Frontier Deception, Conquering Human Cognition, & More

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THEWHITEBOX

TLDR;

Technology:

🧐 A Humanoid that’s too good to be true?

😱 A First in AI: A Metagenomics Model

Markets:

🤧 Is NVIDIA Deceiving Us?

Product:

🤨 Are OpenAI's o1 Results Inflated?

TREND OF THE WEEK: A Foundation Model for Human Cognition

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ROBOTICS

A Humanoid That’s Too Good to be True?

Recently, Chinese company EngineAI unveiled its humanoid robot SE01, which has unheard-of mannerisms and movements. The videos are so impressive that even NVIDIA’s robotics lead, Jim Fan, openly questioned whether they were real or AI-generated (the researcher later confirmed that the video is, in fact, real).

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

As a young adult, I grew up seeing the amazing developments that Boston Dynamics showed with their humanoids. However, the speed of progress of this particular industry in the last few years is staggering.

The impressive thing here is not the robot’s autonomy (the robot could very well be teleoperated in the video).

What makes this humanoid unique is that its movements are so natural that it’s hard to fathom how much we will progress this decade alone. Elon Musk was ridiculed for saying we would have billions of robots by the end of the decade, but these improvements, added to the excellent unit economics of some of these companies (especially the Chinese ones), which offer quadruped robots for the price of $1,600, make me believe that robots are coming to your home sooner than we could have ever predicted.

Conquering good robot movements is a much harder task in robotics than improving the robot’s actual intelligence.

BIOLOGY

Prime Intellect’s Amazing MetaGenomics Model

Prime Intellect, the guys behind Intellect-1, the largest decentralized LLM ever trained, has announced METAGENE-1, a 7-billion-parameter model referred to as a metagenomic foundation model developed collaboratively by researchers from USC, Prime Intellect, and the Nucleic Acid Observatory.

Trained on over 1.5 trillion base pairs of DNA and RNA sequences obtained from human wastewater samples, this model captures the patterns in the extensive genomic diversity present in the human microbiome.

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

We are becoming accustomed to AI breakthroughs in every field imaginable. But this release is different. Instead of trying to understand patterns in a narrowed view, as the name of the model suggests, researchers are trying to capture population-level patterns (across a wide number of people). This could be essential for identifying risks for large numbers of people and, potentially, even preventing pandemics like COVID-19.

Once again, we observe the insane powers of AI in discovering patterns in big data. This theme is so important that it is the main center point of today’s trend of the week.

While recent research has proven that humans, despite ingesting billions of data points per second through our senses, can only process around 10 bits per second (making our cognitive bandwidth extremely limited), AI…

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