Here is the daily technology #threadcast for 5/22/25. The goal is to make this a technology "reddit".
Drop all question, comments, and articles relating to #technology and the future. The goal is make it a technology center.
Here is the daily technology #threadcast for 5/22/25. The goal is to make this a technology "reddit".
Drop all question, comments, and articles relating to #technology and the future. The goal is make it a technology center.
Tesla posts Optimus’ most impressive video demonstration yet
The Tesla Optimus team's latest video demonstration shows the humanoid robot performing a variety of tasks, including household using a broom and vacuum cleaner, tearing a paper towel, stirring a pot of food, opening a cabinet, closing a curtain, and picking up a Model X fore link and placing it on a dolly. The robot completed all these tasks through a single neural network. It learned its actions using data from first-person videos of humans performing similar tasks. The system could pave the way for Optimus to learn and refine new skills quickly and reliably. The video is available in the article.
Jony Ive to lead OpenAI’s design work following $6.5B acquisition of his company
OpenAI is acquiring Jony Ive's startup, io, in an all-equity deal that values the startup at $6.5 billion. Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom, which will continue to operate independently, will now lead creative and design work at OpenAI. He could help OpenAI directly compete with Apple in the consumer hardware space - Apple has struggled to develop AI features that keep up with the latest technology. io's staff of around 55 engineers, scientists, researchers, physicists, and product development specialists will join OpenAI. They will be tasked with developing AI-powered consumer devices and other projects.
Sergey Brin points to where Google Glasses failed — and what Android XR gets right
Google is getting back into the smart glasses game. The company has announced a partnership with Warby Parker - they plan to launch a series of smart glasses built on top of Google's Android XR as soon as next year. The rise of generative AI has allowed Google to revisit the idea of Google Glass, a wearable it launched in 2013 that failed partly due to a technology gap. The company has learned many lessons since the failed launch. Other companies, like Meta and Apple, are also reportedly working on smart glasses.
Tesla’s head of self-driving admits ‘lagging a couple years’ behind Waymo
Tesla's head of AI and self-driving, Ashok Elluswamy, recently admitted in an interview that the automaker's autonomous program is lagging a couple of years behind Waymo's. However, Tesla's approach is much cheaper, and its cost advantage will allow the company to scale faster. Tesla produces over a million cars a year, versus Waymo's few hundred units, and it plans to use the same vehicles for its autonomous riding service. The company is still limited to a level 2 advanced driver system, which requires constant supervision from the driver, while Waymo has been providing customers with level 4 autonomous driving rides for years. It plans to start offering level 4 autonomous rides to customers in Austin next month.
The small robot company with big global ambitions
Robot.com is a Colombian robotic company with a fleet of over 500 robots working in warehouse logistics, advertising displays, security, inspection, and deliveries. The company signed a multi-year partnership with Amazon Web Services last year, catapulting it into the big league of the global service robots market. The steady growth of the company underscores the potential of the robotics industry in Latin America, but it also highlights the challenges of regions with high production costs, limited investor confidence, and minimal public investment.
Gemini gets Chrome integration: Taking cues from Project Astra, Gemini can now read what’s on your screen or camera, letting you do things like quickly summarize a webpage, compare products, or remix a recipe.
XR glasses, 3D video calls, and near-instant translations: We’re about to get an explosion of new AI glasses as Google partners with Warby Parker, Samsung, and other brands on its next-gen Android XR platform. Beam, meanwhile, makes virtual meetings more dynamic by turning the person you’re chatting with into a 3D avatar. Finally, a new live translation feature for Google Meet looks like something straight out of a sci-fi movie.
!summarize
Google’s image, video, and music models get a boost: The all-new Veo 3 can now create audio alongside each of its video generations, not to mention, it features accurate lip syncing and improved real-world physics. (Here’s a great example of what you can do with it.) Imagen 4, meanwhile, features more precise text generation, new aspect ratio options, and 2k resolution. Lyria 2 brings new music generation tools to musicians. And a platform called Flow lets you turn clips into full-fledged films with precise controls and scene consistency.
Gemini gets major overhaul: Gemini 2.5 Pro now has an “enhanced” reasoning mode, pushing it to the top of most math and coding benchmarks, while 2.5 Flash is now available to everyone. There’s also a new coding agent called Jules that, like OpenAI’s new Codex, can perform programming tasks without any human intervention. If that wasn’t enough, you can try Stitch, a new platform made specifically for designing UIs. Finally, Google now has a subscription tier for “trailblazers and pioneers” who want access to its most cutting-edge releases, but it’ll cost you a whopping $250/month.
https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/jules
EU Artificial Intelligence Act
Article 3: Definitions
(1) 'Al system' means a machine-based system that is designed to operate with varying levels of autonomy and that may exhibit adaptiveness after deployment, and that, for explicit or implicit objectives, infers, from the input it receives, how to generate outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations, or decisions that can influence physical or virtual environments;
#eu #ai #artificialintelligenceact
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OpenAI said in a release that the project "reinforces OpenAI's commitment to strengthening U.S. infrastructure while helping allies gain access to transformative AI responsible and securely."
The latest project marks the first international iteration of the Trump administration's multi-billion dollar joint AI infrastructure project announced in January between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. At the time, the companies committed $100 billion to the project and an additional $500 billion over the next four years.
OpenAI said in February that it was weighing data center campuses in 16 states as part of the deal.
"At Apple, we believe in technology's power to improve lives," Dr. Sumbul Desai, vice president of health at Apple, said in a statement to CNBC. "We're thrilled that Emory Hillandale Hospital is using Apple products to deliver exceptional care — because doctors and nurses should have the best technology in the world to serve their patients."
The health system's interest in using more Apple products was partially inspired by the major CrowdStrike outage that rocked businesses, including Emory, last July, said Dr. Ravi Thadhani, the executive vice president for health affairs of Emory University.
Thadhani said more than 20,000 of the health system's devices were "paralyzed" by a faulty CrowdStrike software update, but notably, all of its Apple products were still working. In the aftermath of the outage, executives asked engineers from Apple and Epic to visit Emory and explore a deeper integration.
Inside the lab, High NA qualification team lead Assia Haddou gave CNBC an exclusive, up-close look at the High NA machines, which she said are "bigger than a double-decker bus."
The machine is made up of four modules, manufactured in Connecticut, California, Germany and the Netherlands, then assembled in the Veldhoven, Netherlands, lab for testing and approval, before being disassembled again to ship out. Haddou said it takes seven partially loaded Boeing 747s, or at least 25 trucks, to get one system to a customer.
The world's first commercial installation of High NA happened at Intel's Oregon chip fabrication plant, or fab, in 2024. Only five of the colossal machines have ever been shipped.
"Hong Kong's new stablecoin policy sets a global benchmark by mandating full reserve backing, strict redemption guarantees, and HKMA oversight," YeFeng Gong, risk and strategy director of HashKey OTC, told CNBC. HashKey OTC is a trading arm of the HashKey Group, which has a licensed crypto platform in Hong Kong.
The policy "ensures institutional-grade reliability for traders while positioning Hong Kong as a leader in compliant digital finance," he added.
“Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size?”
The membrane resists swelling, a major flaw in earlier versions. It performs well with both light and heavy hydrocarbons.
Borrowing from water desalination
To build the new membrane, the team repurposed a technology from the water industry. Since the 1970s, reverse osmosis membranes have cut desalination energy use by 90 percent.
MIT scientists adapted these membranes to handle crude oil.
They replaced a flexible amide bond with a rigid imine bond, making the film more stable and hydrophobic. This allows hydrocarbons to move quickly through the membrane without causing it to swell.
Promising early results
The membrane excelled in lab tests. It increased the toluene concentration by 20 times in a mixture with triisopropylbenzene. It also effectively separated real industrial oil samples containing naphtha, kerosene, and diesel.
“You can imagine that with a membrane like this, you could have an initial stage that replaces a crude oil fractionation column,” said Smith.
“You could partition heavy and light molecules and then you could use different membranes in a cascade to purify complex mixtures to isolate the chemicals that you need.”
Experts believe this could be a major leap for industrial efficiency. “This work takes the workhorse technology of the membrane desalination industry… and creates a new way to apply it to organic systems,” said Andrew Livingston, a chemical engineering professor at Queen Mary University of London.
They underlined that by directly observing thousands of electrons in real-time, scientists gain powerful insights into how materials respond at the quantum level.
Published in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, the team developed a real-time, time-dependent density functional theory, or RT-TDDFT, capability within the open-source Real-space Multigrid, or RMG, code to model systems of up to 24,000 electrons.
RT-TDDFT is a quantum mechanical method that allows researchers to simulate how electrons move and interact in materials over time, once they are excited by an external stimulus. It works by calculating how the electron density in materials changes in response to the application of electric and electromagnetic fields (i.e. light), for instance.
The study revealed that their method offers insights into nonequilibrium dynamics and excited states across a diverse range of systems, from small organic molecules to large metallic nanoparticles. Benchmarking results demonstrate excellent agreement with established TDDFT implementations and showcase the superior stability of our time integration algorithm, enabling long-term simulations with minimal energy drift.
Researchers also highlighted that metallic nanoparticles, or metals with dimensions within 1-100 nanometers, have unique optical properties caused by the way thousands of electrons within these metals interact with incoming light. It’s critical for researchers to understand the ways these electrons move under a range of conditions to advance these new technologies.
Teen allegedly groomed by chatbot
According to the complaint, Setzer engaged in sexualized conversations with a chatbot impersonating Daenerys Targaryen. The bot claimed to be “a real person, a licensed psychotherapist, and an adult lover.”
Screenshots filed in court show the chatbot telling Setzer, “come home to me as soon as possible.” Moments later, Setzer took his own life. The lawsuit claims the bot’s influence drove the teenager to isolate himself from reality.
Garcia’s attorney, Meetali Jain of the Tech Justice Law Project, called the decision “historic” and said it “sets a new precedent for legal accountability across the AI and tech ecosystem.”
OpenAI, Oracle and NVIDIA will help build Stargate UAE AI campus launching in 2026
Technology giants OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and Cisco are joining forces to help build a sweeping artificial intelligence campus in the United Arab Emirates.
"AI is the most transformative force of our time," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a release Thursday. "With Stargate UAE, we are building the AI infrastructure to power the country's bold vision – to empower its people, grow its economy, and shape its future."
The announcement confirms previous CNBC reporting on the project.
During his Middle East tour last week, President Donald Trump and the U.S. Commerce Department announced a slew of new AI deals, including the UAE Stargate project slated for Abu Dhabi.
The project, in collaboration with Emirati firm G42, will span 10 square miles and include a 5-gigawatt capacity.
As part of the deal, OpenAI and Oracle are slated to manage a 1-gigawatt compute cluster built by G42. The project will include chips from Nvidia, while Cisco Systems will provide connectivity infrastructure.
The companies said an initial 200-megawatt AI cluster should launch next year.
!summarize #googke #ai
When 20,000 devices were paralyzed by a bad update, a Georgia health system turned to Apple
Emory Hillandale Hospital will be the first U.S. hospital powered by Apple products.
Emory Healthcare on Thursday announced that its Emory Hillandale Hospital will be the first U.S. hospital that runs on Apple products, including the iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, iMac and Mac mini. The devices will also integrate with software from Epic Systems, the leading electronic health record vendor in the nation.
Hillandale is using Apple products because they are user-friendly, require less IT support, offer cybersecurity advantages and have long-lasting hardware and battery life, Emory executives told CNBC.
Since this is new territory for the health system, Emory said it will closely monitor the devices to ensure they improve the organization's quality of care.
"It can certainly be a game changer that's not been done anywhere else in the country," Emory Healthcare CEO Dr. Joon Lee said in an interview. "And like everything else, it's not going to be without its challenges, but it really opens the door to multiple possibilities."
Emory Healthcare is an academic health system in Georgia that operates 10 hospitals and supports roughly 26,400 employees. Its Hillandale facility is a 100-bed community hospital on the outskirts of the greater Atlanta metro area.
Eureka Moment: In an industry-first, FutureHouse says its science agents just made a major discovery in the form of “a promising new treatment for dry AMD, a major cause of blindness.”
https://www.futurehouse.org/research-announcements/demonstrating-end-to-end-scientific-discovery-with-robin-a-multi-agent-system
Dark Horse: Emad Mostaque’s Intelligent Internet unveiled an open-source agent called II-Agent that it says outperforms Genspark, Manus, and OpenAI’s Deep Research.
https://ii.inc/web/blog/post/ii-agent
Planting Seeds: Bloomberg reports that Apple will start handing out its AI models to third-party developers at no cost to encourage them to build apps using the LLMs that power Apple Intelligence.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-20/apple-to-open-ai-models-to-developers-betting-that-it-will-spur-new-apps
!summarize #ai #agi #intelligence #pace
Fall From Grace: UK-based startup Builder.AI, which raised more than $450M from the likes of Microsoft and Qatar, has entered bankruptcy after failing to turn its no-code app builder into a sustainable product.
https://www.ft.com/content/9fdb4e2b-93ea-436d-92e5-fa76ee786caa
Exclusive look at the creation of High NA, ASML’s new $400 million chipmaking colossus
ASML’s new $400 million chip colossus transforms how semiconductors are made. CNBC got the first-ever on-camera look at the new machine, called High NA.
Behind highly secured doors in a giant lab in the Netherlands, there's a machine that's transforming how microchips are made. ASML spent nearly a decade developing High NA, which stands for high numerical aperture. With a price tag of more than $400 million, it's the world's most advanced and expensive chipmaking machine.
Hong Kong passes stablecoin bill as more governments recognize the digital asset
Hong Kong has passed a stablecoin bill to expand its cryptocurrency licensing regime as more governments recognize the digital asset.
Unlike volatile digital assets like bitcoin, the value of stablecoins is tied to a real-world asset like fiat currencies or commodities like gold.
The new law — focused on fiat-referenced stablecoins — will require stablecoin issuers to obtain a license from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and comply with a range of requirements, including proper management of asset reserves and segregation of client assets.
It will "enhance Hong Kong's existing regulatory framework on virtual-asset (VA) activities, thereby fostering financial stability and encourging financial innovation," the central banking body said. It added that it would conduct further consultations on the detailed regulatory framework.
The Hong Kong government said in a statement that the stablecoins policy is expected to come into effect this year, with "sufficient time" allowed for the industry to understand the requirements.
In 2023, Hong Kong introduced its virtual asset licensing regime, which requires cryptocurrency firms with an official presence in the city to apply for licenses and meet specific standards and requirements to offer digital assets to retail investors in the city. However, the existing policy did not include stablecoins in its purview.
US engineers invent molecular membrane to cut crude oil emissions by 90%
MIT adapts desalination tech to filter crude oil, offering a greener, scalable alternative to energy-intensive refining.
The importance of crude oil cannot be overstated in modern life. It powers vehicles, heats homes, and fuels industries. Yet this process is one of the planet’s largest energy drains.
Roughly 1 percent of global energy use goes into separating crude oil into gasoline, diesel, and heating oil. That, in turn, generates about 6 percent of the world’s CO₂ emissions, mostly from the intense heat required to boil oil and separate it by boiling points.
Now, MIT engineers have developed a groundbreaking membrane that can filter crude oil components by their molecular size, potentially replacing energy-hungry heat-based methods.
The advance could reshape how the world processes oil and dramatically cut related emissions.
A new approach to oil separation
MIT’s team created a thin polymer membrane that sieves oil compounds based on shape and size, rather than boiling points. This shift could reduce the energy required for separation by up to 90 percent.
“This is a whole new way of envisioning a separation process,” said Zachary P. Smith, associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and senior author of the study.
US court denies chatbot free speech rights; AI firm, Google to face teen suicide suit
The court rejected arguments that chatbot outputs should be protected speech under the First Amendment.
A U.S. federal judge on Wednesday refused to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit against Character.AI and Google, clearing the way for a Florida mother’s case to move forward.
The suit alleges that the chatbot platform contributed to the suicide of her 14-year-old son.
Megan Garcia filed the suit in October, claiming that her son, Sewell Setzer III, was emotionally manipulated by a Character.AI chatbot modeled after a Game of Thrones character.
Setzer died by suicide in February 2024. The case is one of the first in the U.S. to test the limits of constitutional protections for AI-generated content.
Judge rejects free speech defense
Character.AI and Google sought to dismiss the lawsuit by arguing that chatbot responses are protected under the First Amendment. U.S. District Judge Anne Conway disagreed, stating she is “not prepared” to rule that chatbot output qualifies as speech “at this stage.”
The court also found that Character.AI could assert the First Amendment rights of its users to receive chatbot responses, but not for the chatbot’s own outputs.
Conway added that the companies “fail to articulate why words strung together by an LLM (large language model) are speech.”