Lifeboat Foundation

LG Electronics may no longer be a household name in smartphones, but it still sees a big future in gadgets like robots. Today, the company confirmed a $60 million investment in Bear Robotics, the California startup that makes artificial intelligence–powered server robots (autonomous tray towers on wheels that are meant to replace waiters) for restaurants and other venues. With the investment, LG Electronics becomes Bear’s largest shareholder.

Bear’s last fundraise in 2022 valued the company at just over $490 million post-money, per PitchBook data. It’s not clear what the valuation is for this latest investment, but the last year has not been a great one for startups in the space.

On the other hand, the current vogue for all things AI, and the general advances that are coming with that, are giving robotics players a fillip — see yesterday’s Covariant news, for another example. Still, it’s not clear what Bear hopes to tackle next with the basic trays-on-wheels form factor that it has adopted for its flagship Servi robots.

Adding a fourth light to traffic signals—in addition to red, green, and yellow—would shorten wait times at street corners for pedestrians, as well as improve traffic flow for both autonomous vehicles and human drivers. And the more autonomous vehicles there are in the traffic network, the shorter the wait times for everyone.

Tesla has started to push a new Full Self-Driving Beta v12 software update. It’s still not going wide, there’s no new release note, but CEO Elon Musk says it’s a “big release”

When talking about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving program, it’s hard not to talk about delays.

Tesla fans would argue that the company is trying to solve a major problem in self-driving and we should cut it some slack when it comes. The counter argument is that Tesla started selling Full Self-Driving since 2016 and by doing it, it created pressure on itself to deliver on its promise.

Science and Technology:

I will want to see a video of myself doing sex with some cinema actresses 😍❤️

OpenAI’s premier text-to-video generator is coming in 2024, and the company is not ruling out AI-generated adult content.

ABOVE: Blackiston and his colleagues dovetailed biology and robotics to generate biobots derived from frog stem cells. These biobots can move due to cilia, small hairlike structures that cover their surfaces. Douglas Blackiston and Sam Kriegman, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Douglas Blackiston, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, has always been fascinated by transformation. Using uncommon model organisms, from caterpillars and butterflies to tadpoles and frogs, he investigates how biology is adaptive. In one of his favorite projects, Blackiston transplanted eyes into the tails of blind tadpoles, restoring their vision in a striking display of tissue plasticity. This led him to an unusual spin-off project, where his work in biology dovetailed with robotics. In this work, Blackiston and his colleagues repurposed frog stem cells into programmable synthetic organisms to explore the design space of cells and their interactions.

The European Union is enacting the most comprehensive guardrails on the fast-developing world of artificial intelligence after the bloc’s parliament passed the AI Act on Wednesday.

The show on Tuesday night was an abstract light show partially designed with AI.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking trillions of dollars in investments to overhaul the global semiconductor industry, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Altman has long talked of the supply-and-demand problem with AI chips — many AI giants want them, but there aren’t enough to go around — and that it limits OpenAI’s growth. He’s considering a project that would increase global chip-building capacity, according to a Thursday evening report in The Wall Street Journal, and is reportedly in talks with different investors, including the government of the United Arab Emirates.

Altman could need to raise between $5 trillion and $7 trillion for the endeavor, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing one source. CNBC could not confirm the number. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Engineers have unveiled an encodable multifunctional material that can dynamically tune its shape and mechanical properties in real time. Inspired by the remarkable adaptability observed in biological organisms like the octopus, a breakthrough has been achieved in soft machines. A research team, led by Professor Jiyun Kim in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at UNIST has successfully developed an encodable multifunctional material that can dynamically tune its shape and mechanical properties in real-time. This groundbreaking metamaterial surpasses the limitations of existing materials, opening up new possibilities for applications in robotics and other fields requiring adaptability.

Current soft machines lack the level of adaptability demonstrated by their biological counterparts, primarily due to limited real-time tunability and restricted reprogrammable space of properties and functionalities.

In order to bridge this gap, the research team introduced a novel approach utilizing graphical stiffness patterns.