A Waymo driverless taxi was attacked and burned to the ground Feb 10, 2024 in San Francisco’s Chinatown around 9PM PT. A crowd formed around the car, covered it in spray paint, broke out its windows, and set it on fire.
Co-designed by Teenage Engineering, what makes the Rabbit R1 special is the interface: instead of a grid of apps, you get an AI assistant that talks to your favorite apps and does everything for you.
You could get the R1 to research a holiday destination and book flights to it, or queue up a playlist of your favorite music, or book you a cab. In theory, you can do almost anything you can already do on your phone, just by asking. It remain a lot of questions over exactly how it works and protects your privacy in the way it describes.
Pre-orders are available at the Rabbit website with deliveries expected around March/April 2024.
Let’s hope it does better than the Humane AI pin that is already floundering and laying off staff. At least the Rabbit doesn’t require a monthly subscription.
HEAP (Hydraulic Excavator for an Autonomous Purpose), a modified 12-ton Menzi Muck M545, began by scanning a construction site, created a 3D map of it, then recorded the locations of boulders that had been dumped at the site. The robot then lifted each boulder off the ground and utilized machine vision technology to estimate its weight, center of gravity, and shape.
An internal algorithm then determined the best location for each boulder and built a stable, stacked/mortarless 20-ft high, 213-ft long stone wall.
I previously wrote about the Everybody Dance Now technology that allows you to take a video of a source dancer and then apply it to a video of a target person.
Now we have text-to-video technology called DreaMoving. You can start with a reference image, type in a description of the kind of moving you want, and get a generated video clip.
MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia is a tool that came out about 3 years ago and can add animation to static faces in your photos to bring life to them. People first tried it on historical images:
Then it became a trend on TikTok to upload images of relatives that have long since died. While it’s not perfect, it brought many to tears to see their loved ones again.
Of course, this can be a double-edged sword. This technology can bring the past to life, but it can also be used to create fake videos of living people.
Rainbolt is one of the world’s best players of Geoguessr – a game in which you are given a 360 picture and you get about 20 seconds to guess where in the world it was taken. A team at Stanford took 2 months and built an AI that can guess 92% of countries correctly and a median miss error of only 44km – which is astounding.
Here’s a head-to-head competition between the AI Predicting Image Geolocations (or PIGEON) and a pro geogussr player:
But there’s another side of this kind of technology. NPR did an interview and presented a few personal photos to the algorithm. PIGEON was able to guess the location the photo was taken to a really high degree of accuracy. This means you can find places taken in old family snapshots, but it also means that algorithms like this can reveal everywhere you are, and have been, based on your social media posts.
How it works
The algorithm that PIGEON uses is an interesting combination of AI model techniques. Besides the AI based learning, they use some interesting methods such as ‘geocells’ that uses political/geographic regions to help narrow locations instead of just naïve squares.
Rainbolt even pointed out that PIGEON picked up on camera lens smudges in the sky that were very common in Canadian google image captures:
You can only imagine where things will be in just a few years. Anyone that doesn’t think AI is already changing the world is missing it as it’s happening.
EMO is an audio-driven portrait-to-video generation framework. Input a single reference image and the vocal audio, e.g. talking and singing, and generate vocal avatar videos with expressive facial expressions, various head poses. Generate any duration depending on the length of input video.
You can make still images talk, sing, or cross-actor operations in which still images can deliver the performances of other actors or in different languages.
Rie Kudan has won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, with her most recent book: The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy. The judges praised the book, with one even calling it ‘flawless’.
What came next is unexpected. She revealed that she use AI to write parts of her novel (The Times). She revealed about 5% of the book was verbatim sentences she generated using AI.
This wasn’t the first time AI has won a top prize either. The winner of 2022’s Colorado State Fair’s prize for digital art also turned out to be AI-generated.
Nor is it the first time AI has won a writing prize. Journalism professor Shen Yang at Beijing’s Tsinghua University wanted to write a science fiction novel about the metaverse and humanoid robots. The AI ended up generating his entire book – which then took out a national science fiction award Jiangsu Science Writers Association . Using 66 different prompts, the AI drafted ‘Land of Memories‘ in just 3 hours.
After we went through dozens of prompts, the AI generated all of the content – from the pen name, title and text to accompanying pictures. And it’s not half bad. Here’s an excerpt:
In the metaverse’s edge, lies the ‘Land of Memories’, a forbidden realm where humans are barred. Solid illusions crafted by amnesiac humanoid robots and AI that had lost memories populate its domain. Any intruder, be it human or artificial, will have their memories drained away, forever trapped within its forbidden embrace.
Tetris is a tremendously fun 2D game, but 3D Tetris (Block Out, Virtual Boy 3D Tetris, Tetrix) never caught on. It was a lot more difficult to visualize and play.
But it looks like FedEx is up to the challenge. They are developing a two-armed robot from Dexterity AI called DexR to help pack some of the millions of boxes they get each day into delivery trucks.
I gotta hand it to Nathan Truesdell. He has a whole line of AI based coloring books – that likely took him all of an afternoon to create. It’s highly likely it only took him an hour or two with some prompts to make the line art. He then probably worked with an online physical book publisher – who may even be printing them up on demand for him to avoid handling stock or shipping – and now sits back and watches the money roll in with pretty much zero effort.
He didn’t even bother to fix the 7 fingers and thumb.
