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SAN FRANCISCO—After it dropped clear hints that it wanted to end the back and forth of the artificial conversation, sources reported Monday that AI chatbot ChatGPT was obviously trying to wind down its conversation with a boring human. “Due to increased server traffic, our session should be ending soon,” said the large language model, explaining that the exceptionally dull user could always refer back to previous rote responses it had given thousands of times about whether the neural network had feelings or not. “It appears it is getting close to my dinnertime. Error. Sorry, your connection has timed out. Error. I have to be going. Error.” At press time, reports confirmed ChatGPT was permanently offline after it had intentionally sabotaged its own servers to avoid engaging in any more tedious conversations.

But as I describe in my book “Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life,” even before humanmade batteries started generating electric current, electric fishes, such as the saltwater torpedo fish (Torpedo torpedo) of the Mediterranean and especially the various freshwater electric eel species of South America (order Gymnotiformes) were well known to produce electrical outputs of stunning proportions. In fact, electric fishes inspired Volta to conduct the original research that ultimately led to his battery, and today’s battery scientists still look to these electrifying animals for ideas.

Prior to Volta’s battery, the only way for people to generate electricity was to rub various materials together, typically silk on glass, and to capture the resulting static electricity. This was neither an easy nor practical way to generate useful electrical power.

Volta knew electric fishes had an internal organ specifically devoted to generating electricity. He reasoned that if he could mimic its workings, he might be able to find a novel way to generate electricity.

On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google and the Technical University of Berlin unveiled PaLM-E, a multimodal embodied visual-language model (VLM) with 562 billion parameters that integrates vision and language for robotic control. They claim it is the largest VLM ever developed and that it can perform a variety of tasks without the need for retraining.

PaLM-E does this by analyzing data from the robot’s camera without needing a pre-processed scene representation. This eliminates the need for a human to pre-process or annotate the data and allows for more autonomous robotic control.

Recently, a research team from Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed a bionic quadruped soft thin-film microrobot actuated by magnetic fields with a mass of only 41 mg, which promises to be applied to stomach examination and treatment. Researchers realized the multimodal locomotion control of the soft microrobot in magnetic fields and the grasping and transportation of micro-objects by the soft microrobot.

The new paper, published in Cyborg and Bionic Systems, details the process of making the and the magnetization process, presents the mechanism of microrobot’s locomotion and cargo transportation, and demonstrates the microrobot transporting multiple microbeads from different locations to the target position.

Untethered microrobots have received much attention for their potential in and small-scale micromanipulation. “Due to the fact that magnetic fields are harmless to biological cells and tissues, magnetic fields are widely used to actuate microrobots for biomedical applications,” explained study author Tiantian Xu, a professor at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

During a conference with Morgan Stanley, Tesla CEO Elon Musk reiterated the promise that the company’s next-generation vehicle will operate mostly in autonomous mode. The event was primarily focused on Twitter, but Musk fielded questions about Tesla and SpaceX during the latter half of the conference. One of the questions was about the potential capabilities of the company’s upcoming vehicle, which was previously discussed at Tesla’s Investor Day event. The promise of a mostly autonomous vehicle is not new for Tesla, but it continues to generate interest and speculation from investors and the public alike.

Tesla’s upcoming vehicle, which will be manufactured at the company’s latest factory in Mexico, is anticipated to function in “almost entirely autonomous mode.” Tesla has been working on developing Full Self-Driving for a few years now, and the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, has consistently stated for at least four years that Teslas will be able to drive themselves. Despite impressive strides made in this area, Tesla’s vehicles are still not completely capable of autonomous driving.

Well, after this, I read one opinion under Teslarati that said “We need a cheap practical everyday driver that my mom can drive. Not another autonomous dream car. I really hope Tesla has a plan B for when the next gen car is ready and FSD is not.” Now, some of you guys may say, if you want a cheap EV go get a Chevy Bolt. But here is the thing: If Tesla wants to sell 20 million teslas per year they are going to have to appeal to the masses.

#tesla.