This U.S. company is helping arm Ukraine against Russia with AI drones : Consider This from NPR Palmer Luckey launched his first tech company as a teenager. That was Oculus, the virtual reality headset for gaming. Soon after, he sold it to Facebook for $2 billion.

Now 31, Luckey has a new company called Anduril that's making Artificial Intelligence weapons. The Pentagon is buying them keeping some for itself and sending others to Ukraine.

The weapons could be instrumental in helping Ukraine stand up to Russia.

Ukraine needs more weapons and better weapons to fight against Russia. Could AI weapons made by a billionaire tech entrepreneur's company hold the answer?

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Palmer Luckey, 31, founder of Anduril Industries, stands in front of the Dive-LD, an autonomous underwater drone at company headquarters in Costa Mesa, Calif. Anduril recently won a U.S. Navy contract to build 200 of them annually. Philip Cheung for NPR/NPR hide caption

Palmer Luckey, 31, founder of Anduril Industries, stands in front of the Dive-LD, an autonomous underwater drone at company headquarters in Costa Mesa, Calif. Anduril recently won a U.S. Navy contract to build 200 of them annually.

Palmer Luckey launched his first tech company as a teenager. That was Oculus, the virtual reality headset for gaming. Soon after, he sold it to Facebook for $2 billion.

Now 31, Luckey has a new company called Anduril that's making Artificial Intelligence weapons. The Pentagon is buying them keeping some for itself and sending others to Ukraine.

The weapons could be instrumental in helping Ukraine stand up to Russia.

Ukraine needs more weapons and better weapons to fight against Russia. Could AI weapons made by a billionaire tech entrepreneur's company hold the answer?

For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

This episode was produced by Kathryn Fink and Jonaki Mehta. It was edited by Courtney Dorning and Andrew Sussman. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun

Excerpt from:

This U.S. company is helping arm Ukraine against Russia with AI drones - NPR

A lot of these charts are really about what happens when the utopian dreams of AI maximalism meet the messy reality of consumer behaviour and enterprise IT budgets - it takes longer than you think, and its complicated (this is also one reason why I think doomers are naive). The typical enterprise IT sales cycle is longer than the time since Chat GPT3.5 was launched, and Morgan Stanleys latest CIO survey says that 30% of big company CIOs dont expect to deploy anything before 2026. They might be being too cautious, but the cloud adoption chart above (especially the expectation data) suggests the opposite. Remember, also, that the Bain Production data only means that this is being used for something, somewhere, not that its taken over your workflows.

Stepping back, though, the very speed with which ChatGPT went from a science project to 100m users might have been a trap (a little as NLP was for Alexa). LLMs look like they work, and they look generalised, and they look like a product - the science of them delivers a chatbot and a chatbot looks like a product. You type something in and you get magic back! But the magic might not be useful, in that form, and it might be wrong. It looks like product, but it isnt.

Microsofts failed and forgotten attempt to bolt this onto Bing and take on Google at the beginning of last year is a good microcosm of the problem. LLMs look like better databases, and they look like search, but, as weve seen since, theyre wrong enough, and the wrong is hard enough to manage, that you cant just give the user a raw prompt and a raw output - you need to build a lot of dedicated product around that, and even then its not clear how useful this is. Firing LLM web search out of the gate was falling into that trap. Satya Nadella said he wanted to make Google dance, but ironically the best way to compete with Bing Copilot might have been sit it out - to wait, watch, learn, and work this through before launching anything (if Wall Street had allowed that, of course).

The rush to bolt this into search came from competitive pressure, and stock market pressure, but more fundamentally from the sense that this is the next platform shift and you have to grab it with both hands. Thats much broader than Google. The urgency is accelerated by that standing on the shoulders of giants moment - you dont have time to to wait for people to buy devices - and from the way these things look like finished products. And meanwhile, the firehose of cash that these companies produced in the last decade has collided with the enormous capital-intensity of cutting-edge LLMs like matter meeting anti-matter.

In other words - These things are the future and will change everything, right now, and they need all this money, and we have all this money.

As a lot of people have now pointed out, all of that adds up to a stupefyingly large amount of capex (and a lot of other investment too) being pulled forward for a technology thats mostly still only in the experimental budgets.

Link:

The AI summer - Benedict Evans

12 hours ago

ByKatherine Latham and Anna Bressanin,

Researchers studying sperm whale communication say they've uncovered sophisticated structures similar to those found in human language.

"At 1000m (3300ft) deep, many of the group will be facing the same way, flanking each other but across an area of several kilometres," says Young. "During this time they're talking, clicking the whole time." After about an hour, she says, the group rises to the surface in synchrony. "They'll then have their rest phase. They might be at the surface for 15 to 20minutes. Then they'll dive again," she says.

At the end of a day of foraging, says Young, the sperm whales come together at the surface and rub against each other, chatting while they socialise. "As researchers, we don't see a lot of their behaviour because they don't spend that much time at the surface," she says. "There's masses we don't know about them, because we are just seeing a tiny little snapshot of their lives during that 15minutes at the surface."

It was around 47 million years ago that land-roaming cetaceans began to gravitate back towards the ocean that's 47 million years of evolution in an environment alien to our own. How can we hope to easily understand creatures that have adapted to live and communicate under such different evolutionary pressures to ourselves?

"It's easier to translate the parts where our world and their world overlap like eating, nursing or sleeping," says David Gruber, lead and founder of the Cetacean Translation Initiative (Ceti) and professor of biology at the City University of New York. "As mammals, we share these basics with others. But I think it's going to get really interesting when we try to understand the areas of their world where there's no intersection with our own," he says.

Sperm whales live in multi-level, matrilineal societies groups of daughters, mothers and grandmothers while the males roam the oceans, visiting the groups to breed. They are known for their complex social behaviour and group decision-making , which requires sophisticated communication. For example, they are able to adapt their behaviour as a group when protecting themselves from predators like orcas or humans.

Sperm whales communicate with each other using rhythmic sequences of clicks , called codas. It was previously thought that sperm whales had just 21 coda types. However, after studying almost 9,000 recordings, the Ceti researchers identified 156 distinct codas. They also noticed the basic building blocks of these codas which they describe as a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet" much like phonemes, the units of sound in human language which combine to form words. ( Watch the video below to hear some of the variety in sperm whale vocalisations the AI identified.)

Pratyusha Sharma, a PhD student at MIT and lead author of the study, describes the "fine-grain changes" in vocalisations the AI identified. Each coda consists of between three and 40 rapid-fire clicks. The sperm whales were found to vary the overall speed, or the "tempo", of the codas, as well as to speed up and slow down during the delivery of a coda, in other words, making it "rubato". Sometimes they added an extra click at the end of a coda, akin, says Sharma, to "ornamentation" in music. These subtle variations, she says, suggest sperm whale vocalisations could carry a much richer amount of information than previously thought .

"Some of these features are contextual," says Sharma. "In human language, for example, I can say 'what' or 'whaaaat!?'. It's the same word, but to understand the meaning you have to listen to the whole sound," she says.

The researchers also found the sperm whale "phonemes" could be used in a combinatorial fashion, allowing the whales to construct a vast repertoire of distinct vocalisations. The existence of a combinatorial coding system, write the report authors, is a prerequisite for "duality of patterning " a linguistic phenomenon thought to be unique to human language in which meaningless elements combine to form meaningful words.

However, Sharma emphasises, this is not something they have any evidence of as yet. "What we show in sperm whales is that the codas themselves are formed by combining from this basic set of features. Then the codas get sequenced together to form coda sequences." Much like humans combine phonemes to create words, and then words to create sentences.

So, what does all this tell us about sperm whales' intelligence? Or their ability to reason, or store and share information?

"Well, it doesn't tell us anything yet," says Gruber. "Before we can get to those amazing questions, we need to build a fundamental understanding of how [sperm whales communicate] and what's meaningful to them. We see them living very complicated lives, the coordination and sophistication in their behaviours. We're at base camp. This is a new place for humans to be just give us a few years. Artificial intelligence is allowing us to see deeper into whale communication than we've ever seen before."

But not everyone is convinced, with experts warning of an anthropocentric focus on language which risks forcing us to view things from one perspective.

Young, though, describes the research as an "incremental step" towards understanding these giants of the deep. "We're starting to put the pieces of the puzzle together," she says. And perhaps if we could listen and really understand something like how important sperm whales' grandmothers are to them something that resonates with humans, she says, we could drive change in human behaviour in order to protect them.

Categorised as "vulnerable" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), sperm whales are still recovering from commercial hunting by humans in the 19th and 20th Centuries. And, although such whaling has been banned for decades, sperm whales face new threats such as climate change, ocean noise pollution and ship strikes.

However, Young adds, we're still a long way off from understanding what sperm whales might be saying to each other. "We really have no idea. But the better we can understand these amazing animals, the more we'll know about how we can protect them."

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Google is training its robots with Gemini AI so they can get better at navigation and completing tasks. The DeepMind robotics team explained in a new research paper how using Gemini 1.5 Pros long context window which dictates how much information an AI model can process allows users to more easily interact with its RT-2 robots using natural language instructions.

This works by filming a video tour of a designated area, such as a home or office space, with researchers using Gemini 1.5 Pro to make the robot watch the video to learn about the environment. The robot can then undertake commands based on what it has observed using verbal and / or image outputs such as guiding users to a power outlet after being shown a phone and asked where can I charge this? DeepMind says its Gemini-powered robot had a 90 percent success rate across over 50 user instructions that were given in a 9,000-plus-square-foot operating area.

Researchers also found preliminary evidence that Gemini 1.5 Pro enabled its droids to plan how to fulfill instructions beyond just navigation. For example, when a user with lots of Coke cans on their desk asks the droid if their favorite drink is available, the team said Gemini knows that the robot should navigate to the fridge, inspect if there are Cokes, and then return to the user to report the result. DeepMind says it plans to investigate these results further.

The video demonstrations provided by Google are impressive, though the obvious cuts after the droid acknowledges each request hide that it takes between 1030 seconds to process these instructions, according to the research paper. It may take some time before were sharing our homes with more advanced environment-mapping robots, but at least these ones might be able to find our missing keys or wallets.

Read more from the original source:

Google says Gemini AI is making its robots smarter - The Verge

Intuit will tell approximately 1,800 of its global employees10% of its workforcethey will be leaving the company. But leadership says the move isnt to cut costs.

Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of the Fortune 500 company, which offers products like QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and TurboTax, wrote an internal email to employees, seen by Fortune, announcing the very difficult decisions my leadership team and I have made.

Goodarzi explains that Intuits transformation journey, including departing from the 1,800 employees, is part of its strategy to increase investments in priority focus areas of AI and generative AI, such as its GenAI-powered financial assistant called Intuit Assist, and reimagining its products from traditional workflows to AI-native experiences. The strategy also focuses on money movement, mid-market expansion for small businesses, and international growth.

We do not do layoffs to cut costs, and that remains true in this case, Goodarzi writes. Intuit plans to hire approximately 1,800 new people with strategic functional skill sets primarily in engineering, product, and customer-facing roles such as sales, customer success, and marketingand expects its overall headcount to grow in its fiscal year 2025, which begins Aug. 1.

Of the employees who will depart Intuit, 1,050 are not meeting expectations based on a formal performance management process. The company believes they will be more successful outside of Intuit, Goodarzi writes. In addition, Intuit is reducing the number of executivesdirectors, SVPs, and EVPsby approximately 10%, expanding certain executive roles and responsibilities.

Intuit is also consolidating 80 tech roles to sites where it is growing technology teams, including Atlanta, Bangalore, New York, Tel Aviv, and Toronto. The company is closing two sites in Edmonton and Boise that have over 250 employees, with a certain number of employees relocating to other sites within Intuit or leaving the company. Intuit is also eliminating more than 300 roles across the company to streamline work and reallocate resources toward key growth areas, according to the email.

All departing U.S. employees will receive a package that includes a minimum of 16 weeks of pay, plus two additional weeks for every year of service. They will have 60 days before they leave the company, with a last day of Sept. 9. Employees outside the U.S. will receive similar support, taking into account local requirements.

This timing allows everyone leaving to reach their July vesting date for restricted stock unitsand the July 31 eligibility date for annual IPI bonuses, Goodarzi writes. Those not on an IPI plan will be able to reach the eligibility date for July or Q4 incentives. Its the most generous severance package Intuit has ever offered, according to the company.

Intuit is in a position of strength, according to Goodarzi. The company earned $14.4 billion in revenue in its fiscal year 2023, moving up 24 spots on the Fortune 500. For the period ending April 30, Intuit reported revenue of $6.7 billion, up 12%.

See the article here:

Exclusive: Intuit is laying off 1,800 employees as AI leads to a strategic shift - Fortune