A week in Generative AI: Robots, robots and more robots

News for the week ending 7th January 2024

cyberpunk news presenter, male, long hair, behind desk, facing camera, in clean pixel art style, neon colors --ar 16:9

Welcome to 2024 everyone! This year’s going to be a big year and I’m expecting to see even more progress in AI and related fields than we saw in 2023. We’ll start to see ‘enterprise-grade’ applications of generative AI being released, a lot of progress on robotics and multi-modal models and of course, OpenAI’s GPT-5 at some point. It’s going to be an exciting 12 months!

---

Mobile ALOHA - A low-cost, open source, mobile manipulator

2024 will be a big year for robotics, and it’s great to see Mobile ALOHA kicking things off. There was a lot of hype about this announcement this week, so it’s worth a watch BUT be aware than many of the tasks are not being completed autonomously but by remote control (which we seem to be calling ‘Teleoperation’ now 🤓).

Source

---

Character.ai: Young people turning to AI therapist bots

Regular readers will know that I’m very bullish on Character.ai and it’s great to see how the platform can help people with real world issues. However, I feel like this is an area that needs clinical expertise, proper oversight and some serious guardrails to ensure it’s always giving appropriate advice.

Source

---

Google Wrote a ‘Robot Constitution’ So Its Machines Won't Kill You... Hopefully

The robots are indeed coming in 2024, not en masse, but prepare to be continually amazed by what they can do now and the speed of progress you’ll see in the next 12 months.

Source

---

We're getting closer to OpenAI's first device

This is a good summary of various pieces of related news from the last few months. Bottom line is Sam Altman and Jony Ive are working on what an ‘AI-first’ mobile device should be and LoveFrom (Jony’s design company) is seriously staffing up for this effort with lots of Apple alums. Very interested to see where this ends up!

Source

---

AI Ethics News

• Artificial intelligence can find your location in photos, worrying privacy experts

• A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless

• Database of 16,000 Artists Used to Train Midjourney AI, Including 6-Year-Old Child, Garners Criticism

• Images altered to trick machine vision can influence humans too

---

Long Reads

• Time - What Generative AI Reveals About the Human Mind

• MIT Technology Review - What’s next for AI in 2024

• One Useful Thing - Signs and Portents

• WriteBuddy.ai - 50 Most Visited AI Tools and their 24bn+ Traffic

---

“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“

William Gibson