Founder and CEO of Figure AI Brett Adcock says that robotics is now an AI business, and that they have access to all the H100s they want from Microsoft, while their partnership with OpenAI will lead to robots that can reason and plan. — - — 👉 Before you go 👋 If you want to keep up with the latest news on AI startups and how they’re changing the world, join 1000+ subscribers reading our newsletter for FREE! Link in bio. — - — #brettadcock #figureai #robots #robotics #airobot #todayinai
The heart-stopping flights led to his research of unmanned aircraft systems while getting his doctorate degree in aerospace engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then, he formed Rotor Technologies in 2021 to develop unmanned helicopters.
Rotor has built two autonomous Sprayhawks and aims to have as many as 20 ready for market next year. The company also is developing helicopters that would carry cargo in disaster zones and to offshore oil rigs. The helicopter could also be used https://apnews.com/article/wildfire-season-2024-firefighters…2e4c66fd7” rel=“noopener”>to fight wildfires.
For now, Rotor is focused on the agriculture sector, which has embraced automation with drones but sees unmanned helicopters as a better way to spray larger areas with pesticides and fertilizers.
And that “things are going to go a lot faster than people are appreciating right now” — - — 👉 Before you go 👋 If you want to keep up with the latest news on AI startups and how they’re changing the world, join 1000+ subscribers reading our newsletter for FREE! Link in bio. — - — #samaltman #agi #largelanguagemodels #openai #samaltmanquotes #aistartup #artificialgeneralintelligence #todayinai
Google is committing $20 million in cash and $2 million in cloud credits to a new funding initiative designed to help scientists and researchers unearth the next great scientific breakthroughs using artificial intelligence (AI).
The announcement, made by Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis during a fireside chat at the closed-door AI for Science Forum in London today, feeds into a broader push by Big Tech to curry favor with young innovators and startups, a strategy that has included acqui-hires, equity investments, and cloud partnerships — some of which has attracted the attentions of regulators.
This latest announcement, via Google’s 19-year-old philanthropic arm Google.org, is different in that it centers on non-equity funding for academic and non-for-profit institutions globally. But similar to other Big Tech funding and partnership initiatives, this will go some way toward helping Google ingratiate itself with some of the leading scientific minds, through direct cash injections and by providing infrastructure to power their projects. In turn, this positions Google well to acquire future customers — particularly those currently on the cusp of doing great things, working on projects that require significant AI tooling and compute, which Google can provide.
We might like to think of ourselves as autonomous entities but, in reality, we’re more like walking ecosystems, teeming with bacteria, viruses, and other microbes. It turns out that differences in these microbes might be as crucial to evolution and natural variation as genetic mutations are.
This novel perspective was discussed in a recent publication by Seth Bordenstein, director of Penn State’s One Health Microbiome Center, who is a professor of biology and entomology and holds the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Endowed Chair in Microbiome Sciences.
He, along with 21 colleagues from around the globe, collectively known as the Holobiont Biology Network, propose that understanding the relationships between microbes and their hosts will lead to a more profound understanding of biological variation.
We all start our lives as symmetric balls of cells. In humans, during the first few weeks after fertilization, embryonic cells undergo several rounds of division, increasing their mass. Then comes gastrulation, the process that changes everything and establishes our body plan. During gastrulation, the collection of uniform cells that make up the early embryo break symmetry and reorganize into a multi-layered structure with distinct cell types.
At this pivotal moment, our body plan is set. Gastrulation also establishes the three body axes: head–tail, front–back, and left–right. This process requires cells to interact and coordinate with each other with astonishing precision. However, how this is achieved is still largely a mystery.
The Trivedi Group at EMBL Barcelona studies how cells give rise to our body plan and has now published a study in the journal Development that may enhance our understanding of early mammalian development.
The rebirth of commercial supersonic flight has kind of, sort of come to pass as Dawn Aerospace announces that its 16-ft (4.8-m) autonomous Mk-II Aurora rocket-powered aircraft broke the sound barrier with a speed of Mach 1.1 on November 12, 2024.
Ever since the Anglo-French Concorde retired in 2003, civil supersonic flight has been something of a lost art. In recent years, a number of startups have been working on various projects to create a new generation of supersonic transports that are quieter, greener, more efficient, and cost effective to operate.
Now, one supersonic aircraft has actually taken flight, albeit in the form of an uncrewed experimental craft with a wingspan of 13 ft (4 m) and a dry weight of 880 lb (200 kg). In the skies over New Zealand’s Glentanner Aerodrome near the base of Aoraki/Mount Cook, the Mk-II Aurora hit Mach 1.1 while climbing to an altitude of 82,500 ft (25,150 m).