AI & Robotics News and Discussions

[funkervogt]

The latest LLMs pass the Turing Test, and one actually dominates it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

[wjfox]

Spotify debuts Gen AI ads, programmatic ad buying

April 3, 2025

Spotify announced Gen AI ads, among other changes to its advertising business, at an event in New York City on Thursday. Notably, the company introduced a new programmatic offering, the Spotify Ad Exchange (SAX), which allows advertisers to reach Spotify’s logged-in users via real-time auctions.

[...]

In another major announcement, the company said it’s integrating AI into its advertising offerings by allowing marketers to use Gen AI to create scripts and voiceovers for their audio ads using Spotify Ads Manager in the U.S. and Canada.

Spotify says the use of its AI tools will come at no additional cost to advertisers.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/03/spoti ... ad-buying/

[funkervogt]

Here's a composite prediction about the near future of AI from several top forecasters.
https://ai-2027.com/

[wjfox]

[firestar464]

[firestar464]

Qwen release this month

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic Team Up (Kind of) to Boost Business Tools AI

Linking AI systems to tools and databases usually needs custom code for each connection, which takes a lot of time and is difficult to scale.
By Devesh Beri April 14, 2025
Three major AI companies—Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google—are adding Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) to their systems. This is a major step toward creating a standard for how AI works with external tools and business software.

MCP, which Anthropic made open-source late last year, is a universal interface for AI applications. It helps models connect easily to data sources, tools, and systems without needing custom integrations for each one. The protocol has three main parts: Resources (data objects), Tools (functions for actions), and Prompts (templates that guide model behavior). To help companies adopt the protocol faster, Anthropic also provided pre-built servers for widely used enterprise software like Google Drive, GitHub, and Slack.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/g ... s-tools-ai

[wjfox]

Cosmic Robotics’ robots could speed up solar panel deployments

April 16, 2025

The U.S. has been building so many solar farms that companies can’t find enough people to install the panels. By 2033, the number of solar installers is expected to increase by 48%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Even if those labor force growth projections pan out, the industry is still likely to face a shortage of experts with the right skills. Making the work grueling — and unappealing — is the fact that a significant fraction of solar farms are in deserts.

“It’s terrible work in remote places,” James Emerick, co-founder and CEO of Cosmic Robotics, told TechCrunch. To give people a hand, Cosmic has developed a robotic assistant that does the heavy lifting on solar job sites.

Utility-scale solar panels can be enormous, weighing up to 90 pounds. Workers are required to hoist them onto racks several feet off the ground for hours a day. Such exertion in extreme environments can quickly exhaust a worker, or worse.

Those conditions are partly why Emerick and his colleagues started Cosmic. The startup’s robots shoulder some of the job’s physical burden, allowing people to focus on tasks that require more dexterity and intelligence.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/16/cosmi ... a-centers/

[wjfox]

This is by Unitree.

(Chinese company)

[firestar464]

[firestar464]

Exploring model welfare

https://www.anthropic.com/research/expl ... el-welfare

[Cyber_Rebel]

---------------------------------------------------------------

Very nuanced take @27:00 regarding AI utilizing prior learned public data and relation towards the art debate.

[firestar464]

Can you quote it here? I can't seem to access the video.

[firestar464]

I find myself utterly sick of the state of the anti-AI movement. While some of the grievances they hold may be legitimate to varying degrees, everything else about them is a mess. They rarely show any actual understanding of the current capabilities of AI or how it works. They seem utterly incapable of rational, calm discussion with anyone who disagrees but instead prefer to resort to insults and harassment. The most astounding thing perhaps is that most people who oppose AI will identify as progressives. Weren't progressives supposed to be the calm, rational people who focused on facts and reason in contrast to the insanity of the MAGA movement?

They have become what political youtuber Jon Matter called "meat robots." "if (text=AI) { rage}"

[Cyber_Rebel]

Can you quote it here? I can't seem to access the video.

https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyH3NxFz3Aw

And here's from r/singularity:

Apologies for nor getting to this sooner, but hopefully you can view it now! I find Hinton's seriousness on the topic pretty balanced and refreshing, but I guess that's to be expected considering his position, even if I don't agree with him on everything.

The idea of all progressives being rational is likely more a stereotype really, they can be just as emotionally driven within their viewpoints as anyone, and the nuclear energy debate I view to be similar in that regard.

[Yuli Ban]

I find myself utterly sick of the state of the anti-AI movement. While some of the grievances they hold may be legitimate to varying degrees, everything else about them is a mess. They rarely show any actual understanding of the current capabilities of AI or how it works. They seem utterly incapable of rational, calm discussion with anyone who disagrees but instead prefer to resort to insults and harassment. The most astounding thing perhaps is that most people who oppose AI will identify as progressives. Weren't progressives supposed to be the calm, rational people who focused on facts and reason in contrast to the insanity of the MAGA movement?

They have become what political youtuber Jon Matter called "meat robots." "if (text=AI) { rage}"

Devil's advocate, the ENTIRE AI debate is this way. I've seen on /r/AIWars some anti-AI types come over completely willing to debate, and virtually every comment is the most stereotypical AI bro "you're an idiot Luddite who can't accept change" nonsense, typically by types who ALSO don't understand how AI works.
Pro-AI types also conveniently never seem to put up how it works all that well, relying on "it learns like a human" without any technical specifics of why that's the case. The description I used to give— "digital molecular assembly"— could have gone far to at least help explain how it's not simply a glorified collage maker. But very unusually, all the AI companies from OpenAI to Stability to Midjourney have made virtually no sort of "ELI5" guide to explain any of this, so only the anti-AI crowd ever makes the attempt to widely explain how it works to one another
And of course then comes the AI slop problem, where the overwhelming majority of this stuff is low quality where you are expected to gestalt view it to overlook the flaws, a pass we give to no other form of art or entertainment
That's honestly where a lot of the hostility comes from as well: when it's blatantly obvious and uncanny how bad AI output is. I mean f*ck, I stopped posting AI slop online en masse for that very reason. If I have to de-focus my eyes and ignore the blatant flaws of an image to not notice how fucked up it is, it's a shitty image, no ifs ands or buts, unless those flaws are deliberately artistic.
It gets called AI slop because of the sheer overwhelming volume of it as well, because now you can generate hundreds of images, and then post all of the images (that's literally where the term came from, back in late 2022 on DeviantArt and ArtStation— AI generators would create hundreds or even thousands of extremely shitty glossy soulless looking images and mass post them on these sites, clogging the tags and new uploads, until actual human-drawn art, screenshots, text posts, etc. were almost totally drowned out by the deluge, and everyone got sick of it real early)

I can attest, if you put in the effort to make an image generation look good, most people can't even tell it's AI generated. The vast majority of AI "artists" aren't even artists, they have no interest in finding out what makes an image look "good" in the first place, instead "qualitymaxxing" which is what leads to the slop look, with virtually no second pass at it.

Years of this feedback leads to people getting almost paranoid about AI, to the point some attack things that aren't even AI (GIMP filters, upscalers, even video game AI bots).

As for them being progressives, I mean have you see the environmentalists? The Luigi Mangione memes? Many anti-AI types see AI as a horrifically environmentally taxing endeavor, and a naked capitalist scam to disempower workers. Why WOULDN'T they be vitriolic? And making matters worse is how the most visible uses of AI art have come from exactly their worst enemies: Trump, Musk, Altman (directly scraping from Hayao Miyazaki no less), the Israeli government, MAGA, Zionists, Hindutva, etc. Many of whom seem to be genuinely bewildered if you don't embrace using AI

From the perspective of the anti-AI type, the entire generative AI boom has been one of the grossest, most dystopian and borderline fascistic tech trends they've ever seen, and the average AI artist has done virtually nothing to change their minds. You go to YouTube, you find slop channels that post clickbait with AI voices that don't even attempt to fix mispronounced words; some have chatGPT-generated scripts with ZERO oversight or proofreading that outright fabricate events that never happened; some cover real historical events using nothing but AI-generated imagery, voice, and text where you start questioning if anything it's even saying is the truth

And the sad thing is you KNOW that it could be so much better even with AI, if someone put in the effort, or if we just had far more robust AI to begin with (a full fledged AGI likely wouldn't produce something I'd call "AI slop", though the term is now used to describe literally anything produced by AI regardless of quality).

So to that end, I fully understand where the anti-AI types are coming from. I still see a future for synthetic media, and I've been saying that the debate is inevitably going to lead to disillusionment among anti-AI types when synthetic media inevitably crosses various thresholds beyond which it's no longer capable to even tell something is AI generated (a good example, this Scott Pilgrim fancomic I found, though now I'm not sure, as we already have AI image generators capable of passing as human now, between the new NovelAI, new Midjourney, 4o, but still the typical AI shartist refuses to learn how to do this in lieu of that terrible shiny glossy slop look, telling me there might never come a time when it's not possible to tell something that is AI from something that isn't just because AI artists are so terrible at self restraint or learning how to make something not look like slop), this could happen as soon as late this year or next year, for better or worse.


But even back in the day, I was warning of just this sort of thing happening and the dangers of it flooding the internet (before I had ever even heard of the Dead Internet Theory at that). That there'd be a deluge of pure shit before AGI actually was invented, the byproduct of shitty pre-AGIs that have no quality control or assurance and horribly flawed understandings of the world and basic concepts, mass produced for a quick buck or to disinform, or to have fun with little regard for digital pollution

The sad endresult has been the total obliteration of the (online) perception of AI, and I just can't fully fault anti-AI types for that.
Admittedly most people in real life don't really care; the anti-AI blowback seems a lot more widespread than it actually is (consider for a moment that AI subreddits like ChatGPT and AIArt have literally 7-figures and 8-figures numbers of members, compared to anti-AI subreddits like ArtistHate which has had absurdly slow, stunted growth in comparison and has had many of its members outright permabanned for calls to violence, and that said AI slop YouTube videos still nevertheless get hundreds of thousands or millions of views, even with many KNOWING they're AI). A lot of the people who hate it are way less vitriolic in private than you think; a lot of the people who are for it are way more nuanced about it than you think. But the extremists and extremist takes get the most views.

[firestar464]

Did some reflection on y'alls comments.

I acknowledge a lot of criticisms are valid- the lack of simple explanation, the techbros, the slop, serious environmental concerns and concerns over the integrity of online content and discussion (dead internet).

I also did vent about why I left r/DefendingAIArt on this forum a while ago- it became infested with drama queens and other types of idiots (breaking point for me was when I saw a climate denier. I just couldn't anymore.) I just don't rant about these fools as much as I don't see them as much anymore. I'll also acknowledge that there are sane people who are critical of generative AI- though they're usually found offline, as the internet does indeed amplify the insane, you can still find them online.

Also techbro billionaires bad. I don't mind people being mad at them, as I am quite unhappy with them myself, though perhaps I'm much more tame with my criticism as a matter of habit. I will even go as far as to say that I'd rather live in a world without AI than in one where these fucks control it. Perhaps I've failed to acknowledge how many AI people glaze them, as spending time with sane and smart people like y'all definitely skews my perception of the futurism community.

Yuli and Cyber, thanks for giving me some perspective. It was definitely a helpful memory refresher.

[wjfox]

Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI

Apr 29, 2025

Duolingo will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle,” according to an all-hands email sent by co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn announcing that the company will be “AI-first.” The email was posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn account.

According to von Ahn, being “AI-first” means the company will “need to rethink much of how we work” and that “making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there.” As part of the shift, the company will roll out “a few constructive constraints,” including the changes to how it works with contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that “headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.”

von Ahn says that “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees” and that “this isn’t about replacing Duos with AI.” Instead, he says that the changes are “about removing bottlenecks” so that employees can “focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks.”

“AI isn’t just a productivity boost,” von Ahn says. “It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.”

https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/du ... ct-workers

[firestar464]

._.

in theory this could be done well but I don't really trust corpo to do it well