CEO of Tesla Elon Musk says that he plans to sell the company’s artificial intelligence-powered humanoid robots by 2023.
Musk has stated that Tesla’s AI-heavy Optimus robot could hit the market next year. The announcement was made while Tesla’s director for artificial intelligence Andrei Karpath took a four-month sabbatical from the company.
Musk confirmed his aim to demonstrate a working proof of concept for Tesla’s new Optimus robot. “It could be ready by the end of next year, at least for a moderate (scale) series production,” said Musk.
He further added that he expects to reach pretty good results on a prototype basis before the end of December.
Tesla’s top two objectives this year, according to Musk, are finishing Full Self-Driving (FSD) and working on Optimus, not finishing engineering work on multiple cars already promised.
Musk claimed that the humanoid robot he initially revealed in virtual form in August is similar to a Tesla car in various aspects, as the motion is performed through a series of actuators and motors controlled by a central processor and imbued with artificial intelligence.
The significant difference will be that the robot will have a bipedal chassis, unlike the cars.
“Humanoid robots are coming, look at Boston Dynamics. They make better models every year,” Musk said to the German weekly.
Last Week, Tesla also launched its first European Gigafactory located near Berlin, Germany. According to the plans, Tesla’s new Gigafactory will hire more than 12,000 employees, making it the largest employer in the region. Additionally, Musk also rolled out the first batch of Model Y cars to the customers.
NASA has awarded contracts to SpaceX and Northrop Grumman to resupply ISS for 12 further flights. These agreements are designed to keep the ISS stocked through 2026 with two of the agency’s key partners in its ongoing resupply efforts.
The new contracts are worth a potential US$14 billion in total, but the final amounts will depend on the type of missions organized by NASA.
In the last decade, SpaceX, with its Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket combo, and Northrop Grumman with its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule, have supplied cargo to the ISS. Sierra Nevada Corporation came on board in 2016 as the third private company to ferry goods to and from the orbiting laboratory.
The new contracts to SpaceX and Northrop Grumman are worth a potential US$14 billion in total, but the final amounts will depend on the type of missions organized by NASA. In the last decade, SpaceX, with its Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket combo, and Northrop Grumman with its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule, have supplied cargo to the ISS. Sierra Nevada Corporation came on board in 2016 as the third private company to ferry goods to and from the ISS.
NASA has now placed an order for a further 12 flights, six each from SpaceX and Northrop Grumman, to be placed between now and 2026. After this order, the total number of missions ordered under the CRS-2 program has become 32.
SpaceX is responsible for 15, Northrop Grumman 14, and Sierra Nevada Corporation (now known as Sierra Space) will take care of three of the total missions.
On-demand personal styling and shopping services providing company Taffi announces that it plans to launch its new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered fashion platform.
The company says that it has been working on the product for over one year, and the final platform is currently operating on a testing basis, which is expected to launch soon.
Taffi is a fashion marketplace powered by artificial intelligence that helps stylists manage current clients and acquire new ones online.
According to the privately held luxury items merchant and distributor Chalhoub Group GCC’s Luxury Report, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the luxurious market is expected to reach $11 billion by 2023. This is a drastic increase when compared to the current figures, which is $9.7 billion.
Co-founder of Taffi, Shahad Geoffrey, said, “It’s been a year since we’ve entered the market. Since we launched, we’ve been seeing the demand for it, the market is actually ready for this kind of consumer product.”
She further added that After COVID, everyone is switching to internet purchasing, which has made it easier for them to introduce new products and increased their adaptability.
Saudi Arabia-based on-demand personal styling and shopping services offering startup Taffi was founded by Dio Chen and Shahad Geoffrey back in 2020. The company aims to empower people by delivering individualized styling and buying services based on bespoke expert guidance that celebrates their unique and distinctive styles.
To date, Taffi has raised $2 million from investors including Impact46, Rashed Abdul Rahman AlRashed & Sons, and others over two funding rounds.
Earlier this year, the largest online consignment and thrift shop, Swap, also partnered with technology firm Find.Fashion to offer unprecedented visual searching features using artificial intelligence and emotion recognition technologies.
A team of researchers led by Mikael Afzelius from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) broke a new record of storing a photonic qubit in a crystal for 20 milliseconds. In 2015, Mikael Afzelius and his team succeeded in storing a qubit carried by a photon for 0.5 milliseconds, allowing the photon to transfer its quantum state to the crystal atoms before disappearing.
However, the phenomenon’s duration wasn’t long enough to construct a more extensive network of memories, a condition for the development of long-distance quantum telecommunications. On 15th March 2022, Mikael Afzelius’ team published a paper titled ‘Storage of photonic time-bin qubits for up to 20 ms in a rare-earth-doped crystal‘ on how they significantly increased this duration by storing photonic qubit for 20 milliseconds.
Quantum physics has enabled scientists to describe the behavior of atoms, particles, and certain properties of electromagnetic radiation. It allowed researchers to introduce notions without equivalent in the macroscopic world.
Regardless, there is a significant obstacle to developing long-distance quantum telecommunication systems: the photons are lost beyond a few hundred kilometers, and the signal disappears. Since we can’t copy or amplify the signal, losing the quantum state that guarantees its confidentiality. The challenge is to find a method to repeat the signal without altering it.
However, scientists have to overcome several challenges before developing ultra-secure telecommunications networks like extending the storage time. Mikael Afzelius said that extending storage time would be enough to increase the duration of exposure of the crystal to radio frequencies in theory. But, technical obstacles to implementing storage over a more extended period prevent us from going beyond 100 milliseconds. Although, he is confident that they can resolve technical issues.
Additionally, scientists will also have to find methods of designing memories that can store more than one photonic qubits at a time, thus having ‘entangled’ photons that will guarantee confidentiality. The researcher concluded that the aim is to develop a system that can be marketed within ten years.
Getty Images, a well-known global visual image provider and marketplace headquartered in Seattle, Washington, unveiled what it claims is the image industry’s first enhanced model release form last week. It’s a digital document that acknowledges developments in data privacy and security, as well as the rising necessity of biometric data for AI and Machine Learning application training.
The new form, which was created with input from the Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA), a leading organization that promotes business standards in visual content, will provide clarity and guidance on how data, including visual content, can be tracked and handled appropriately to protect the personal and biometric data collected by content creators. Getty intends to utilize it as part of its Getty Photographs and iStock websites and expects that models who appear in new commercial images on either site would sign it.
Biometric data, according to the World Bank, is the “automatic recognition of persons based on biological or behavioral characteristics.” Biometric data is as unique to every individual. Thus, while creating and deploying biometric systems, privacy and security precautionary measures must be considered. There has been a significant increase in planned biometric data collection in recent months, especially due to the onset of the COVID pandemic. Getty points out that when this data falls into the wrong hands, it can be sold on the black market to aid identity theft and be used to launch personally targeted ransomware, malware, and other cyberattacks.
As proof, Getty Images claims a “spate of lawsuits” involving the use of biometric information without the explicit agreement of persons shown in the images, albeit it doesn’t identify any of them. While the legislation in this field is still changing, Getty Images urges developers to start by gathering data from reputable sources and gaining permission for its intended use.
According to Getty Images, the Enhanced Model Release follows the same basic format as the legacy release form and is still simple to comprehend and execute. The form itself was not released as part of this announcement and appears to be a Getty Images internal document.
Getty Images’ Director of Advocacy and Legal Operations Counsel, Paul Reinitz, says the company wants its waiver and contract to become a standard model for content creators.
According to Reinitz, the enhanced model release provides the simplicity of the legacy release form because it is intuitive, easy to execute, and accepted across multiple agencies, allowing a photographer or videographer to submit a single completed form to multiple agencies.
The caveat is that if your face finds up in Getty’s databases, it’s likely to be scraped to develop controversial monitoring technology, but they won’t know your identity. Rather than making a blanket promise not to sell their picture libraries to biometric data businesses, Getty is conceding that it’s simply too profitable an opportunity to pass up. Instead, they intend to safeguard the models’ personal identity information as much as possible. They’re essentially doing the bare minimum while waiting for governments to enact their own restrictions on the developing technology.
Meanwhile, while regulations governing imagery and visual data are still in their infancy, lawsuits are on the rise as new types of videography technology and its applications emerge. Several cases have been filed in recent years, including the unauthorized recording of people who have a video camera installed.
Reinitz believes regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union, as well as other regulations throughout the world, have transformed the way businesses manage personal data. Therefore he urges industry practices must catch up with the changing demands.
Researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine combined the CRISPR technology with a protein designed with artificial intelligence to awaken individual dormant genes by disabling the chemical “off switches” that silence them.
This approach will allow researchers to understand the role of individual genes in normal cell growth, development, aging, diseases such as cancer. With this approach, researchers can safely upregulate specific genes to influence cell activity without permanently changing the genome and causing unintended mistakes.
The research findings by Hannele Ruohola Baker and Shiri Levy have been published in the journal Cell Reports. Hannele Ruohola-Baker, professor of biochemistry and associate director of ISCRM, led this research. David Baker, also a professor of biochemistry and head of the IPD, developed the AI-designed protein at the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design (IPD).
“This was a very important finding,” said Ruohola-Baker. “TATA boxes are scattered throughout the genome, and current thinking in biology is that the important TATA boxes are very close to the gene transcription site, and the others don’t seem to matter. The power of this tool is that it can find the critical PRC2 dependent elements, in this case, TATA boxes that matter.”
With this new technique and AI-Designed Protein, researchers can awaken individual dormant genes and control gene activity without altering the genome’s DNA sequence by targeting chemical changes that help package genes in our chromosomes and regulate their activity. Besides, since these modifications occur on top of genes instead inside the genes, they are called epigenetics. The chemical modifications responsible for regulating gene activity are called epigenetic markers.
Scientists are interested in epigenetic modifications because epigenetic markers contribute to aging, accumulate with time, and affect the health of future generations as we can pass them on to our children.
The Ukraine government launches its new NFT Museum of War in remembrance of the event and to support crowdfunding.
While Russia uses tanks to destroy Ukraine, we rely on revolutionary blockchain tech. @Meta_History_UA NFT-Museum is launched. The place to keep the memory of war. And the place to celebrate the Ukrainian identity and freedom. Check here: https://t.co/IrNV0w54tg
The Meta History NFT Museum, a blockchain-based history of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, was announced by Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation.
On Friday, Ukraine began auctioning a collection of NFTs as part of a cryptocurrency fundraising campaign. The NFT museum is a collection of digital pictures representing a particular day in the fight.
The NFTs include images of various incidents such as silhouettes of jets, screengrabs of news headlines, a cartoon-style illustration of an explosion, and others.
Officials said that artists interested in being exhibited at the museum must submit a portfolio of their work, which will be reviewed by art directors to see if the work is appropriate. Once approved, the NFTs will be minted on the Ethereum blockchain.
Meta History’s website mentions that the NFTs will be created in chronological order, according to the occurrences, in order to preserve and respect the genuine history.
Moreover, artists will also represent how the battle is viewed by the peaceful citizens of Ukraine. The government hopes that by launching this new initiative, it will be able to preserve the memory of historical events, distribute accurate information to the global digital community, and raise funds for Ukraine’s support.
“100 percent of funds from the sale will go directly to the official crypto-accounts of the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine to support the army and civilians,” mentioned the website.
During the war, cryptocurrencies have considerably helped Ukraine gather funds to support its military operations. To date, crypto fundraising has allowed the Ukraine government to collect over $65 million, which has turned out to be of great help as the country defends itself against Russia.
Technology giant Microsoft has been recently accused of paying millions of dollars in bribes each year.
Former Microsoft employee and the whistleblower of this incident, Yasser Elabd, claims that more than $200 million is spent each year on bribes by Microsoft and kickbacks tied to the company’s overseas contracting operations in nations such as Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
Elabd was successful as the director of emerging markets for the Middle East and Africa, and he obtained numerous promotions.
In a blog uploaded on Lioness, he mentioned a $40,000 expenditure request that piqued his interest. According to Elabd, the customer who received the handsome payment was not listed in Microsoft’s internal database of potential clients, and they were unqualified for the project’s scope.
“The partner in the deal was underqualified for the project’s outlined scope, and he wasn’t even supposed to be doing business with Microsoft: he had been terminated four months earlier for poor performance on the sales team, and corporate policy prohibits former employees from working as partners for six months from their departure without special approval,” mentioned the blog.
The problem was escalated to upper management, and the legal and HR teams halted the $40,000 expenditure. However, the officials did not check further into the Microsoft employees who were coordinating the false deal.
“We are committed to doing business in a responsible way and always encourage anyone to report anything they see that may violate the law, our policies, or our ethical standards,” said Vice President of Microsoft Deputy General Counsel for Compliance and Ethics, Becky Lenaburg regarding this incident.
He further mentioned that the company believes it has already examined and resolved these allegations, which date back many years. Additionally, Microsoft also worked with government agencies to address any issues that arose.
The Government of Madhya Pradesh announces that it plans to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) as a subject in schools across the state.
According to the government, the AI course will be included in the syllabus of students studying in grade 8 and higher. It is a one-of-a-kind initiative, and MP becomes the first state of India to launch artificial intelligence as a subject in schools.
The announcement was made by the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, on Sunday 27th March.
In addition to the AI course, the MP government will also launch a veterinary telemedicine service, allowing livestock owners to seek advice over the phone on diseases affecting cows and other animals.
Shivraj Singh Chouhan said, “A decision has been taken to arrange veterinary telemedicine facility so that livestock keepers can get advice on the phone in case of any ailment to cows and other animals.”
Farmers will be able to contact experts over the phone regarding agriculture-related difficulties and crop diseases, according to the chief minister. The decision comes after a 2-day brainstorming session of the Madhya Pradesh cabinet. Other significant decisions made by the state cabinet include the establishment of Sanjivani clinics in urban areas and transportation policy for rural areas.
United States-based facial recognition solution providing company Clearview AI announces the release of the 2.0 version of its much famous facial recognition platform primarily used by law enforcement agencies.
Clearview 2.0 is a significant upgrade to the company’s platform, with a database of more than 20 billion publicly available facial pictures.
According to Clearview AI, its facial recognition algorithm is the world’s most accurate, and the recently launched second version comes with improved compliance and management capabilities to better support law enforcement investigations.
Clearview AI 2.0 offers training for registered users along with additional verification measures that ensure the tool is being used legally.
Co-founder and CEO of Clearview AI Hoan Ton-That said, “Clearview 2.0 adds several security and functionality enhancements to our already proven technology, all designed to help investigators employ the technology in a more user-friendly way that facilitates quicker matches to build cases that are 100 percent compliant.”
He further added that this is in addition to their database of over 20 billion photos, which is the world’s largest of its kind. The company said that the second version of its facial recognition platform is currently being rolled out to existing clients, including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and multiple local agencies operating in the United States.
