Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: robotics/AI – Page 821

Tens of Thousands of People Can Now Order a Waymo Robotaxi Anywhere in San Francisco

On Monday, Waymo announced on X that it’s expanding its city-wide, fully autonomous robotaxi service to thousands more riders in San Francisco.

The company had been testing a service area of nearly the whole city (around 47 square miles) with employees and, later, a group of test riders. But most people using the service were precluded from riding in the city’s dense northeast corner, an area including Fisherman’s Wharf, the Embarcadero, and Chinatown.

Now, the full San Francisco service area will be available to all current Waymo One users—amounting to tens of thousands of people, according to TechCrunch. While it’s a significant increase, not just anyone can use Waymo in SF yet. The company has been growing the service by admitting new riders from a waitlist that numbered 100,000 in June.

The Cosmic Tapestry: Universal Consciousness and the Big Bang

From the vast expanse of galaxies that paint our night skies to the intricate neural networks within our brains, everything we know and see can trace its origins back to a singular moment: the Big Bang. It’s a concept that has not only reshaped our understanding of the universe but also offers profound insights into the interconnectedness of all existence.

Imagine, if you will, the entire universe compressed into an infinitesimally small point. This is not a realm of science fiction but the reality of our cosmic beginnings. Around 13.8 billion years ago, a singular explosion gave birth to time, space, matter, and energy. And in that magnificent burst of creation, the seeds for everything — galaxies, stars, planets, and even us — were sown.

But what if the Big Bang was not just a physical event? What if it also marked the birth of a universal consciousness? A consciousness that binds every particle, every star, and every living being in a cosmic tapestry of shared experience and memory.

Bioprinted Skin Heals Wounds in Pigs With Minimal Scarring—Humans Are Next

Given these perks, it’s no wonder scientists have tried recreating skin in the lab. Artificial skin could, for example, cover robots or prosthetics to give them the ability to “feel” temperature, touch, or even heal when damaged.

It could also be a lifesaver. The skin’s self-healing powers have limits. People who suffer from severe burns often need a skin transplant taken from another body part. While effective, the procedure is painful and increases the chances of infection. In some cases, there might not be enough undamaged skin left. A similar dilemma haunts soldiers wounded in battle or those with inherited skin disorders.

Recreating all the skin’s superpowers is tough, to say the least. But last week, a team from Wake Forest University took a large step towards artificial skin that heals large wounds when transplanted into mice and pigs.

Are we ready to trust AI with our bodies?

Over the next few years, artificial intelligence is going to have a bigger and bigger effect on the way we live.

I hate going to the gym. Last year I hired a personal trainer for six months in the hope she would brainwash me into adopting healthy exercise habits longer-term. It was great, but personal trainers are prohibitively expensive, and I haven’t set foot in a gym once since those six months came to an end.

That’s why I was intrigued when I read my colleague Rhiannon Williams’s latest piece about AI gym trainers.

Yepic fail: This startup promised not to make deepfakes without consent, but did anyway

U.K.-based startup Yepic AI claims to use “deepfakes for good” and promises to “never reenact someone without their consent.” But the company did exactly what it claimed it never would.

In an unsolicited email pitch to a TechCrunch reporter, a representative for Yepic AI shared two “deepfaked” videos of the reporter, who had not given consent to having their likeness reproduced. Yepic AI said in the pitch email that it “used a publicly available photo” of the reporter to produce two deepfaked videos of them speaking in different languages.

The reporter requested that Yepic AI delete the deepfaked videos it created without permission.

Anysphere raises $8M from OpenAI to build an AI-powered IDE

Anysphere, a startup building what it describes as an “AI-native” software development environment, called Cursor, today announced that it raised $8 million in seed funding led by OpenAI’s Startup Fund with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and other angel investors.

The new cash, which brings Anysphere’s total raised to $11 million, will be put toward hiring and supporting Anysphere’s AI and machine learning research, co-founder and CEO Michael Truell said.

“In the next several years, our mission is to make programming an order of magnitude faster, more fun and creative,” Truell told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our platform enables all developers to build software faster.”

Character.AI’s $200 Million Bet That Chatbots Are The Future Of Entertainment

Inside Character. AI’s disheveled Palo Alto, California headquarters, employees at first appear to be hard at work, glued to their computer monitors. But rather than coding, many of them are engrossed in lively group chats with their colleagues and the AI chatbot characters that Character has become known for. Now, thanks to a new group chat function the startup launched Wednesday, they were chatting with work friends along with bots that anyone can build to create the illusion that you’re actually talking to the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Tony Stark or Lucifer.

“The feature was good enough that people stopped working sometimes to use it,” cofounder Daniel De Freitas told Forbes. De Freitas,… More.

The unicorn AI startup is bringing bots that make it sound like you’re talking to well known people like Taylor Swift into interactions with friends.

What’s The Deal With Chatbots? Can They Actually Think?

We’ve been talking about this a lot in the places where we gather to discuss the potential for AI. There’s an extent to which we’ve already seen the big disruption around chat tech – but then there are all of those question marks about how far it’s going to go from here! You get this when you’re listening to dozens of entrepreneurs, researchers, and people connected to top institutions giving out their pearls of wisdom to expectant crowds. And I’ve done a lot of that lately.

Anyway, what we’re finding in terms of chat evolution is that many of these future chatbot systems are likely to be connected to things that aren’t like large language models at all. Hmmm.

Let’s start with the basic premise of what these large language models do – they source a large amount of training data out on the net, they aggregate it altogether, and they use language as a tool to sort of imitate human cognition in digital environments.

New AI model uncovers how and why the human brain ages

Researchers developed ‘HistoAge,’ an algorithm that unravels brain aging and neurodegenerative disorders.

As we age, our brains undergo structural and cellular changes influenced by intrinsic and external factors. Accelerated aging in the brain can result in an increased risk of neurodegenerative conditions, bipolar disorder, and mortality. In a bid to deeply understand how an aging brain works, researchers say they have built a powerful AI tool that can identify regions in the brain vulnerable to age-related changes.

The team used AI to develop an algorithm called ‘HistoAge,’ which predicts age at death based on the cellular composition of human brain tissue specimens with an average accuracy… More.

RapidEye/iStock.