Robotic Seals in Mars 🦭, Google launching a better ChatGPT 👌 , Apple's MR glasses on hold 👓, and much more! ✨
Hi and welcome to another week of Augmented Rarity, the newsletter that coined the gender “Black Mirrorian” as its the only way i seem to be able to describe what i do here.
“Black Mirronian” sounds better tho. I wish I could teach that at uni someday 😝. Enough, let’s begin with this week’s curation 🫡
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
Scrapping billions of data to generate stunning images has its price. Getty images is suing Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement 👩⚖️. It’s not the first viral AI tool to get to court, Lensa (based on Stable Diffusion’s model) and Midjourney got their piece of the cake too 🍰. But what happened to Getty is a bit too cheeky, see it for yourself:
An image created by Stable Diffusion showing a recreation of Getty Images’ watermark. Image: The Verge / Stable Diffusion I’m hyped, you’re hyped, we are all hyped about what GPT4 will be able to do 👯. This graphic has been running all over the internet speculating about the amount of data GPT4 will be processing so you can be your laziest self 💁🏻♀️. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO stated: “It will come out at some point when we are confident that we can release it safely and responsibly”, so we don’t really have a date yet 😩.
To all of this, Google is saying they will be releasing a proper chatbot soon 👌. Considering OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been trained mostly with Google’s data, I expect A LOT from Google themselves. For now we know the bot’s name will be Sparrow 🪶, that the project is being incubated by DeepMind 🪺 (the AI company that Google bought 9 years ago) and there will be a private beta released anytime soon 👀
Why would it be better? Well, they are focusing on making sure that the content is not invented as in ChatGPT, and since DeepMind is an Alphabet company, it might be the reason why Google is not scared of ChatGPT being acquired by Microsoft to be implemented in Bing, as they will have their own chatbot on steroids.I can’t wait for the day that Atlas, Boston Dynamics’s parkour robot would chat with us as those chatbots. Here’s their most recent demo 😮💨:
I know many people are afraid of these robots if they fall into the wrong hands, but that's where the law has to get tough so that doesn't happen. When I watch these videos, I don't see an army of robots exterminating the human race, but humans programming robots for good, for example, to rescue people 🤩.
From humanoid robots to cute and fluffy ones: Robotic seals soon to be comfort pets for astronauts 🦭. Let me develop that 🧐. Paro, the Guinness World Record for "most therapeutic" robot is being tested to be sent to Mars. Yes there’s a Guinness World Record for that. And it’s a seal. A robotic seal. Funny that seems, they are considering to take this robotic seal to Mars because it has been in the market for years and it has been proved it’s a great comfort “robopet”, so theoretically if humans were sent to Mars, since the trip would take months (9 at least) and the conditions on the red planet would be very hard, having this comfort “roboseal” would be very beneficial for the astronauts mental health. I’m in.
Before we move to the next section, I don’t know how to say this, like it feels wrong to take a seal to a desert planet? I would have taken a robotic camel 🐫 but I guess that’s absurd because Mars is a waaaay colder planet than Earth, so theoretically a seal would survive and a camel won’t. And it’s not as handy and fluffy like a robotic seal. I keep losing the point we are talking about a robot here 🤖
🥽 Extended Reality
Ok so regarding Apple’s new headset, I’m lost. But apparently the revolutionary lightweight “Apple Glass” is going to be on hold for now and they will be focusing their resources on launching a more affordable MR headset late this year 🥽. By more affordable we mean iPhone price, so not that affordable but we are talking about around 1k instead of 3-5k.
For Android people, the Oculus Quest 2 now offers an integration that lets you track your heart rate 💗, so yeah, Meta is really pushing that training in VR to try to make its way into the mainstream. Smart because the work approach is still too far from being a reality since VR’s adoption is mostly gaming and art.
I bought my Quest 2 when they launched (October 2020) aaaand I must say I loved exercising in VR, but I stopped because the app I was using suddenly decided it would be now a subscription, and I had enough subscriptions already (like the gym pass I was ignoring I had heh), so I stopped training in VR.
🗃 Resources
Since we had too many updates this week, we’ll keep this section short today.
Read, watch, listen
If you enjoyed seeing the progress of Atlas, here's a video where their creators explain the behind the scenes of their research and how it works 🥹💯:
To try/download
A ChatGPT but for books content 📚, being transparent with the sources it’s using so you can evaluate your reliance on the answer. I asked it “what did Aristotle think about beauty?” and here’s what it returned:
And that’s it for today! I’ll be back next Friday 💚
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The Getty Image/Stable Diffusion lawsuit is interesting especially considering Shutterstock is partnering with OpenAI and implementing DALL-E into its product offering.
Genre* not gender 🫠