H+ Weekly - H+ Weekly - Issue #363

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Issue #363

This week - a general AI from DeepMind; reviving dead eye cells; a robotic artist gets her first solo exhibition; deepfaking vacation photos with DALL-E 2; and more!

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MORE THAN A HUMAN

Life After Death for the Human Eye: Reviving Light-Sensing Cells
We can now bring dead eye cells back to life. During their research on how neurons die, scientists discovered a new method of reviving dead neurons and photoreceptor cells back to life. These results may lead to new therapies to cure blindness and neurodegenerative diseases.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Gato - A Generalist Agent
Researchers from DeepMind present Gato - an AI agent that can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more. What is interesting about this AI is that it can do all of these tasks without retraining, hence the name "generalist agent". For some, this result is an indicator that we are much closer to artificial general intelligence - the Holy Grail of AI research.

My deepfake DALL-E 2 vacation photos passed the Turing Test
Who needs to go on vacation when you can use a state-of-the-art AI image generator to fool your friends with deepfakes photos from a trip that never happened?

Language Models Perform Reasoning via Chain of Thought
In this blog post, researchers from Google AI present the results of applying a chain of thought to a language model. Their AI can answer questions and instead of just returning the answer, it shows intermediate reasoning steps before giving the final answer. This approach resulted in a higher success rate and also gives a peek into the inner wirings of the AI.

ROBOTICS

John Deere closes in on fully autonomous farming with its latest AI acquisition
John Deere, the manufacturer of farming vehicles, is slowly becoming a major player in the autonomous vehicles market. The company has announced acquisition of a startup working on self-driving vehicles using only cameras (similar to Tesla's approach of not using a Lidar). With that, it might be possible the first fleets of fully autonomous vehicles will hit fields rather than roads.

The world's first robot artist reveals amazing new paintings in its first solo exhibition
Ai-Da Robot, the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist, recently opened its first solo exhibition at the Concilio Europeo Dell'Arte venue of the InParadiso Gallery. Titled Leaping Into The Metaverse, the exhibition explores the interface between human experience and AI technology.

Maple Seeds Inspire Efficient Spinning Microdrone
In a paper published in Science Robotics, researchers from the City University of Hong Kong have come up with a spinning drone inspired by maple seeds that weigh less than 50 grams but can hold a stable hover for over 24 minutes.

BIOTECHNOLOGY

Playing God with Pork
We are past the first successful xenotransplations - the transfer of living cells, tissues, or organs from one species to another. It has been proven that kidneys and hearts from gene-edited pigs can work inside human body. There is, however, still a long road ahead for this to be standard practice. This article focuses on three roadblocks - one is the economics of xenotransplation, the second one is safety (how to minimalise the chances of pig diseases attacking humans) and the third one is ethics.

This issue was brought to you by our awesome patrons Eric, Andrew, dux and Tom! You too can support the newsletter on Patreon.

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Conrad Gray (@conradthegray)

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H+ Weekly - H+ Weekly - Issue #363

MORE THAN A HUMAN

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

ROBOTICS

BIOTECHNOLOGY

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H+ Weekly - Issue #361

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