Good morning human brains, welcome back to your daily munch of AI news.

Here’s what’s up:

• A cheap robotic system that could replace millions of human jobs 👷

• Open letter from Elon Musk demands OpenAI pause AI development 🛑

• Google and Replit are partnering up 🤝

• Joe Rogan fights a bear 🐻

P.S. This newsletter just passed 2000 subscribers! Thanks for reading 🦾

P.P.S. We are hiring researchers and writers, click here for more info.

APPETIZER

Elon Musk Says Giant AI Experiments Must Stop

Citing risks to society and humanity, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Steve Wozniak, and dozens of other notable figures in tech and academia published an open letter imploring Open AI and all other AI labs to pause large AI experiments.

Scientists fear the possibility of “runaway AI” which could spontaneously begin improving its own capabilities and consolidating power, rapidly accelerating to become a super-intelligence capable of subjugating humanity itself.

Stopping the emergence of an AI superintelligence might be impossible, but what if the superintelligence was good? What if it shared the same goals as us and made our lives better?

This problem is known as “AI alignment”, and it’s a field of research that has, unfortunately, lagged far behind the recent explosion of AI capabilities.

Elon Musk & co propose a 6-month ban on advanced AI research to give safety research a chance to catch up.

Our take: Not gonna happen. You’d have a better chance of turning a pancake back into flour and eggs than putting this genie back in its bottle.

The incentives to “win” the AI race are simply too massive. Tech companies, AI research labs, and even nation-states are now locked in an AI arms race and no one wants to risk giving up their lead.

BUZZWORD OF THE DAY

RECOMMENDED READING

The SaaS Operator Newsletter

Get actionable case studies on how to build & grow your SaaS.

5-Minute Read. Every Tuesday. For Free.

Every week The SaaS Operator Newsletter breaks down one strategy to grow your SaaS startup based on a real-life case study and provides actionable tactics you can execute with your team immediately.

MAIN COURSE

ALOHA! Robots just learned how to use two hands.

Researchers at Stanford have developed a system that allows two robotic arms to coordinate in high-precision tasks. Think of opening a candy wrapper, tying a shoe, or operating power tools.

These tasks might seem trivial for a human, but until now they were impossible tasks for nearly any robot.

It’s called ALOHA 🏖: 𝐀 𝐋ow-cost 𝐎pen-source 𝐇𝐀rdware System for Bimanual Teleoperation and it’s going to have huge ramifications for both human and robotic workers.

ALOHA has two leader and two follower arms. The human user teleoperates the arms by simply moving the leader robots.

The entire kit is available for sale or you can re-build it yourself using the open-source code and documentation.

But that’s only half the story. Until now we’ve been talking about a human-operated machine. However, this setup is fully capable of autonomous AI-powered automation.

Introducing ACT: Action Chunking with Transformers 🤖

Give the arms a task and they will attempt to complete it on their own using AI.

The implications:

1/ Factory automation. Human pick-and-pack jobs were already at risk of partial automation, but the risk was limited by cost and imprecise robotics. This project flattens both speedbumps to fully autonomous factories and packing plants.

2/ Robots in your home. No one wants a Boston-dynamics-style robot in their kitchen. They’e agile, but not suited to precise work. Now it looks like the next generation of robots will be gentle enough to operate in your home and assist with tasks like cooking and cleaning.

3/ Teleoperated robotic aids. The solution to the growing shortage of nurses, home aides, and other healthcare workers might be partially alleviated with teleoperated robotic units. One nurse could turn beds and check vitals by controlling a small army of pre-deployed health bots.

MEMES FOR DESSERT

YOUR DAILY MUNCH

Think Pieces

Post-GPT Computing. What does it mean to be a programmer when AI is faster than any human coder?

When programming is gone, will we like what's left? Another think-piece on the same theme of post-GPT coding.

The Accidental Consumer Tech Company. A piece by Stratechery on the implications of a deep-tech company like OpenAI transforming into a gigantic consumer-tech company practically overnight.

Startup News

Google Partners with AI Startup Replit to Take on Microsoft’s GitHub

Darklang is “going all in” on AI with AI-generated code for deployless cloud backends. Generate code straight into production.

Roblox is integrating generative AI into its platform to help creators build immersive 3D experiences.

Research

ChatDoctor: A doctor-bot powered by Facebook’s LLaMA model and trained on healthcare data to give medical advice.

LangFlow: a user interface for LangChain that lets you build your own version of ChatGPT and add any capabilities you want to it.

PAniC-3D: turn your anime waifu drawing into animated 3D.

Tools

libraria.dev: create, manage, and embed custom assistants from your own data with Open AI embeddings.

smousss: automates repetitive tasks for Laravel developers.

Crabo: access chatGPT on telegram as a personality-based chatbot.

Taleblocks: an easy-to-use tool for turning text into videos.

PlatePose: an AI food stylist for restaurants and ghost kitchens.

TWEET OF THE DAY

Tag us on Twitter @BotEatBrain for a chance to be featured here tomorrow.

AI ART-SHOW

Until next time 🤖😋🧠