New World Same Humans David Mattin

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮
For this week’s instalment, I’m doing something different.
A few days ago I recorded a video update to share some thoughts on OpenAI’s new GPT-4o and the state of AI.
It went first to Exponentialist subscribers. But I want to share it with you all, too.
In the video I get into:
* Why GPT-4o is OpenAI’s play for billions of users, and for a virtual companion that weaves itself through the fabric of everyday life
* Where we are inside the amazing AI moment we’re living through, and what’s coming next, including a path to AGI
* How this all connects to the Great Enweirdening of the economy that I believe is coming
There’s so much happening with AI right now; I hope this provides some useful framing. And if it proves popular, I’ll do more video updates in future.
By the way, there’s still time to grab a six day trial to The Exponentialist for just $1.
Thanks for watching, and be well,
David.


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Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮
To Begin
This week brings news from Boston Dynamics and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The message common to both stories? The humanoid robots are coming.
Meanwhile, the internet reacts to Apple’s new Vision Pro headset.
And the FCC take action against a California company that used AI to create fake phone calls from President Biden.
Let’s go!
🤖 Robots are go
This week, yet further signs that the robots will soon walk among us. I mean, all of us.
The Boston Dynamics humanoid, Atlas, has been a regular in this newsletter over the years. Recently it has been overshadowed by competitors, including the Digit humanoid by Agility Robotics and Tesla’s Optimus.
But this week Boston Dynamics released a video that shows Atlas picking up automotive struts and placing them in a flow cart.
The team say Atlas is using onboard sensors and object recognition to perform the task. The footage is short. But it marks a significant advance for Atlas, because previous videos have shown the robot doing elaborate dances rather than useful work, and those dances have been pre-programmed rather than autonomous.
Meanwhile, in Beijing a research team at the Institute of Automation in the Chinese Academy of Sciences this week debuted their Q Family of humanoid robots.
The research team have reportedly built a ‘big factory’ for the design and manufacture of Q Family humanoids.
Back in New Week #124 we saw how the CCP has ordered ‘domestic mass production’ of humanoids’ to fuel economic growth. Remember, this is the underlying demographic reality that has China dashing towards robots.
⚡ NWSH Take: In last month’s Lookout to 2024 I said this would be the year of the humanoid. We closed out 2023 with the announcement that the Digit humanoid had started a trial inside US Amazon fulfilment centres. Days after I published the Lookout, BMW announced a trial of Digit in its California manufacturing plant. Now, the Boston Dynamics team are clearly eyeing commercial applications, too. Their Atlas robot has so far remained a research project; the question they’ll have to answer if they want to change that is whether Atlas can match Digit and Tesla’s Optimus for autonomous capability. // The graph above tells the underlying socio-economic story here. Both the CCP and innovators in the Global North know that working age populations are falling. If economic growth isn’t to become a distant memory, we need new armies of autonomous workers. AI applications can handle some of our knowledge work. But we’ll need humanoids to do some of the physical work that currently only people can do. The CCP see this as an existential imperative; they know they must maintain GDP growth. For innovators in the US and beyond, it’s an epic opportunity.
👀 Having visions
No one could have missed the launch of the Apple Vision Pro a few days ago.
Years from now, this instantly iconic magazine cover will no doubt spark intense nostalgia for the simpler times that were 2024:
It took about ten minutes for someone to try out their new Vision Pro while using Full Self Drive in their Tesla:
This was later revealed to be (surprise!) a skit for YouTube. Still, it delivered useful findings; the man in the picture, Dante Lentini, says the Vision Pro doesn’t really work inside a moving car because it can’t properly display visuals over a fast-moving landscape.
⚡ NWSH Take: After the frenetic metaverse hype of 2021, many will shrug at the launch of the Vision Pro. But something real, and powerful, is happening here. The internet is going to become part of the world around us. In the end, this is about the deep merging of information and physical reality, of bits and atoms, that I wrote about in the essay

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮
To Begin
One week until the Christmas break: where did 2023 go?
This week, DeepMind serve up proof that a large language model can create new knowledge.
Also, more news from the accelerating story that is the march of the humanoid robots. It’s clear next year will be a pivotal one for this technology.
And researchers hook up brain organoids to microchips to create a new kind of speech recognition system.
Let’s get into it!
🧮 Fun times at DeepMind
This week, yet another step forward in the epic journey we’ve taken with AI in 2023.
Researchers at Google DeepMind used a large language model (LLM) to create authentically new mathematical knowledge. Their new FunSearch system — so called because it searches through mathematical functions — wrote code that solved a famous geometrical puzzle called the cap set problem.
The researchers used an LLM called Codey, based on Google’s PaLM 2, which can generate code intended to solve a given maths problem. They tied Codey to an algorithm that evaluates its proposed solutions, and feeds the best ones back to iterate upon.
They established the cap set problem using the Python coding language, leaving blank spaces for the code that would express a solution. After a couple of million tries — and a few days — the mission was complete. FunSearch produced code that solved this geometrical problem, which mathematicians have been puzzling over since the early 1970s.
DeepMind say it’s the first time an AI has produced verifiable and authentically new information to solve a longstanding scientific problem.
‘To be honest with you,’ said Alhussein Fawzi, one of the DeepMind researchers behind the project, ‘we have hypotheses, but we don’t know exactly why this works.’
⚡ NWSH Take: For pure mathematicians, a solution to the cap set problem is a big deal. For the rest of us, not so much. But this result really matters, because it resolves a central and much-discussed question about LLMs: can they create new knowledge? // Until this week, many believed LLMs would never do this — they they’d only ever be able to synthesise and remix knowledge that already existed in their training data. But there was no solution to this problem in the data used to train Codey; instead, it created novel and true information all of its own making. This points a future in which LLMs solve problems in, for example, statistics and engineering, or can create new and viable scientific theories. // In other words, this little and somewhat nerdish research paper heralds a revolution. So far, only we humans have been able to push back the frontiers of what we know. It’s now clear that in 2024, we’ll have a partner in that enterprise. // For this reason and so many others, I’m increasingly convinced that an unprecedented socio-technological acceleration is coming. It’s been a wild year; things are about to get even wilder.
🤖 Like a human
A quick glimpse of two stories this week. Both point in one direction: the humanoids are coming.
Tesla released a new video of its humanoid robot, Optimus. The Generation 2 Optimus can do some pretty fancy stuff, including delicately handling an egg:
Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Tokyo hooked a robot up to GPT-4.
The Alter3 robot is able to understand spoken instructions and adopt a range of poses without those poses being pre-programmed into its database.
In other words, Alter3 is responding in real-time to natural spoken language; it’s an embodied version of GPT-4, best understood as a kind of text-to-motion model.
⚡ NWSH Take: The closing months of 2023 have brought a welter of humanoid robot news. Amazon are now trialling the Digit humanoid in some US fulfilment centres. T

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮
To Begin
It’s a bumper instalment this week; what do we have in store?
Google DeepMind owned this week’s tech headlines with the release of Gemini, a new multi-modal AI intended to outdo GPT-4.
Meanwhile, Harvard researchers have created tiny biological robots that can heal human tissue.
And the world’s largest nuclear fusion reactor is now online in Japan.
Let’s go!
Gemini has liftoff
This week, major news out of Google’s DeepMind AI division.
The DeepMind team announced Gemini, a multi-modal LLM that looks to have pushed back the frontiers when it comes to these kinds of AI models.
Launch videos suggest Gemini can speak in real-time (though as I go to press doubts about that are being raised; more below). It understands text and image inputs, and can combine them in novel ways. Here it is giving ideas for toys to make out of blue and pink wool:
It can write code to a competition standard. In tests it outperformed 85% of the human competitors it was compared against; that means it’s excellent even when compared to some of the best coders on the planet.
Gemini can even perform sophisticated verbal and spatial reasoning, and handle complex mathematics. Imagine if you’d had this to help with your homework:
This is significant; OpenAI’s GPT-4 is notoriously bad at maths and logic puzzles.
And Google are, of course, taking direct aim at OpenAI with this launch. Gemini comes in three variants: Ultra, Pro, and Nano. US users can access the Pro version now via Bard, and the Ultra model will soon be made available to enterprise clients.
⚡ NWSH Take: It will take time to independently verify the claims DeepMind are making; there are some murmurs that their launch videos overstate Gemini’s competence. Still, there’s no denying this model looks impressive. // Scratch the surface, meanwhile, and we can discern some underlying signals about the future development of LLMs. This AI outperforms GPT-3.5 when it comes to linguistic tasks such as copy drafting. But it’s the multi-modal nature of Gemini that’s really significant; in particular, its ability to reason. LLMs are trained to do next word prediction; that means they’re brilliant at sounding right. But they lack any underlying ability to know whether what they’re saying is right, or even makes sense. Gemini seems to address this shortcoming. The promise of an LLM that can act as a true reasoning partner is exciting, should haunt the dreams of all at OpenAI. // OpenAI’s reported work on the still-mysterious Q* algorithm is also believed to be about reasoning. All this suggests we’re hitting the limits of the performance improvements to be gained simply by training LLMs on even larger data sets. Instead, the future belongs to those who can weave multiple models together. // Finally, a word for Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai: kudos. Alphabet AI engineers invented the transformer model; then the company went missing. Gemini puts Alphabet firmly back in the race. And given the recent fiasco at OpenAI, Pichai this week looks like a man playing a canny long game. It’s going to be a fascinating 2024.
🤖 Anthrobots are go
Two stories this week signal powerful new avenues of discovery for the life sciences.
Scientists at Harvard and Tuft’s University have created tiny biological robots, called anthrobots, made out of human cells. In tests, the anthrobots were left in a small dish along with some damaged neural tissue. Scientists watched as the bots clumped together to form a superbot, which then repaired the damaged neurons.
Each anthrobot is made by taking a single cell from the human trachea. Those cells are covered in tiny hairs called cilia. The cell is then grown in a lab, and becomes a multi-cell en

Welcome to this update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮
To Begin
This week, more AI magic rains from the sky.
Also, average temperatures on planet Earth exceed the 2C warming threshold for the first time.
And my take on the OpenAI fiasco. In the end, it’s about power.
Let’s get into it.
✨ Like magic
This week, further glimpses of the ongoing collision between human creativity and machine intelligence.
Stable Diffusion released Stable Video Diffusion, a new text-to-video model that looks to be a step beyond anything we’ve seen so far.
In keeping with the company’s open source mission, the code for the model is available at its GitHub repository.
Meanwhile, X users went wild for a new tool, Screenshot to Code, that leverages GPT-4 and DALLE 2 to take a screenshot of any web page and automatically write the code that will render it:
And Elon Musk announced that X’s new on-platform large language model, Grok, will launch to all Premium users next week:
Grok is trained on a vast dataset of X posts; it’s sure to be expert in writing posts with a great chance of going viral. What’s more, it will have access to X posts in real-time; that could make for a whole new way to discover and interact with news stories.
⚡ NWSH Take: This gallery of the week’s AI wonders could go on far longer. I didn’t mention the new voice-to-voice model from UK-based Eleven Labs, for example: just upload your own voice and hear it converted to that of a famous celebrity, or a custom character that you create. // What’s the broader point here? A couple of weeks ago I shared an excerpt from a long AI essay called Electricity and Magic. That essay argues for a two-sided model of machine intelligence and its manifestations in the coming decades. First, machine intelligence is becoming something foundational — akin to a form of fuel that will power an army of autonomous vehicles, robots, and more. But in our daily life AI will manifest differently; not as fuel, but as magic. The innovations above give a glimpse of what I’m talking about. AI is moving into domains — from music, to film-making, to writing — once believed to be impervious to encroachment by automation. It’s as though someone has waved a magic wand over our machines. // The crucial point to understand, though, when it comes to AI magic? The result won’t be, as many people imagine, the devaluation of human creativity. Instead, amid a tsunami of machine-generated outputs, what is uniquely human — including creative work grounded in embodied experience — will only become more prized.
🌊 Crossing over
Another significant, and unwelcome, climate milestone was passed in the last seven days.
According to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Services (CS3), Friday 17 November was the first day on which average global temperatures were more than 2C above pre-industrial levels.
Data for 17 November indicated that global surface air temperatures were 2.07C above those in 1850. Provisional data for the following day indicated a 2.06C elevation.
This doesn’t mean that the much-discussed 2C threshold has been crossed. For that, we’d need to see a sustained elevation above 2C.
CS3 is part of the EU’s Copernicus Earth Observation Programme, which draws on vast amounts of satellite and other data to track the changing planetary environment.
⚡ NWSH Take: It’s expected that we’ll see occasional 2C+ days well before we exceed the 2C limit as commonly defined. Still, this week saw both the first ever and the second day that global average temperatures tipped over the threshold. It’s pretty clear where we’re heading. // This news comes on the eve of the UN COP28 summit in Dubai, which starts on 30 November. Many view last year’s summit, held in Egypt, as the moment

Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and haven’t yet subscribed, join 25,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better future 🚀🔮
To Begin
This week, Microsoft and Nvidia go head to head with new chips intended to train the next generation of AI models. And a clever hoax underlines a powerful truth when it comes to the war for compute power.
Meanwhile, a viral tweet about viral TikToks engenders another viral tweet. The lesson here? We’re living in a deeply enweirdened informational environment.
And in a world first, the UK approves a CRISPR-fuelled medicine.
Let’s go!
👾 Compute wars
This week, a glimpse of an emerging power struggle set to help shape the decades ahead. This isn’t a battle for land or natural resources. I’m talking about the struggle for compute power.
Microsoft announced their first and long-awaited custom AI chips, the Azure Maia AI chip and Cobalt CPU. Set to arrive in 2024, the chips will power Microsoft’s Azure data centres, and are intended to train the next generation of large language models (LLMs).
And Nvidia launched its new H200 AI chip, the successor to the H100. The iconic H100 is the fuel that’s driven this AI moment; huge clusters, consisting of tens of thousands of H100s, were used to train pretty much every large AI model you can name, including GPT-4.
Meanwhile, something quite different. A mysterious company called Del Complex announced the BlueSea Frontier Compute Cluster: a massive offshore data centre intended to circumvent the new the US Executive Order that says organisations training the most powerful new AI models must share information with government.
Del Complex calls BlueSea Frontier ‘a new sovereign nation state’. The announcement post achieved 2.5 million views, and was accompanied by a fancy website featuring images of BlueSea scientists at work. Tech blogs reported on the launch.
But wait; it is all a hoax! BlueSea Frontier is a comment on the These Strange Times by an artist and developer called (or so he claims) Sterling Crispin.
But I think Crispin may be onto something.
⚡ NWSH Take: The Del Complex hoax was a great bit of online trickery. But it was so convincing because it taps into a deep underlying truth. Compute is becoming a crucial nexus for techno-economic, sovereign, and geopolitical power. // The tech battle taking shape here is just one dimension of a broader story. Microsoft need to supply huge compute resources to their partner OpenAI to allow it to fully commercialise ChatGPT and train the upcoming GPT-5. So far, their data centres have been dependent on Nvidia AI chips. The new Maia AI and Cobalt CPU chips are intended to change that. // The broader story? It’s now clear that those nation states with the best machine intelligence will own the geopolitical future. The USA and China are now locked in a race to develop the vast compute needed to develop ultra-powerful next-generation models. Last year’s US CHIPS Act devotes $280 billion to semiconductor and AI research; inflation adjusted that’s more than the cost of the entire Apollo moon programme. And last week I wrote about new US restrictions on chip exports, intended to hamper China’s AI efforts. // It wouldn’t surprise me, then, if we do see the establishment of new offshore compute clusters, or even the development of new pseudo-sovereign entities based around compute power and AI. As with all the best satire, Del Complex’s vision is so wild it might just come true.
🔍 Can’t handle the truth
Also this week, another reminder of the hall of mirrors that is our new and connected media environment.
US journalist and X (formerly Twitter) personality Yashar Ali went viral with a tweet about TikTok. Ali claimed that across the previous 24 hours, many thousands of TikToks had been posted in which mostly young north Americans claimed to have