Gm! It’s Brett again. Last week I had the opportunity to visit the Open AI offices and ask Sam Altman if he thought AI is conscious and what the relationship between intelligence and consciousness is. There have been a lot of bad takes here but his was spot on “intelligence is an emergent property of matter and consciousness is a weird separate thing.”

🏠 Robotics

Humanoids rising

You've probably seen the videos of the new Figure 01 bot going viral. 

At first, I was like "cool, another robot that can do basic tasks." But after looking at the videos, this thing feels legit.

The magic is how it combines a language model (presumably GPT-4) with computer vision actually to analyze its surroundings and decide how to move. Most robots are just playing back canned routines. But Figure 01 is perceiving the world and dynamically figuring out how to manipulate objects. That human-like dexterity to gently grasp things is the holy grail roboticists have been chasing.

There are clearly still some latency issues they need to solve before this becomes a Terminator-level threat. But being able to autonomously break down abstract commands and execute them in the real world...that's a big leap forward.

This is an interesting take on the contrast between Figure and Boston Dynamics. 👇

Then you've got Tesla's Optimus robot which is meant for general purpose tasks and labor. But unlike Figure 1's end-to-end neural networks, it looks like Optimus still relies on OG techniques like teleoperation or waldos - basically a human pulling the strings to puppeteer the robot's motions remotely.

Case in point, if you look closely at that widely shared Optimus "laundry folding" demo from Tesla...you'll notice a human arm sneakily entering the frame, controlling its movements. 

At least for now - the race is still on and you know the Musk stans will cry "FUD!" But I'm impressed with what I've seen from Figure so far.

The Figure team's goal is to put humanoid robots in the workforce - doing undesirable labor or high-precision medical tasks. Definitely some exciting possibilities if we can get the ethics right.

The Big Picture: We're entering a new phase beyond narrow AI and pure language models — systems that can understand their environment and take physical actions based on that context.

🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• The US Govt will ban TikTok in 6 months if the US arm doesn’t divorce from its Chinese parent.

• SpaceX Starship successfully reaches space and captures beautiful images of Earth.

• 61 AI companies are hiring, apply here.

• Reddit’s sale of user data for AI training can earn them $200M in revenue, FTC inquires into it.

AI

• OpenAI CTO Mira Murati says Sora was trained on public and licensed data.

• Cognition Labs introduces Devin, the world’s first AI software engineer.

• Google Deepmind's AI agent SIMA can play a video game with you.

• EU Parliament adopts the AI Act.

SCIENCE

• Chinese scientists created an electricity generator inspired by drinking bird toys.

• Methane leaks in the US are higher than what the Government has estimated.

• Ancient malaria genome from Romans explains how the disease has evolved.

• Scientists want to understand why most astronauts get headaches.

CRYPTO

• Bitcoin price slumps to $65K.

• Billion-dollar volumes followed by a steep drop prompt allegations on Aevo.

• Solana approaches $200 for the first time since December 2021.

• BOME (a Solana meme coin) rallies 220% following Binance's announcement to list it.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Telo, an electric vehicle company, raised $5.4M to support virtual vehicle safety validation and development towards a road-ready model. Tesla co-founder, Marc Tarpenning also joins TELO’s board.

Stat: 148. The launches SpaceX aims to complete in 2024. So far, it has launched 24 rockets.

Rabbit hole: How humanity has benefited from accelerationist movements & why we need them.

🤩 MONDAY MOTIVATION

"The ability to endure pain and suffering is one of the most important characteristics of successful people." - Jensen Huang

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

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💉 DOPAMINE HIT

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