Futurology

Tesla has given its first demonstration of its newly upgraded Optimus hand, showcasing its ability to catch a tennis ball.

The brief video showed Optimus effortlessly catching two tennis balls with precision and smooth movements.

Tesla Senior Staff Software Engineer Julian Ibarz confirmed in a follow-up post that the demonstration was teleoperated.

Alibaba's Qwen team just released QwQ-32B-Preview, a powerful new open-source AI reasoning model that can reason step-by-step through challenging problems and directly competes with OpenAI's o1 series across benchmarks.

The details:

QwQ features a 32K context window, outperforming o1-mini and competing with o1-preview on key math and reasoning benchmarks.

The model was tested across several of the most challenging math and programming benchmarks, showing major advances in deep reasoning.

QwQ demonstrates ‘deep introspection,’ talking through problems step-by-step and questioning and examining its own answers to reason to a solution.

The Qwen team noted several issues in the Preview model, including getting stuck in reasoning loops, struggling with common sense, and language mixing.

Why it matters: Between QwQ and DeepSeek, open-source reasoning models are here — and Chinese firms are absolutely cooking with new models that nearly match the current top closed leaders. Has OpenAI’s moat dried up, or does the AI leader have something special up its sleeve before the end of the year?

By fine-tuning models with carefully curated techniques, TTT improved accuracy sixfold in some cases and set a new state-of-the-art for purely neural approaches, achieving 53% accuracy with an 8-billion-parameter model. When combined with program synthesis methods, the models reached 61.9% accuracy, matching average human performance. The findings suggest that symbolic reasoning isn’t essential for solving complex problems, emphasizing the power of dynamic, computation-focused approaches during inference. → Read the full paper here.

This article - How the Rise of New Digital Workers Will Lead to an Unlimited Age - makes the mainstream case for the future of employment with respect to robotics and AI. By mainstream, I mean that it completely ignores the central question. What happens to human employees when most or all (even future uninvented) work can be done for pennies an hour by AI & robotics employees?

As almost always, he poses the question, and in classic Strawman fashion - pretends to answer it, by answering a different question. Mr Benioff says automation has always created more jobs than it eliminates. But that only answers a different question and ignores the most important one.

Mr. Benioff, CEO of Salesforce and owner of TIME magazine is no different from mainstream economists, or the Silicon Valley elite, in building this world and blindly leading us to it.

One day society is going to have to wake up to the fact we are being duped by these people, and the longer we keep believing them, the more we just get all the angst and chaos, and none of the understanding we need to fashion a new reality.