Brain connected MR headsets 🧠, Google's unstable AR leadership 📉, an ethical AI to beat ChatGPT ⚖️, Elon's new AI company 🤵🏻‍♂️, and more!

Jul 14, 2023

Hi and welcome to another week of Augmented Rarity! 👽 Let’s get started with this week’s updates 👇

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

Just when we thought Elon Musk wouldn’t attempt to conquer anything else, Elon launched a new company, xAI, which aims to discover the true nature of the universe and to understand reality.
A universe interpreted only by men, as the team photo they made sure was visible on the homepage shows. Is it an attempt to regain his “masculinity” after Threads?
The Federal Trade Commission (America’s independent agency that aims to protect consumers) is probing that ChatGPT can harm people by publishing false information about them
Shudder ChatGPT, Anthropic is now available! One of the arguments against AI is that it's not safe for businesses, so Anthropic, Google's secret weapon startup, is using safety as its argument. Over the past two months, Anthropic has tested its AI model with companies such as Slack and Notion, and more than 350,000 people have joined the waiting list. Unfortunately, I can't test it because it's only available in the US and UK (and I don't feel like getting a VPN right now), but here's the link if you're willing to give it a try.

The future is here. OpenBCI is a Brooklyn-based company that develops research tools for brain-computer interfaces. Their upcoming product, Galea, a headset that combines Mixed Reality and noninvasive brain-computer-interface technology 🧠. It's supposed to be released later this year, but is fully reserved now, probably because of all the hype it got during CES ( it's around 25k though, so not like we could afford it in a consumer level).
Image: OpenBCI

Google’s software lead for AR and XR quit the company 👋 due to Google’s unstable vision in AR. Over the past few weeks we've covered how Google Glass support will end later this year, how Project Iris, Google's new MR device, has also been cancelled, and how the new focus is on building “Android for AR”, which I think is a very smart move as it allows others to focus on the hardware while they concentrate on building the best software.

"We didn't rush the Quest 3 VR headset because we were worried about the Apple Vision Pro" 🥸 said Andrew Bosworth (Meta’s CTO) who timed Meta's announcement for June based on consumer shopping habits.

NASA's Valkyrie humanoid robot is being tested in Australia. It's designed to perform vital tasks for future space and Earth missions, helping humans in dangerous environments.
Image: NASA
Indirectly tech-related: NASA's Perseverance has found preserved organic molecules on Mars 🦠. Although this doesn't confirm the existence of past life on Mars, it is a sign that the necessary conditions for life as we know it once existed on the planet.

Since it’s all videos this week, let’s separate them by platform:

And that’s it for today!

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