A US company has built a flame-throwing robot dog capable f shooting jets of fire up to 30 feet that is available for purchase online.
Called the Thermonator, the four-legged robot comes equipped with an ARC Flamethrower mounted on its back.
Designed by Ohio-based firm Throwflame, the $9,420 (£7,600) robot is not advertised as a weapon, with the manufacturer suggesting possible uses include wildlife control, snow and ice removal and general entertainment.
#usa #dog #robot
Humanoid robots have been in development for many years by Japan’s Honda and Hyundai Motor’s Boston Dynamics. Earlier this year, Microsoft and Nvidia-backed startup Figure said it had signed a partnership with German automaker BMW to deploy humanoid robots in the car maker’s facility in the US.
Elon Musk said before that robot sales could become a larger part of the Tesla business. He said, “I think Tesla is best positioned of any humanoid robot maker to be able to reach volume production with efficient inference on the robot itself.”
Science And Technology For Emerging National Security Threats — Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Ph.D. — Nonlinear Solutions LLC — Fmr. Director, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), United States Department of Defense.
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, Ph.D. is Owner of Nonlinear Solutions LLC., an advisory group that provides strategic scientific and intelligence consulting services, with a focus on emerging science and technology trends, to clients in both the defense and intelligence communities.
Dr. Kirkpatrick recently retired from federal Senior Service in December 2023 and prior to his current responsibilities he answered to the Deputy Secretary of Defense to stand-up and lead the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO — https://www.aaro.mil/) in early 2022, leading the U.S. government’s efforts to address Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) using a rigorous scientific framework and a data-driven approach.
Dr. Kirkpatrick attended University of Georgia as an undergraduate, to study physics, where he also did his Ph.D. work in nonlinear and nonequilibrium phonon dynamics of rare earth doped fluoride crystals, and currently serves as an adjunct professor at UGA.
Dr. Kirkpatrick began his career in Defense and Intelligence related science and technology immediately out of graduate school. After receiving his Ph.D. in Physics in 1995, he subsequently took a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, investigating laser-induced molecular vibrations of high explosives under an AFOSR program. In 1996, he was offered a National Research Council Fellowship at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C. investigating novel solid-state lasers for the Department of the Navy. In 1997, he was recruited by the Air Force Research Laboratory to build an Ultrafast Laser Physics Lab to investigate nonlinear optics, novel ultrafast spectroscopic methods, and nonlinear micro/nano-fabrication techniques for the Air Force.
We’re beginning to see the early stages of that trend pick up pace: In 2022, 34% of job tasks were completed by machines versus 66% by humans, according to the World Economic Forum’s “The Future of Jobs Report 2023”. By 2027, that ratio is expected to increase to 43% of tasks completed by machines and 57% by humans.
“On the one hand, yes, it’s scary to envision a world in which almost no job is safe from automation or from robotics. But the important thing to keep in mind is that through this kind of creative destruction process, while jobs will certainly be lost in some areas, there also will be jobs that will be gained.”
Despite those concerns, investors are looking for ways to bet on the growth of robotics. And according to the International Federation of Robotics, they don’t have to look very far. The US is home to the most suppliers that manufacture service robots and is well-positioned to cater to the rapidly growing global demand for robotics. The annual installation of industrial robots is expected to grow by about 30%, from 553,000 installations in 2022 to 718,000 in 2026.
Marine biologists are racing against the clock to decode the bizarre aquatic behavior.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has admitted that the generative AI boom caught Google by surprise.
During an event at Stanford University earlier this month, the tech boss said his company was “surprised” by the sudden public interest in AI.
Despite saying he recognized the tech’s significance years ago, he admitted he had a “different sense of the trajectory in mind” when it came to society’s adoption of AI.
It watches, saps the very spirit. And the worst thing of all is I watch it. I can’t not look. It’s like a drug, a horrible drug. You can’t resist it. It’s an addiction. These words of testimony are babbled by the crumbling Colonel Grover to describe O.B.I.T. — The Outer Band Individuated Teletracer — a hellishly precise surveillance machine of questionable origin. Uncovered by a murder investigation at a Defense Department research center, O.B.I.T. proves to be an insidious instrument that breeds fear and hostility. Both cautionary tale and tight courtroom drama, this haunting episode explores the fear and hostility that result when all privacy is eliminated…and all secrets are revealed! Alan Baxter, Jeff Corey and Peter Breck star!
Bacterium could head off food versus fuel dilemma by producing chemicals from agricultural waste.
Apple presents OpenELM An Efficient Language Model Family with Open-source Training and Inference Framework.
Apple presents OpenELM
An Efficient Language Model Family with Open-source Training and Inference Framework.
The reproducibility and transparency of large language models are crucial for advancing open research, ensuring the trustworthiness of results, and…
Join the discussion on this paper page.
That led the Microsoft Research machine learning expert to wonder how much an AI model could learn using only words a 4-year-old could understand – and ultimately to an innovative training approach that’s produced a new class of more capable small language models that promises to make AI more accessible to more people.
Large language models (LLMs) have created exciting new opportunities to be more productive and creative using AI. But their size means they can require significant computing resources to operate.
While those models will still be the gold standard for solving many types of complex tasks, Microsoft has been developing a series of small language models (SLMs) that offer many of the same capabilities found in LLMs but are smaller in size and are trained on smaller amounts of data.
