Lifeboat Foundation

The Matic is a fully autonomous robot vacuum that its founders claim will clean your floors without getting stuck on cables or toys and without sending a map of your home to the cloud. And it’ll only cost you $1,800.

The Matic is a new robot vacuum with a different approach to cleaning your floors. Built by two former Google Nest engineers, it’s designed to move around your home in the same way most humans would, processing things visually instead of spatially. It uses five RGB cameras to navigate, rather than the sensors, bumpers, and lidar tech found on most of today’s robot vacs. In theory, this makes it less prone to common robot vacuum pitfalls —such as high-pile rugs, cables, and tight spaces — because it can actually see where it’s going in real time rather than relying on a preprogrammed map. It also operates locally — with no cloud component at all. Mapping is done on the device, and it doesn’t require an internet connection to run, so your data should never leave your home. $1,800 robot vacuum thinks it can beat the best of them.

Up until that moment, Tokelau, formally a territory of New Zealand, didn’t even know it had been assigned a ccTLD. “We discovered the.tk,” remembered Aukusitino Vitale, who at the time was general manager of Teletok, Tokelau’s sole telecom operator.

Zuurbier said “that he would pay Tokelau a certain amount of money and that Tokelau would allow the domain for his use,” remembers Vitale. It was all a bit of a surprise—but striking a deal with Zuurbier felt like a win-win for Tokelau, which lacked the resources to run its own domain. In the model pioneered by Zuurbier and his company, now named Freenom, users could register a free domain name for a year, in exchange for having advertisements hosted on their websites. If they wanted to get rid of ads, or to keep their website active in the long term, they could pay a fee.

In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant—but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its.tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million. But there has been and still is only one website actually from Tokelau that is registered with the domain: the page for Teletok. Nearly all the others that have used.tk have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.

Apple CEO Tim Cook pushed back a bit at the notion that the company was behind in AI on yesterday’s Q4 earnings call with investors, as he highlighted technology developments that Apple had made recently that “would not be possible without AI.” Specifically, the exec pointed to new iOS 17 features like Personal Voice and Live Voicemail as examples of its innovation with AI technologies. In addition, Cook confirmed Apple was working on generative AI technologies.

The features Cook called out aren’t necessarily thought of as AI by consumers, and that may be by design. Cook suggested that Apple doesn’t label the features as “AI” necessarily.

“We label them as to what their consumer benefit is,” Cook said. “But the fundamental technology behind it is AI and machine learning.”

The Nobel Awards Season just ended, with the “Oscars of Science” awarded to some of the world’s brightest minds. The entire science world was watching, and just like with the Oscars, there was an element of suspense, drama, envy, celebration, and happiness. Most of the Nobel Laureates are also phenomenal speakers and communicators with decades of teaching experience, and thousands of people across the world are glued to their monitors to hear their inspiring stories. The Nobel Prizes are awarded in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economic Sciences. Unfortunately, there is no Nobel Prize for Computer Science, Mathematics, or Engineering. So, it seems like it… More.

While there is no Nobel Prize for AI, Jumper and Hassabis may be the frontrunners for a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of AlphaFold.

The company aims to launch a larger and more powerful reusable rocket in 2025.

A Chinese company has made significant progress in developing its reusable rocket after successfully testing the first stage of its Hyperbola-2 launch vehicle in a desert. iSpace, a Beijing-based firm, conducted a “hop test” at the Jiuquan satellite launch center on Thursday, which lasted for about a minute and demonstrated the rocket’s ability to take off and land vertically. The company said the test was an essential step towards flying its larger and more powerful Hyperbola-3 reusable rocket in 2025.

As per SCMP.

Continue reading “SpaceX rival, China’s iSpace claims success in vertical landing rocket test” »

China has announced a plan to produce its first humanoid robots by 2025, as part of its push to develop the future industry.

China has long been eyeing the top spot in emerging fields like AI and quantum computing. Now, it has a new goal: to create realistic robots that can mimic human actions and emotions.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has unveiled a plan to produce China’s first humanoid robots by 2025. The program also aims to foster more startups in the sector, set industry norms, cultivate talent, and enhance international cooperation.

“We will have for the first time something that is smarter than the smartest human,” added Musk at the UK’s AI Safety Summit.

The latest advancements in artificial intelligence are also fanning an anxious frenzy around the technology replacing human jobs. And that’s something that came up in a candid discussion between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak around the sidelines of the AI Safety Summit.

Wikimedia Commons.

Continue reading “‘AI will do everything’: Elon Musk on the future of jobs” »

Set up in July, xAI aimed to take a path very different from OpenAI. How far it has succeeded will be known soon.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, is ready to showcase its first product to the world and will release it to a select group tomorrow, as per a tweet from Musk.

Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI when the organization worked as a non-profit and for the advancement of AI. Over the years, though, OpenAI started leaning towards profit and teamed up with Microsoft, which has poured billions into its growth. The Tesla CEO eventually fell out with his other co-founders and has often criticized OpenAI for its change in stance.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, to release first program tomorrow” »

A record-breaking superatomic semiconductor material allows particles to traverse it between 100 and 1,000 times faster than electrons pass through a silicon chip.

By Matthew Sparkes