The Download: automating warehouse tasks, and problems with recycling plastics
Before almost any item reaches your door, it traverses the global supply chain on a pallet. More than 2 billion...
World
AI is poised to automate today’s most mundane manual warehouse task
After much trial and error, Jacobi’s founders, including roboticist Ken Goldberg, say they’ve cracked it. Their software, built upon research...
Here’s the problem with new plastic recycling methods
But there are a few challenges with this process that I see a lot in recycling methods. First, reaching a...
The Download: defining AI, and China’s driverless ambitions
3 Amazon claims to have met a clean energy goal seven years earlySome experts aren’t convinced its calculation method is...
Housetraining robot dogs: How generative AI might change consumer IoT
What is going on? Why now? Examining potential changes to consumer IoT could provide some answers. Specifically, the vast range...
The Chinese government is going all-in on autonomous vehicles
2. The Chinese EV leader BYD will spend $1 billion to build a factory in Turkey. (Financial Times $) This...
What is AI?
ALCON ENTERTAINMENT VIA ALAMY Right around the same time, Tegmark founded the Future of Life Institute, with a remit to...
The Download: planning a honeymoon with AI, and deepfakes in 2024
The big storyWelcome to Chula Vista, where police drones respond to 911 calls February 2023 In the skies above Chula...
Can AI help me plan my honeymoon?
In the future, an AI agent could not only suggest things to do and places to stay on my honeymoon;...
The Download: vacation planning with AI, and smaller models
2 Scrappy weapons startups are changing the face of war in UkraineThey’re leaving the more established players in the dust....
How to use AI to plan your next vacation
Beyond LLMs, there are also tailored tools available that can help you to work out the kinds of conditions you...
The Download: AI agents, and how to detect a lie
“I’m so cute; please watch my campaign broadcast.” —Airi Uchino, a candidate in Tokyo’s forthcoming governor elections, takes a novel...
What are AI agents?
Agents featured prominently in Google’s annual I/O conference in May, when the company unveiled its new AI agent called Astra,...
AI lie detectors are better than humans at spotting lies
This reliance can shape our behavior. Normally, people tend to assume others are telling the truth. That was borne out...
The Download: recycling clothing, and fish-friendly hydropower
The news: Less than 1% of clothing is recycled. Most of the rest ends up dumped in a landfill or...
What new hydropower tech says about climate action
The presentation was from our ClimateTech event in 2022, when we invited scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs in fields from fusion...
A polyester-dissolving process could make modern clothing recyclable
Nevertheless, the process could be difficult to scale, says Bryan Vogt, a chemical engineer at Penn State University, who was...
The Download: listening robots, and Google’s AI emissions
We all want to be able to speak our minds online—to be heard by our friends and talk (back) to...
A way to let robots learn by listening will make them more useful
Researchers at the Robotics and Embodied AI Lab at Stanford University set out to change that. They first built a...
The Download: mind-controlled prosthetics, and the price of AI training data
What’s new: When someone loses part of a leg, a prosthetic can make it easier to get around. But most...