Mark Zuckerberg’s AI grand vision
Ray Kurzweil's humanoid robot startup
Facebook delays flagship AI model
Mark Zuckerberg’s AI grand vision
Meta’s CEO is promoting a future where artificial intelligence is increasingly intertwined with people’s lives. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to have AI friends, an AI therapist and AI business agents. In Zuckerberg’s vision for a new digital future, artificial-intelligence friends outnumber human companions and chatbot experiences supplant therapists, ad agencies and coders. AI will play a central role in the human experience, the Facebook co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms has said in a series of recent podcasts, interviews and public appearances. “I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” Zuckerberg said Tuesday during an onstage interview with Stripe co-founder and president John Collison at Stripe’s annual conference.
Zuckerberg said on a podcast last week that he thinks the average person wants to have more friends and connections with other people than they currently do—and that AI friends are a solution. “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends,” he said in the interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. On a separate podcast with media analyst Ben Thompson, Zuckerberg continued: “For people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI.” When someone is making a purchase and needs to speak to a person from that business, an AI agent will be there to help them, Zuckerberg said Tuesday. The Tuesday talk capped a media blitz that included high-profile podcasts and public talks with fellow tech executives. While the Meta CEO has been a guest on podcasts before, the number and quick succession of appearances was rare. Zuckerberg has had mixed success predicting how people will interact with each other in the future….
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Ray Kurzweil's humanoid robot startup
A humanoid robotics startup co-founded by prominent artificial-intelligence futurist Ray Kurzweil said on Tuesday that venture capital firm Gauntlet Ventures will back its $100 million Series B funding round. The company, Beyond Imagination, will be valued at $500 million, and venture capital firm Gauntlet Ventures will be the round's sole investor.
Kurzweil is known for popularizing the term "the singularity," when he predicted two decades ago that by 2045, artificial intelligence would surpass human intelligence and embark on a path of accelerating self-enhancement. These ideas, which once seemed like science fiction, are now viewed as mainstream by many technologists. Beyond Imagination is co-founded by scientist, entrepreneur and filmmaker Harry Kloor. The company has developed a humanoid robot — the Beyond Bot - and accompanying AI models that it intends to deploy in industrial settings such as factories, pharmaceutical plants and chip manufacturing facilities, said Gauntlet Ventures co-founder Oliver Carmack.
The company has been testing its robots and is now looking for large enterprises into which they can be deployed, Carmack said, adding that he chose to back Beyond Imagination because of its potential to revolutionize U.S. manufacturing and address the projected global shortage of skilled labor. Major tech companies including Nvidia, Meta Platforms (Facebook) and Tesla, alongside various startups, are rushing to make humanoid robots. Kurzweil's predictions of the future have a good track record….
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Facebook delays flagship AI model
For the last several years, AI models have improved at breathtaking speeds, developing capabilities in writing, reasoning, coding and other functions that few knew were possible even a decade ago. But lately, there are signs such rapid advancements may not go on forever. Meta is delaying the rollout of a flagship AI model after company engineers have struggled to significantly improve its performance.
OpenAI and Anthropic have also experienced similar delays with some of their most advanced models. Some researchers see the pattern as evidence that future advances in AI models could come at a far slower pace than in the past, and at tremendous cost.
Company engineers are struggling to significantly improve the capabilities of its “Behemoth” large-language model, leading to staff questions about whether improvements over prior versions are significant enough to justify public release, the people said. Early in its development, Behemoth was internally slated for an April release to coincide with Meta’s inaugural AI conference for developers. Meta put out two smaller models in its Llama AI model family ahead of the event, but later pushed an internal target for the larger Behemoth’s release to June. Now, it’s been delayed to fall or later. Meta engineers and researchers are concerned its performance wouldn’t match public statements about its capabilities, the people said. The two smaller models that were released in April initially performed well on a popular AI chatbot leaderboard. However, it was later revealed that the model submitted to the leaderboard was not the same model that was released to the public.
Senior executives at the company are frustrated at the performance of the team that built the Llama 4 models and blame them for the failure to make progress on Behemoth, according to people familiar with their views. Meta is contemplating significant management changes to its AI product group as a result, the people said. The Facebook-parent has publicly touted the capabilities of Behemoth, saying it already outperforms similar technology from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic on some tests. But internally, its performance has been hobbled by training challenges, the people said.
“Right now, the progress is quite small across all the labs, all the models,” said Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, an assistant professor and faculty fellow at New York University’s Center for Data Science. GPT-5, one of OpenAI’s next big technological leaps forward, was initially expected around mid-2024, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. In December, The Journal reported that development on the model was running behind schedule. In February, OpenAI Chief Sam Altman said the model would be released as GPT-4.5 and that GPT-5—the model they hoped would come with bigger technological breakthroughs—was still months away. ChatGPT currently runs on versions of GPT-4o. OpenAI declined to comment on the timing of GPT-5’s release.
Anthropic last year said it was working on a new model called Claude 3.5 Opus, a larger version of the AI models it released last year and has continued to update. That heftier version still hasn’t been released. A spokeswoman says Opus is coming soon. Meta’s first version of Llama was produced by its Fundamental AI Research Team, which largely consists of academics and researchers with doctorate degrees. The team released the models and a research paper explaining them to the public in early 2023. Since then, 11 of the 14 researchers on that original paper have left the company. The Llama models since the first ones have been developed by a different team….