AI:
Figure 02 unveiled — working autonomously at BMW's Spartanburg factory. ⦿ New 16 Degrees of Freedom hand ⦿ Onboard inference, running VLM locally for speech-to-speech reasoning ⦿ 2.25 KWh battery ⦿ Exoskeleton structure + Integrated wiring https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SRVJaOg9Co (press article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/figure-new-humanoid-robot)
Fully-automatic robot dentist performs world's first human procedure https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/robot-dentist-world-first/
Big tech’s huge AI spending isn’t slowing down. And according to their forward-looking statements, that spending is expected to go up even more. https://sherwood.news/tech/meta-amazon-microsoft-massive-ai-capex-spending-quarterly-earnings/
Flux: OpenAI’s DALL-E 3-Like AI For Free, Forever! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7crpGKEA2g
Meta presents Self-Taught Evaluators: Without any labeled preference data, the proposed model utperforms commonly used LLM judges such as GPT-4 and matches the performance of the top-performing reward models trained with labeled examples https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02666
AI capabilities can be significantly improved without expensive retraining https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07413
MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.01800
DeepL’s latest large language model, which is trained to specialize in translation, outperforms Google Translate and GPT-4 for translation tasks. https://thenextweb.com/news/deepl-new-llm-that-outperforms-google-translate-chatgpt
A New Type of Neural Network Is More Interpretable -- Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks could point physicists to new hypotheses https://spectrum.ieee.org/kan-neural-network
GPUDrive: Data-driven, multi-agent driving simulation at 1 million FPS https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.01584
Tenstorrent has developed a new set of AI chips that are much less expensive than NVIDIA’s. They are available as PCIe cards or as components of complete workstations. https://wccftech.com/tenstorrent-wormhole-ai-processors-risc-v-phenomenal-price-to-performance-value/
Meta says it will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 compared to Llama 3. https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/01/zuckerberg-says-meta-will-need-10x-more-computing-power-to-train-llama-4-than-llama-3/
“Breaking my hand forced me to write all my code with AI for 2 months. I’m never going back.” https://erikschluntz.com/software/2024/07/30/code-with-ai.html
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announces he is joining Anthropic. https://x.com/johnschulman2/status/1820610863499509855
OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman is taking an extended leave https://x.com/gdb/status/1820644694264791459
Miscellaneous:
‘Sensational’ Proof Delivers New Insights Into Prime Numbers https://www.quantamagazine.org/sensational-proof-delivers-new-insights-into-prime-numbers-20240715/
Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences. https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-happens-in-a-mind-that-cant-see-mental-images-20240801/
No proof that radiation from X rays and CT scans causes cancer https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160203134456.htm
Japan's unmanned stores count on shoppers' honesty https://web-japan.org/trends/11_tech-life/tec202309_unmanned-stores.html
Ukraine:
Ukraine Had A Chance To Blow Up Russia’s Best Warplanes On The Tarmac. The White House Said No—And Now It’s Too Late. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/08/05/ukraine-had-a-chance-to-blow-up-russias-best-warplanes-on-the-tarmac-the-white-house-said-no-and-now-its-too-late/
“Here we go again... After failed large-scale assaults, the Russians, emboldened, launched another attack on the positions of the 79th Air Assault Brigade.” https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1820496840997093593
Definitive List of Russia's Armored Fighting Vehicles in Storage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu-nR7OVttU
“In the Sudzhansky district of Kursk Oblast, Russian aviation, including Su-25 jets, are actively involved. According to Russian media, fighting continues involving artillery, drones, and various firepower.” https://x.com/NOELreports/status/1820819602802139272
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I’ve also seen unmanned stores in America, but only in high-trustworthiness areas where everyone would feel guilt if they didn’t pay. A few people defecting from the social contract can really make a lot of nice things untenable if society tolerates petty crime.