimic the performance of a human brain. The artificial brain cells, developed by the team from Utrecht University in the Netherlands and Sogang University in South Korea, use the same water and salt ingredients the brain uses.

The results of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists striving to develop energy efficient and high-performance computers often look up to human brains as a source of inspiration.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has said the 2013 Spike Jonze film is his favorite movie, invited comparisons by posting the word “Her” on X after the company announced the new ChatGPT version. But later, OpenAI executives denied any connection between Johansson and the new voice assistant.

Then the company suddenly dropped the voice.

In a post on X just before midnight Pacific time Sunday, OpenAI said the voice would be halted as it addresses “questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT.” A company spokeswoman would not provide further detail.

OpenAI has introduced GPT-4o, in the form of a digital personal assistant that can interact using text and visuals 🤖

Here, we look back at GPT-4’s performance in human exams from a year ago for comparison.

From the archive:

A new Winows 11 feature that will remember what you did in your PC.

Microsoft has announced a new AI-powered feature for Windows 11 called ‘Recall,’ which records everything you do on your PC and lets you search through your historical activities.

Recall works like a photographic memory for your PC, letting you access everything you’ve seen or done on your computer in an organized way using queries in your native language.

Continue reading “Windows 11 Recall AI feature will record everything you do on your PC” »

Joints are an essential part in robotics, especially those that try to emulate the motion of (human) animals. Unlike the average automaton, animals are not outfitted with bearings and similar types of joints, but rather rely sometimes on ball joints and a lot on rolling contact joints (RCJs). These RCJs have the advantage of being part of the skeletal structure, making them ideal for compact and small joints. This is the conclusion that [Breaking Taps] came to as well while designing the legs for a bird-like automaton.

These RCJs do not just have the surfaces which contact each other while rotating, but also provide the constraints for how far a particular joint is allowed to move, both in the forward and backward directions as well as sideways. In the case of the biological version these contact surfaces are also coated with a constantly renewing surface to prevent direct bone-on-bone contact. The use of RCJs is rather common in robotics, with the humanoid DRACO 3 platform as detailed in a 2023 research article by [Seung Hyeon Bang] and colleagues in Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

Continue reading “Emulating Biology For Robots With Rolling Contact Joints” »

In 2006, Feifei Li aimed to address the limitations of AI algorithms, which were hampered by small, non-diverse datasets.

And the unbending faith! A behind-the-scenes look at the unlikely ingredients that fueled the 2000s AI boom.