Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly in talks to invest $100 million into robotics startup Figure — suggesting that they might hope to combine their tech with its humanoid robot.

The background: A lot of humanoid robots can look impressive in demos but turn out to be highly limited in reality.

To have a big impact in the workforce, these machines need to be not only physically capable of doing a job — a tricky enough engineering challenge — but also smart enough to tackle a huge variety of tasks with minimal training and supervision.

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As the opioid crisis worsens, one Boston-based pharmaceutical company has used some impressive biology to create what it says amounts to a non-addictive, non-opioid painkiller.

As the New York Times reports, Vertex Pharmaceuticals seems to have shown some promising results in Phase 3 clinical trials, announced earlier this week in a statement, for patients who experienced “moderate-to-severe acute pain” after getting surgery.

Whereas opioids generally target both the brain and the body, which ultimately leads to their addictiveness, non-opioid drugs like Vertex’s VX-548 focus on peripheral nerves, or those outside of the brain and spine, the NYT explains. By blocking pain at the source, the logic goes, it can be averted before reaching the brain and developing the kind of feedback loop that lends itself to dependency.

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Apple’s Vision Pro may have dazzled the world with its stunning display and sleek design, but not everyone is convinced it’s the best headset on the market. One of its biggest rivals, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has some pinching words for the device and its maker.

So why is Quest 3 a better overall product according to Zuck?

Zuckerberg took to Instagram on Tuesday to share his thoughts on the Vision Pro, which he tried out for himself. He compared it to Meta’s Quest 3, the latest version of the popular standalone VR headset. He filmed the video using the Quest 3’s video passthrough feature, which lets users see the real world in color through the headset’s cameras.

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Big Tech is also throwing its weight behind a promising technical standard that could add a “nutrition label” to images, video, and audio. Called C2PA, it’s an open-source internet protocol that relies on cryptography to encode details about the origins of a piece of content, or what technologists refer to as “provenance” information. The developers of C2PA often compare the protocol to a nutrition label, but one that says where content came from and who—or what—created it. Read more about it here.

On February 8, Google announced it is joining other tech giants such as Microsoft and Adobe in the steering committee of C2PA and will include its watermark SynthID in all AI-generated images in its new Gemini tools. Meta says it is also participating in C2PA. Having an industry-wide standard makes it easier for companies to detect AI-generated content, no matter which system it was created with.

OpenAI too announced new content provenance measures last week. It says it will add watermarks to the metadata of images generated with ChatGPT and DALL-E 3, its image-making AI. OpenAI says it will now include a visible label in images to signal they have been created with AI.

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Adobe and TikTok announced today that TikTok’s AI-powered Creative Assistant is now available directly within Adobe Express. The two companies say the integration will help businesses and creators make and market content more effectively. Creative Assistant is available now in English as an add-on in Adobe Express for both free and Premium users.

The Creative Assistant add-on in Adobe Express aims to reduce the time and effort required when working across different platforms when creating content. With Adobe Express, creators have access to templates, Adobe Stock video clips, audio, stickers and an Adobe Express TikTok video creator. With the new Creative Assistant add-on, creators will get access to TikTok insights about trending hashtags and AI-powered tools all within Adobe Express. The Assistant can also brainstorm creative ideas or even write out video scripts.

The integration also allows businesses and creators to schedule and publish content directly to TikTok, without having to leave Adobe Express.

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