Hello and welcome to Weekly News Roundup Issue #471! After WWDC 2024, the only thing the tech world is talking about is Apple Intelligence and what Apple brings to the generative AI revolution (or bubble, depending on your views). Apple Intelligence was supposed to be the topic for this week’s write-up, but the text about it grew to the point it needed its own article. It will go out a couple of hours after this week’s news roundup.

In other news, Elon Musk withdrew his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman. Meanwhile, Mistral AI reached a $6B valuation, and François Chollet launched a $1 million contest to help create AGI.

In robotics, a humanoid robot learned how to drive in Japan, and NATO funded a German startup building autonomous war robots.

We will finish this week’s roundup with the story of how nanopore sequencers came to be and with the creation of the most detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain.

I hope you enjoy this week’s selection!

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🦾 More than a human

Humans May Be Able to Grow New Teeth Within Just 6 Years
Scientists in Japan will begin clinical trials of a tooth-regrowing drug in September. The treatment has been proven to work in ferrets and mice. If all goes well, the treatment will be administered to patients between the ages of 2 and 7 who are missing at least four teeth, with the ultimate goal of having a tooth-regrowing medicine available by the year 2030.

🔮 Future visions

▶️ 12 Predictions for the Future of Technology | Vinod Khosla (9:31)

Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, founder of Khosla Ventures, and self-proclaimed techno-optimist, shares his predictions for the future. He envisions a future of abundance where expertise and labour are nearly free, preventive medicine detects diseases much sooner, and we live in car-free cities, all powered by clean energy.

🧠 Artificial Intelligence

AI Will Become Mathematicians’ ‘Co-Pilot’
In this interview, Terence Tao, one of the most accomplished mathematicians of our time, discusses the growing role AI tools have in mathematics. According to Tao, these tools can not only speed up the process of finding proofs for currently unsolved problems but also enhance collaboration among mathematicians.

Elon Musk abruptly withdraws lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI
Elon Musk has moved to dismiss his lawsuit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the startup’s original mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. Musk launched the suit against Altman in February, and the case had been slowly working its way through the California court system. Musk’s request for a dismissal contained no reason for the decision. Musk’s suit drew scepticism from legal experts who argued that certain claims in the filing—such as that OpenAI had created artificial intelligence on a level that could match human intelligence—did not hold up to scrutiny.

Paris-based AI startup Mistral AI raises $640M
Mistral AI, the AI startup behind popular models like Mistral and Mixtral, has raised a $640 million Series B funding round. The French startup, which was founded in April 2023, is now valued at $6 billion following this funding round.

▶️ Francois Chollet - LLMs won’t lead to AGI - $1,000,000 Prize to find true solution (1:34:39)

This is a fascinating conversation. François Chollet, an AI researcher at Google and the creator of Keras, a popular deep learning framework, introduces ARC—a memorisation-resistant benchmark designed to test AI models—and the ARC Prize, a $1 million competition to solve Chollet’s so far unbeaten test, launched to help in creating AGI. It is also a conversation about what intelligence and reasoning are, and the difference between generalisation and memorisation. Chollet also comments on the state of AI research, saying that OpenAI has pushed back AGI by 5-10 years due to closing down frontier research publishing.

▶️ Geoffrey Hinton - "Will digital intelligence replace biological intelligence?” (36:53)

In this lecture, Geoffrey Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI and currently a strong advocate for AI safety, explains why he thinks large language models are intelligent. He claims that these models understand language just as humans do, citing the similarities between how large language models work and our current understanding of how the human mind functions. Hinton then goes on to discuss the dangers of AI and how to ensure it does not take control of humans and, consequently, wipe out humanity.

▶️ I Made a Neural Network with just Redstone! (17:22)

Minecraft redstone engineers are crazy talented. They have built functioning calculators, displays, and even full computers within the game. This video documents one redstone engineer’s quest to build a compact neural network in Minecraft that can recognise handwritten digits, a task equivalent to writing a "Hello, world!" program.

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🤖 Robotics

NATO funds German startup building autonomous war robots
NATO’s Innovation Fund has led a €9 million seed investment into ARX Robotics, a German robotics startup founded by army veterans, to help the company develop unmanned ground robots for battlefield use. ARX Robotics offers four modular robots, resembling small tanks without guns, capable of carrying up to 500 kg, including injured soldiers, and equipped with radar, mine-sweeping devices, or medical stretchers.

This humanoid robot can drive cars — sort of
Researchers from the University of Tokyo have built a "musculoskeletal humanoid" robot called Musashi that can drive a car. The robot drove a small electric car through a test track on its own, just like a human would—by grabbing the steering wheel with its hands and using its foot to operate the brake and acceleration pedals. The first experiments were successful, and researchers are looking forward to developing the next-gen robot and software.

New robotic gripper for automated apple picking developed
Researchers at Washington State University have developed a robotic gripper capable of gently picking apples from trees without damaging them. The gripper, which costs around $30 to produce and uses 3D-printed fingers tipped with silicone rubber, successfully harvested over 87.5% of apples without causing damage. Field tests are expected later this year. The researchers hope their gripper will help address labour shortages in Washington’s agricultural sector.

🧬 Biotechnology

Driving Toward Nanopores
In this article, Stephen Malina tells a fascinating story of how nanopore sequencers—tiny devices that can quickly sequence DNA with high accuracy—went from being an idea one person had while driving to revolutionising genetic engineering and biotech. It is also a story of how to build a good measuring device and how different technologies come together to create an innovative device.

💡Tangents

Google helped make an exquisitely detailed map of a tiny piece of the human brain
Scientists from Harvard and Google have created a detailed, nanoscale-resolution map of a single cubic millimetre of the human brain. The map contains roughly 57,000 cells, about 230 millimetres of blood vessels, and nearly 150 million synapses, all mapped in exquisite detail. This map, the highest-resolution picture of the human brain ever created, could be an invaluable resource for neuroscientists, allowing them to trace the brain’s wiring one neuron at a time down to the synapses.

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