Neuralink recruiting for human trials 🧠, Robots replacing kids in Japan 🎒, Dalle3 launch ⚡️, and more! ✨
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Hey there! Welcome back to Augmented Rarity 👽, your weekly email on emerging tech and future trends 📡
🖼️ Today's cover: Neuralink's first human trials, which I now wonder if this is too old school BCI because they have an app...
Anyway, let’s begin! 👇
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
Neuralink has finally received permission to start human trials and is currently recruiting 🧠. Chill out, we're still far from those sci-fi brain interfaces you see in movies, this part of the research is only for people with quadriplegia - check out the eligibility requirements here.
Image: Neuralink According to Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google's DeepMind, generative AI is just a phase, the next big thing is interactive AI . The idea is that you will communicate with AI in a more natural way, an improved Siri or Alexa, that you will ask it with your voice and it will autonomously call other software and APIs to find the best solution to your request. Read the full interview here.
Image: MIT Technology Review
In Japan, Duolingo is getting replaced by a physical robot that teaches you English, but that’s not it, robots are also replacing kids that don’t feel like going to school 🎒, so the other kids have their friends phigitally there. If you are in shock, i’m too, so of course this is the topic I’ve picked for the Sunday essay.
Image: Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images Google’s Bard has just launched the feature that most tech workers have been waiting for: an AI that not only searches the web, but also your documents and emails 📧 (from your Google Work account only, of course). This could be useful in many work environments, and is definitely a good challenger to Microsoft's Copilot offering 👀
OpenAI is releasing Dalle3, their improved AI that can add real and accurate text to your AI art 🎨 and understand the relationships between different objects in your prompts. It will be released in October this year for ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise customers only, because yes, you get to create those images inside of ChatGPT.
Image: OpenAI Wanna to know who else is getting an AI boost? Alexa 🤓 This update will finally make interacting with your speaker a more natural conversation.
Believe it or not, mass production of robots is coming soon. Agility Robotics is opening a robot factory in the US that will produce 10,000 units from 2024. In the video they compare it to the first car factory, exciting times.
Image: Agility Robotics
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🥽 Extended Reality
As the Meta Connect event approaches, more leaks are coming. Rumour has it that the Meta Quest 3 has improved spatial awareness 🛋️ thanks to its depth sensor, which collects spatial data to understand the environment and better recognise objects. I'm not planning on upgrading my Quest 2 because I don't use it that much, but it's a feature I'd like to have so I stop hitting the wall or a lamp by mistake - one of the 9 reasons I think VR hasn't gone mainstream yet.
Image: Meta In case you were wondering if the Apple Vision Pro launch is still on track, Tim just confirmed ✅ in an interview. Watch from 03:55.
And that's it for today! Hope you enjoyed the picks 🤓. If you're a paid subscriber, you'll get the resources section in a few minutes 🗃️.
See you on Sunday with an essay on ‘Robots replacing kids at school 🤖🎒📚’.
Best,
Martina ✨