Futurology

A team of researchers across 20 separate labs just unveiled Genesis, an open-source physics engine that combines generative AI with ultra-fast simulations, potentially transforming how AI learns to interact with the physical world.

Genesis runs 430,000 times faster than real-time physics, achieving 43 million FPS on a single RTX 4090 GPU.

It’s built in pure Python, it's 10-80x faster than existing solutions like Isaac Gym and MJX.

The platform can train real-world transferable robot locomotion policies in just 26 seconds.

The platform is fully open-source and will soon include a generative framework for creating 4D environments.

Why it matters: By enabling AI to run millions of simulations at unprecedented speeds, Genesis could massively accelerate robots' ability to understand our physical world. Open-sourcing this tech, along with its ability to generate complex environments from simple prompts, could spark a whole new wave of innovation in physical AI.

Commentary from 'The Rundown' Newsletter

I follow a lot of tech news, and one of the most common biases I see in most commentary is its 'Venture- Capital-Centredness'. Almost everybody mostly just talks about VC-funded start-ups. Meanwhile, often the most important trends are happening outside of those spaces.

Open Source's role in AI and robotics is a prime example of this. Players in the AI space are using it to 'poison pill' their competitors. Investors are pouring hundreds of billions into companies like OpenAI, but every time they have a chance to justify that cost with a revenue stream, someone ruins it by open-sourcing the tech and making it free-to-use.

These 20 academic institutions aren't motivated the same way, but they will have the same effect. Former robotics leaders like Boston Dynamics have lost their advantages. Now small companies in China's industrial zones have the same as them, but at no cost.

The result? Married to Chinese manufacturing, future robots will be cheap, ubiquitous, and it's likely no one Big Tech player will own the space. Will there be an Apple version of robotics? A company able to make hundreds of billions from high end products? Perhaps. But even if there is, most robots will still likely spring from open-source and many different manufacturers.

Press Release

Youtube Demo

It's only a matter of time before tech like this becomes widespread for grieving families. Eerie to think that in preparing for death some people will create their own afterlife personas to best comfort the people who care about them they are leaving behind.

More prosaically it makes a great alternative to regular phone messaging and emails. If you can trust the AI "You" to say the right thing in responses.

If you thought the proliferation of virtual boyfriends and girlfriends was sad already, prepare to get sadder.

Market share data courtesy of yipitdata.com.

There are others, but Waymo in the US and Badiu's Apollo Go in China, now seem ready for take-off with robo-taxis. From now on the only constraints to growth will be how quick they can deploy new vehicles to new markets. When this explosive growth is finished, there will be tens of millions of robo-taxis in every town and city on planet Earth.

The real revolution will be the global displacement of tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of human driver jobs. We are rushing headlong into this future without anyone preparing for it, yet it's going to happen whether people like it or not, and it's heading straight for us.

IMAGINE: In 2124, androids and humans coexist seamlessly. You’re sitting in a cozy cafe, watching two people have an intimate, almost lovers' conversation. One of them has a small glowing emblem on their wrist, an unmistakable sign that they are an android, required by law. Despite this, their connection feels real, deep, and natural, as if they’ve been in each other’s lives for years. The emblem is the only thing separating them from being human, but the conversation, full of quiet affection, feels indistinguishable from any other intimate exchange.

Given the growing movement to remove the emblem, would you support it or feel it should stay?)

Edit: Direct YouTube link.

This is a good application of the tech

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 1025 or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch.

I am reading The New Wave, the last book from Microsoft AI CEO Suleyman. He mentioned that a massive study pegged down the General Purpose Technologies to be only 24 in the last 10000 years (so fire is not included for example), but I can’t find the study. Does anybody know the study? This is the list btw:

Domestication of plants Domestication of animals Smelting of ore Money Wheel Writing Bronze Iron Water wheel Three-masted sailing ship Printing Factory system Steam Engine Railways Steamship Internal combustion engine Electricity Automobile Airplane Mass production Computer Lean production Internet Biotechnology

EDIT: I found the source https://www.amazon.com/Economic-Transformations-General-Purpose-Technologies/dp/019929089X

We've done this for a few years on the r/futurology subreddit. Here's 2024's predictions. Not many seem to have got a lot right, though most got a certain amount correct.