☕️ Figuring Out a Future With Robots

An explosion of serious AI developments has washed over the news this week, from Figure's humanoid AI robot backed by OpenAI tech to Google DeepMind's latest AI agent and gaming companion project in the form of SIMA to Devin, the world's first AI software engineer, made by Cognition. There's a lot of ground to cover, so join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings.

Robotics startup Figure shows off OpenAI-enhanced conversational robot

Figure, the first-of-its-kind AI robotics company, recently unveiled its Figure 01, a humanoid robot capable of real-time conversations thanks to generative AI tech from its alliance with OpenAI, which brings high-level visual and language intelligence to the table, allowing Figure's robots to achieve "fast, low-level, dexterous robot actions" - and this is just the start. As OpenAI improves its models, many believe that the abilities of Figure 01 and its future versions will grow in tandem.

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So what can it do?

In Figure's showcase video, Figure 01 demonstrates multitasking abilities and reasoning, capable of understanding and reacting to human interactions. It achieves this by turning videos captured by its camera into images and transcribing audio from its microphones to text, then feeding it all into a large multimodal model trained by OpenAI, which in turn gets processed by Figure's neural network. Senior AI Engineer Corey Lynch states that Figure 01 can "describe its visual experience, plan future actions, reflect on its memory, and explain its reasoning verbally."

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Cognition AI launches Devin, the world's first AI software engineer

In a blog post released this Wednesday, AI startup Cognition founder and CEO Scott Wu unveiled Devin, the company's brand new AI software engineer and the world's first. Not to be confused with the likes of GitHub Copilot and Amazon Codewhisperer, Devin is not an AI code assistant but rather a system that functions like a developer, as founder Wu explains that Devin is capable of handling a wide range of developer tasks, such as deploying apps and websites, finding and fixing bugs in codebases, or even fine-tuning other language models.

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Google DeepMind unveils a video game AI companion for co-op play

SIMA, or Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, is Google DeepMind's latest AI model designed to play multiple 3D games and act on verbal instructions. Video game AI is nothing new, but the way SIMA differs from traditional AI characters is that it was trained on hours of video footage showing gameplay by humans, not by following a set of rules with a "reward system" (also known as reinforcement learning) to influence the AI's behavior. Aside from advancing general AI agent technology, DeepMind researchers hope that this project allows them to create a much more natural gaming companion in comparison to stiffer traditional ones.

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Amazon launches a new feature to allow AI to make listings via a URL

After launching some generative AI features in September of last year, Amazon aims to pad up its list of AI abilities with even more, now allowing sellers to create listings from a single URL. Amazon's new tool extracts information from an item's URL on the seller's site and then uses it to create an appropriate Amazon listing. According to Amazon, 100,000 sellers have already opted to try out the company's generative AI features, with a whopping 80% of its AI-powered tool suggestions being accepted by the sellers.

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Apple acquires AI startup DarwinAI just ahead of its iOS 18 launch

According to Bloomberg News, tech giant Apple has bought Canadian-based AI company DarwinAI, a startup focused on using AI to improve inspections during manufacturing operations. Many of DarwinAI's employees have reportedly been added to Apple's AI division in what many predict to be in preparation for the launch of iOS 18. Though Apple has been on the back foot in the field of generative AI for a while, the company has recently begun showing high interest despite not cementing any major use cases.

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The EU passes the world's most comprehensive set of AI rules

Approving the world's first major set of AI rules is the European Union as the parliament passed the regulation on Wednesday, aiming to govern the exponentially growing world of artificial intelligence. With the political consensus brokered in early December of 2023, it was now finally endorsed by the EU parliament with 523 votes in favor, 46 against, and 49 not cast. "Artificial intelligence is already very much part of our daily lives. Now, it will be part of our legislation too," wrote the president of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, on social media.

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Zscaler acquires cybersecurity firm Avalor to boost its AI data security

Cloud security company Zscaler recently penned a $310 million cash and equity deal to buy out the Israeli-based cybersecurity firm Avalor, only 26 months after its founding. The deal aims to add to the company's platform abilities, ranging from incident mitigation to data classification to security policy generation, with Avalor's unique ability to handle data from diverse sources, vulnerability risk management, and prioritization tools. Along with Canonic and Trustdome, Avalor is the third firm to be bought out by Zscaler, which could hint at more interest in the cybersecurity M&A market.

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Among The AI Doomsayers (29-min read)

Some people think machine intelligence will transform humanity for the better. Others fear it may destroy us. The New Yorker's article dives into AI safety and who will decide our fate.

AI Agents Take the Wheel (19-min watch)

Join AI Explained, a YouTube channel focused on covering the biggest news in AI and tech, as he takes a deeper dive into the most recent developments in AI - Devin, Figure 01, and SIMA.