Google's new robot 🤖, Meta becoming a meme 🤪, Neuralink being surpassed by Synchron 🧠, and more!

And after a week and a half break, welcome back to Augmented Rarity! Now on Wednesdays. Let's get started 👇

Artificial Intelligence

• Civil unrest in India requires only 80% accuracy and above as a positive match. Using this technology, the police identified suspects in the 2020 riots, the clashes at Red Fort in 2021 during the farmers' protest, and the Jahangirpuri riots this year. Of course, this alarms privacy and civil liberties experts 🚨

• Google’s new robot will blown your mind 🤖. Natural language trained on the internet + physical abilities of a robot (like moving around and grabbing objects) = in a robot that is not trained to perform an action but that improvises with your random petition of the moment. I must say it’s way less scary than Boston Dynamics one because this one is still looking like a Thermomix 😜

  

• When your enemies are too strong, there's only one thing left to do: join them. Or in Elon's case, buy them. Neuralink is considering buying its main competitor, Synchron 🧠. Why? Because Neuralink is behind in its human trials, but Synchron began a month ago implanting its mind-reading device in the first U.S. patient in a paralysis trial. Will this takeover attempt end up like Twitter 🐦?

• Meanwhile, Neuralink has already announced that it will hold a show and tell event to showcase its progress on Halloween 🎃. Very fan of the date for such a sensitive topic.

• AI art personal update! I’m still obsessed with it. Last week I made a demo of Codex, the AI that codes for you, and this week I have put Dalle2 and Midjourney to compete again, this time interpreting songs 🎶

Extended Reality

• Very low-res graphics to announce the launch of Horizon Worlds in Spain 🥘 and France 🥐, definitely not what we expected from a company that has spent billions on building the Metaverse. Of course this became a Twitter meme.

  

• Of course after that fail we have Zucks response: Meta is capable of much more 🐣, and showing us the major updates that we’ll be getting soon. Tbh we all know they are capable of much more, but come on, yassify those marketing creativities a bit before announcing such a big launch.

• Considering that Meta Quest 2's audio was a bit disappointing, Logitech launched Chorus, their brand new VR speakers to ‘Enhance your time in the Metaverse with clear, natural sound, plus awareness of the real world around you.’ I do see how better audio can improve your presence while in VR, but tbh I'm not picky enough about audio yet to spend $100 on it. It looks great tho.

  

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  Hope you liked today’s selection, if so let me know in the comments and give it a like 💚

  See you in a week 👽

  Best,

  Martina