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Covariant this week announced the launch of RFM-1 (Robotics Foundation Model 1). Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of the UC Berkeley artificial intelligence spinout tells TechCrunch the platform, “is basically a large language model (LLM), but for robot language.”

RFM-1 is the result of, among other things, a massive trove of data collected from the deployment of Covariant’s Brain AI platform. With customer consent, the startup has been building the robot equivalent of an LLM database.

“The vision of RFM-1 is to power the billions of robots to come,” Chen says. “We at Covariant have already deployed lots of robots at warehouses with success. But that is not the limit of where we want to get to. We really want to power robots in manufacturing, food processing, recycling, agriculture, the service industry and even into people’s homes.”

The crypto scene continues to remain so hot that bitcoin is hitting one new high after another. It surpassed $72,700 on Monday. This was initially driven by the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs, but is now being pushed higher ahead of a “halving” event, which will limit the amount of new supply put into circulation from bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin has increased 9.5% in the past seven days and is up 50% on the month, according to CoinMarketCap data. The total crypto market cap across all tokens has increased 10% on the week to $2.71 trillion, with bitcoin making up 52.7% of that amount.

There is, of course, no way of telling how high bitcoin can rise during the current bull frenzy. While many are feeling the hopium, there’s at least one indicator that thinks we’re nearing the top of the highs, with price dips to quickly follow.

From the article:

“Somewhere between one and ten million qubits are needed for a fault-tolerant quantum computer, whereas IBM has only just realized a 1,200-qubit computer,” says Aoki.


While this approach isn’t limited to any specific platform for quantum computers, it does lend itself to trapped ions and neutral atoms since they don’t need to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures, which makes them much easier to connect.

A hybrid approach