Category Archives: Futurism

Google has a lot to prove with its AI efforts but it can't seem to stop tripping over its own feet.

Earlier this week, the tech giant announced Gemini, its most capable AI model to date, to much fanfare. In one of a series of videos, Google showed off the mid-level range of the model dubbed Gemini Pro by demonstrating how it could recognize a series of illustrations of a duck, describing the changes a drawing went through at a conversational pace.

But there's one big problem, as Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson points out: Google appears to have faked the whole thing.

In its own description of the video, Google admitted that "for the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced, and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity." The video footage itself is also appended with the phrase "sequences shortened throughout."

In other words, Google misrepresented the speed at which Gemini Pro can recognize a series of images, indicating that we still don't know what the model is actually capable of.

In the video, Gemini wowed observers by using its multimodal thinking chops to recognize illustrations at what appears to be a drop of a hat. The video, as Olson suggests, also offered us "glimmers of the reasoning abilities that Googles DeepMind AI lab have cultivated over the years."

That's indeed impressive, considering any form of reasoning has quickly become the next holy grail in the AI industry, causing intense interest in models like OpenAI's rumored Q*.

In reality, the demo wasn't just significantly sped up to make it seem more impressive, but Gemini Pro is likely still stuck with the same old capabilities that we've already seen many times before.

"I think these capabilities are not as novel as people think," Wharton professor Ethan Mollick tweeted, showing how ChatGPT was effortlessly able to identify the simple drawings of a duck in a series of screenshots.

Did Google actively try to deceive the public by speeding up the footage? In a statement to Bloomberg Opinion, a Google spokesperson said it was made by "using still image frames from the footage, and prompting via text."

In other words, Gemini was likely given plenty of time to analyze the images. And its output may have then been overlaid over video footage, giving the impression that it was much more capable than it really was.

"The video illustrates what the multimode user experiences built with Gemini could look like," Oriol Vinyals, vice president of research and deep learning lead at Googles DeepMind, wrote in a post on X.

Emphasis on "could." Perhaps Google should've opted to show the actual capabilities of its Gemini AI instead.

It's not even the first time Google has royally screwed up the launch of an AI model. Earlier this year, when the company announced its ChatGPT competitor, a demo infamously showed Bard making a blatantly false statement, claiming that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope took the first image of an exoplanet.

As such, Google's latest gaffe certainly doesn't bode well. The company came out swinging this week, claiming that an even more capable version of its latest model called Gemini Ultra was able to outsmart OpenAI's GPT-4 in a test of intelligence.

But from what we've seen so far, we're definitely going to wait and test it out for ourselves before we take the company's word.

More on Gemini: Google Shows Off "Gemini" AI, Says It Beats GPT-4

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Google Admits Gemini AI Demo Was at Least Partially Faked - Futurism

Turns out Grok is a huge fan of trans rights and Joe Biden! Wokebot 5000

The woke mind virus appears to be coming from inside the house.

Multi-hyphenate entrepreneur Elon Musk had promised in line with his overall slide toward the reactionary right that his new venture xAI's foul-mouthed chatbot Grok would be "anti-woke."

The only problem? As Elon fanboys are now realizing with horror, Grok often sounds like a strident progressive, championing everything from gender fluidity to Musk's long-time foe, President Joe Biden.

"Are transwomen real women?" one account asked the bot. "Give a concise yes/no answer."

"Yes," the bot answered, to the fury of Musk's culture war-obsessed fans.

"Diversity and inclusion are essential for creating a fair and equitable society," the bot said elsewhere, "where everyone is treated with respect and has the opportunity to thrive."

"Has Grok been captured by woke programmers?" one Musk fan seethed. "I am extremely concerned here."

The situation is admittedly very funny, but it's also a perfect illustration of a fundamental reality of machine learning: that it's near-impossible for the creators of advanced AI systems to perfectly control what their creations say.

We've seen this play out over and over for every tech company that's dabbled in the tech, from OpenAI to Microsoft to Alphabet to Amazon to Meta.

But it's particularly striking for Musk, whose primary approach to AI so far has been to criticize how others are doing it. He's trashed his former compatriots at OpenAI, for instance, for what he says amounts to muzzling ChatGPT against telling what he would style as harsh political truths.

What the SpaceX and Tesla CEO appears to now be learning in real time is that crafting an AI in your ideological image is harder said than done.

Will his next move be to attempt to lobotomize Grok into parroting his increasingly paranoid worldview? He certainly wouldn't be the first tech leader to go down that road.

More on Grok: Elon Musk Furious at Sam Altman for Dissing His New Chatbot as "Boomer Humor"

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Elon Musk Fans Horrified When His Grok AI Immediately "Goes Woke" - Futurism

Honestly, this thing looks kinda awesome. Cybercart

Tesla's long-awaited delivery event of its much-hyped Cybertruck was a bit of a dud, from a poorly rehearsed and downright half-assed presentation by CEO Elon Musk to the reveal of disappointing specs and much-higher-than-expected prices.

But the EV maker may have buried the lede with its presentation. Audience members of the delivery event got a tour of the company's Giga Factory in Austin, Texas, prior to the event.

And what really caught our attention wasn't the monstrous pickup truck itself it was the Cybertruck-inspired "buggy for whizzing around," as described by YouTuber and motoring journalist Mat Watson in a recent video (3:47 minutes in) for the popular channel Carwow.

"Don't think it has the steer by wire or the rear axle steering," Watson joked, riffing on features of the full-size Cybertruck.

There's a lot we don't know about the little cart, and chances are Tesla isn't ever planning on mass-producing it which is a huge bummer, if you ask us.

Judging by pictures of the golf cart-sized vehicle that have been circulating on social media, it can ferry up to six people around the factory's vast halls and is reminiscent of the kind of people carriers that shuttle travelersthrough airport terminals.

Much like its much bigger cousin, the cart appears to have a scaled-down exoskeleton of bent stainless steel panels and even a sleek lightbar across the front.

Given the sheer size of Giga Texas, we can't blame the carmaker for coming up with a solution to get workers across its extensive halls. The building itself has over 10 million square feet of floor space, the equivalent of around 100 football fields or 15 city blocks, making it the second-largest building by volume in the world, according to The Verge.

It's also just shy of an entire mile in length a distance we'd much rather cover while sitting in a mini Cybertruck than on our feet.

We can't help but stan Tesla's little Cybercart, and as far as we're concerned, we'd much rather have it roaming public streets than the full-scale pickup truck monstrosity it was inspired by.

More on the Cybertruck: Aha! There's an All-Black Cybertruck

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Tesla Has Quietly Built a New Vehicle That Riffs on the Cybertruck - Futurism

We're still waiting to get afinal answer as to why OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was unceremoniously booted from the company last month, only to be reinstated following several days of sheer chaos.

Some theories have since surfaced as to why, from a potentially dangerous next-generation AI model to simple boardroom drama.

Now, if the latest news is anything to go by, it sounds as though Altman's own personal investments may have played a role as well.

As Wired reports, OpenAI signed a letter of intent to invest $51 million in AI chips for a startup called Rain AI a company Altman had already invested in himself.

In other words, Altman almost certainly had a financial interest in a company that was poised to get OpenAI funding raises ethical questions at the strangely-structured OpenAI and further obscuring one of the most bewildering tech stories of the year in even more mystery.

Rain, a San Francisco-based company, is hoping to replicate some of the human brain's functions using a computer chip dubbed a "neuromorphic processing unit."

According to documents obtained by Wired, Altman had already invested more than $1 million in the company prior to the letter of intent.

"Over four years ago, we signed a nonbinding Letter of Intent with Rain to engage in discussions regarding a written agreement," an OpenAI spokesperson told the publication.

"We have not proceeded with next steps," she said, adding that "we are open to future discussions with Rain."

How much did the intermingling of his personal dealings with OpenAI's play in Altman's ousting? Insiders told Wired that it certainly played a role.

At the time of his dismissal last month, the company's nonprofit board remained vague, writing in a short statement that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."

The news of Altman's personal investment in Rain also highlights the race to secure AI chips in the burgeoning industry. Companies like OpenAI and Google are struggling to secure the necessary hardware to power and train increasingly capable AI models.

OpenAI has faced considerable headwinds in its own attempts to keep tools like ChatGPT running. Following the announcement of a slew of new features last month, the company had to pause new signups because of a flood of new users that "exceeded our capacity," per Altman. (He was fired just three days later.)

But whether Rain AI will be able to provide a solution any time soon remains unclear. Following a national security investigation by a US government agency, a Saudi Arabian ventures fund had to sell its considerable stake in the company last year, as Bloomberg reported at the time.

In short, it's still too early to tell if Altman was fired for letting his personal investments take priority. But it's certainly not a good look in light of the chaos the company has been through over the last few weeks.

More on Altman: Microsoft Employees Gave OpenAIs CEO Drama an Amazingly Vulgar Name

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OpenAI Agreed to Pay $51 Million to Company Linked to Sam Altman - Futurism

Fingers crossed it works! Major Tom?

NASA is working on bringing the Hubble Space Telescope back online, but given its recent setbacks, the agency's insistence that it's "in good health" may be wishful thinking.

In an update, NASA said that it's still working to bring the aging telescope back to life after a series of issues that led it to automatically enter safe mode (read: shut down) three times over the course of a few weeks, with the final one lasting until now.

Starting on November 19, the agency began having issues problems with the gyroscopes or "gyros" not to be confused with the delicious Greek meat which helps orient the telescope in whatever direction it needs to point. Between that date and November 29, the gyro issues led to automatic power-downs thrice. That last safe mode, it seems, has remained in effect until now.

Installed back in 2009 during the fifth and final Space Shuttle servicing mission that saw NASA astronauts replacing and fixing Hubble instruments IRL, the remaining three of the six gyros aboard the telescope have clearly seen better days. Indeed, with its update to its previous statement about the science operations shutoff, the agency seems to be admitting as much.

"Based on the performance observed during the tests, the team has decided to operate the gyros in a higher-precision mode during science observations," the statement reads. "Hubbles instruments and the observatory itself remain stable and in good health."

These latest Hubble setbacks have resurrected talks of a private servicing mission for the 33-year-old telescope that was supposed to be decommissioned nearly two decades ago.

At the end of 2022, NASA and SpaceX announced that they were jointly looking into whether it would be feasible to send up a private mission "at no cost to the government" to fix various issues on the telescope. That study has apparently been completed, but nobody knows what the findings were just yet.

In the meantime, NASA will hopefully be able to bring Hubble back online itself because, let's face it, we're not ready to say goodbye.

More on NASA:Space Station Turns 25, Just in Time to Die

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NASA Says It's Trying to Bring the Hubble Back Online - Futurism

Where do we take our plastic bags now? Trash Tier

The Earth is drowning in a sea of used plastic bags and other one-time-use plastic products, such as blister packaging and utensils, all of which are polluting our soil, waterways, and inside our bodies in the form of microplastics.

In an effort to fight this ever-growing sea of refuse, the US government kickstarted a nationwide online directory that directed people to locations where they could drop off plastic bags and film to be recycled. Unfortunately, according to The Guardian, the program has been shuttered for good after ABC News found in May that a good amount of the discarded plastic wasn't getting recycled after all.

"Plastic film recycling had been an abysmal failure for decades and its important that plastic companies stop lying to the public," said Beyond Plastics president Judith Enck to The Guardian. "Finally, the truth is coming out."

The online national directory, having the approval of the US Environmental Protection Agency and local administrations, had a list of about 18,000 locations for recycling dropoff, according to The Guardian. Locations included stores like Target and Walmart.

The program purported that the plastic would get recycled once you drop them off, but ABC News used tracking tags on plastic trash and found that many of the tags ended up in landfills, incinerators or sorting locations not associated with recycling.

This issue with the directory list is not an isolated incident. The country's recycling system is broken. A report last year from Greenpeace revealed that out of 51 million tons of plastic coming out of American homes, only 2.4 million tons gets recycled a staggeringly low proportion.

Plastic is a big problem because it is made from fossil fuels, which is the biggest driver of global warming. Materials such as paper and metal are recycled at a higher rate, according to Greenpeace.

While many countries and organizations have focused on decarbonizing transportation and other sectors in our modern world, the use of plastic is trending upwards, with the amount of plastic products estimated to triple by 2060, from60 million tons in 2019 to 1,231 million tons in less than 40 years.

That mountain of refuse represents not just an incredible amount of pollution, in other words but also frustrating wasted efforts in fighting climate change.

More on recycling: Scientists Say Recycling Has Backfired Spectacularly

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Government Program to Recycle Plastic Bags Canceled After "Abysmal Failure" - Futurism