The Electric Viking
Category: robotics/AI – Page 44
Elon Musk Is Disrupting Humanity Forever
Hans Nelson
US Energy Secretary’s INSANE Bet Against Elon Musk
Questions to inspire discussion.
Energy for AI and Infrastructure.
🤖 Q: How does AI development impact energy demands? A: AI development will drive massive demand for electricity, with solar and batteries being the only energy source with an unbounded upper limit to scale and meet these demands.
⛽ Q: Can solar energy support existing infrastructure? A: Solar energy can produce synthetic biofuels and oil and gas through chemical processes, enabling it to power existing infrastructure that runs on traditional fuels.
Expert Predictions.
🚗 Q: What does Elon Musk predict about future energy sources? A: Elon Musk predicts that solar and batteries will dominate the future energy landscape, citing China’s massive investment as a key factor in this prediction.
AI system leverages standard security cameras to detect fires in seconds
Fire kills nearly 3,700 Americans annually and destroys $23 billion in property, with many deaths occurring because traditional smoke detectors fail to alert occupants in time.
Now, the NYU Fire Research Group at NYU Tandon School of Engineering has developed an artificial intelligence system that could significantly improve fire safety by detecting fires and smoke in real-time using ordinary security cameras already installed in many buildings.
Published in the IEEE Internet of Things, the research demonstrates a system that can analyze video footage and identify fires within 0.016 seconds per frame—faster than the blink of an eye—potentially providing crucial extra minutes for evacuation and emergency response. Unlike conventional smoke detectors that require significant smoke buildup and proximity to activate, this AI system can spot fires in their earliest stages from video alone.
Elon Musk: Robotaxis Will Replace Personal Cars, Not Just Uber
Questions to inspire discussion.
🧠 Q: How does Tesla’s upcoming AI chip compare to the current one? A: Tesla’s AI5 chip will be 40 times better than the current AI4 chip, which is already capable of achieving self-driving safety at least 2–3 times that of a human.
💰 Q: What is the expected pricing for Tesla’s robotaxi service? A: Tesla’s robotaxi service is projected to cost $2 per mile at launch, which is cheaper than Uber rides in high-cost areas like Seattle.
Impact on Transportation.
🚘 Q: How will robotaxis affect car ownership? A: Robotaxis are expected to become a viable alternative to car ownership, especially when prices reach $1 per mile, making them cheaper than options like airport parking.
💼 Q: How does Tesla’s robotaxi cost compare to competitors? A: Tesla’s robotaxi can be built and deployed for half the cost of competitors like Whim, potentially offering more competitive pricing.
The 2030 Deadline: $14/Hour Robots & The End of Human Work
Over The Horizon
A Systems View of LLMs on TPUs
Training LLMs often feels like alchemy, but understanding and optimizing the performance of your models doesn’t have to. This book aims to demystify the science of scaling language models: how TPUs (and GPUs) work and how they communicate with each other, how LLMs run on real hardware, and how to parallelize your models during training and inference so they run efficiently at massive scale. If you’ve ever wondered “how expensive should this LLM be to train” or “how much memory do I need to serve this model myself” or “what’s an AllGather”, we hope this will be useful to you.
Mathematical model of memory suggests seven senses are optimal
Skoltech scientists have devised a mathematical model of memory. By analyzing its new model, the team came to surprising conclusions that could prove useful for robot design, artificial intelligence, and for better understanding of human memory. Published in Scientific Reports, the study suggests there may be an optimal number of senses—if so, those of us with five senses could use a couple more.
“Our conclusion is, of course, highly speculative in application to human senses, although you never know: It could be that humans of the future would evolve a sense of radiation or magnetic field. But in any case, our findings may be of practical importance for robotics and the theory of artificial intelligence,” said study co-author Professor Nikolay Brilliantov of Skoltech AI.
“It appears that when each concept retained in memory is characterized in terms of seven features—as opposed to, say, five or eight—the number of distinct objects held in memory is maximized.”