Daily Archives: February 13, 2024

Whoop-dee-do. Ad Nauseam

The Super Bowl is almost upon us, and you know what that means: it's time to mock, jeer, and clap like seals at stupidly expensive commercials.

This year, Microsoft, no stranger to the occasion but off a several year hiatus, has stepped up to the plate with an ad for its chatbot called Copilot. It's intended to replace the Bing search assistant as the tech giant's flagship AI product, but the ad doesn't make a particularly convincing case for itself.

We'll get to our gripes in a moment, but here's what you need to know: Copilot is targeted at what the industry likes to label 'creators,' and more specifically, anyone that uses Microsoft's Office suite. It offers them what Microsoft has billed as an "AI companion" to help creators out with their projects a chatbot, image generator, and a coder all rolled into one. All the kind of stuff that will have AI bros chomping at the bit.

Now anyone with the Copilot app which is available on pretty much every platform can load up the AI and ask it to do stuff like, as shown in the ad, "Write code for my 3D open world game," or "Generate storyboard images for the dragon scene in my script." Y'know, things that motivated, creative people do.

And with all that riding on Copilot, we have to say: the ad kind of stinks. What you get is an uninspired montage of young people walking through city streets and gazing out windows, solemn and unmotivated until one activates Microsoft's AI gizmo, and then they're suddenly galvanized out of their creative drought, churning out code and bad dragon art to the anthemic chorus of a stomp-clapping pop song.

Yeah, it's generic ad stuff not the kind of head turning things you'd expect from a Super Bowl commercial, not particularly sad or dramatic or funny, the three modes that these ads tend to operate in.

So if this is Microsoft's way of making a statement, it's not much of one.

But here's another way it's trying to get people to try its product: Microsoft's keyboards will soon come with a built-in AI key to summon Copilot, a clever if not incredibly annoying method of ensuring everyone in its ecosystem knows they have the chatbot at their fingertips.

It's worth noting that this moment also marks a pretty big turning point for Microsoft's arch-nemesis Google, which is also rebranding its suite of AI products to stay ahead of the competition after fielding a forgettable chatbot of its own. And hey: may the best ad-maker win.

More on Microsoft: Google Renames Its Forgettable AI in Fight to Stay Relevant

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Microsoft's Super Bowl AI Ad Will Get Dumbest People You Know Absolutely Hyped - Futurism

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Since the human genome was first sequenced, popular science has dictated that genes act as a blueprint for life but the reality, experts are now arguing, is much more complex and beautiful.

In a new book titled "How Life Works: A Users Guide to the New Biology," British science writer and author Phillip Ball writes that the modern conception of genes as hard-and-fast cogs in the machine of life doesn't at all jive with what geneticists have learned in the intervening years: that life is a messy mystery, and the genetics encoding it are its enigmatic and chaotic instruments.

In a review of the bookpublished by the journalNature, where Ball happens to be a longtime editor, decorated British biologist Denis Noble quoted his fellow science writer as saying that the concept of life as a machine is a "lazy metaphor."

Instead, as both writers assert, there's a lot of "fuzziness and imprecision" in the way genes work. Scientists now believe, for instance, that up to 70 percent of protein domains, or the strings of amino acids on the ladder steps of DNA, could be disordered, omeaning theyact in diverse and surprising ways that often stump even expert scientists.

That disordering makes proteins "versatile communicators," Ball insists but also makes them complicated to pin down in the black-and-whitethinking of genetics as a "blueprint" for life.

In one telling example, Noble noted that there are nearly 300 genes indicating a risk for schizophrenia, which throws water in the face of a simplistic conception of genetic risk for mental illness. Enter the old nature versus nurture argument, but with a twist: everything from maternal dietto whether a given person lives in an area with significant pollution as environmental risk factors for the disorder, and you start to see that gene expression has no hard and fast switch.

Perceptions of biology don't need to be radically shifted, both Ball and Noble contend. Rather, scientists need to help the public understand that genes are not simply one thing or another, but ever-changing parts of what makes life so fascinating.

Ultimately, as Noble quotes Ball, "we are at the beginning of a profound rethinking of how life works."

More on changing perceptions:23andMe Has Lost Billions, Almost Worthless Now

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Genes Aren't Actually the Blueprint of Life, Experts Say - Futurism

A 42-year-old Tesla driver, who at first denied having killed a woman with his Tesla in a hit-and-run, is now claiming that he can't remember if he ran her down or not. If he did, he says, he must've been on Autopilot and "checking work emails" while doing so.

It's a bizarre defense strategy that highlights the many glaring gaps in the legal frameworks when it comes to driver assistance software and how these features, despite their considerable limitations, are being used to avoid blame.

As Minnesota newspaper the Star Tribune reports, a late January affidavit revealed that the driver's cellphone was near Lake Mille Lacs, north of Minneapolis, when a car fatally struck 56-year-old Cathy Ann Donovan, who was walking her dog along a nearby highway in November, before fleeing the scene.

The case against the Tesla driver, who initially denied having hit her, has only been building since then. For one, police found a windshield wiper near her body, and surveillance footage of a gray 2022 Tesla Model X lined up with his cellphone records. Investigators also found light damage to the front passenger side of the vehicle and have since collected hair samples from three locations, per the report.

"I think for sure we've established probable cause," local county sheriff Kyle Burton told the Star Tribune.

It's important to note that charges have not been filed yet. The Tesla driver's attorney David Risk, however, is already resorting to a bizarre line of argument.

"My client voluntarily spoke to investigators, and he explained it is probable his car would've been using Tesla's full self-driving capability," he told the newspaper, referring to the EV maker's infamous driver assistance add-on. "He will continue to fully cooperate with this investigation until its completion."

According to court filings, the driver "maintained that he doesn't remember hitting Cathy Donovan with his Tesla, but if he did, he would have been alone in his Tesla driving on 'Autopilot,' not paying attention to the road, while doing things like checking work emails."

Who doesn't remember fatally striking a person on the side of a highway? It's a baffling defense that underlines the strangeness of driver-assist features in the real world.

Despite the Elon Musk-led company's misleading marketing, Tesla vehicles are still far from being able to drive themselves, and drivers must be "ready to take immediate action including braking," as the company points out on its website.

The carmaker is already being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration following a series of accidents in which Teslas have smashed into emergency response vehicles that were pulled over with sirens or flares.

The number of known deaths involving Tesla's Autopilot has also surged, with the regulator's June analysis revealing that there have been at least 736 crashes in the US that involved the EV maker's controversial driver assistance feature since 2019, at least 17 of which were fatal.

More on Tesla: Tesla Is Officially the Worst-Performing S&P 500 Stock of the Year

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Tesla Driver Says He's Not Sure If He Killed a Pedestrian Because He Was on Autopilot - Futurism

Bard is dead. Enter: Gemini. Island of Lost Bots

Google's AI chatbot, Bard, has officially been sent upstate, to the Big Tech sunsetted product farm.

Just a few short months after rival OpenAI's ChatGPT was released into public hands reportedly prompting a "code red" to be issued within a nonplussed Google Bard launched in early 2023.

The two competing chatbots are effectively the same thing. But while they might be comparable in ability, ChatGPT handily has more name recognition among the public than Bard ever did. Now, less than a year after Bard's release, Google appears determined to change that.

As of today, Google has rebranded its AI product suite Bard included under one name: Gemini, the name of the advanced large language model (LLM) that powers the search giant's generative AI ambitions.

"Our mission with Bard has always been to give you direct access to our AI models, and Gemini represents our most capable family of models," Google Vice President and Gemini general manager Sissie Hsiao stated in a company blog post, published earlier today. "To reflect this, Bard will now simply be known as Gemini."

In addition to the name alteration, Google made another big and directly competitive change to Bard: it introduced a payment tier. Users can now cough up $19.99 each month to access "Gemini Advanced," a version of the chatbot powered by Ultra 1.0, described by Google in a blog postas the "largest and most capable" Gemini model. If that sounds familiar, it's because OpenAI offers a similar, $20-per-month payment tier granting customers access to OpenAI's most advanced LLM, GPT-4.

Another notable change amid the brand overhaul: Google's decision to absorb "Duet AI" a workplace AI assistantdesigned to compete with Microsoft's impressive AI "Copilot" tool under the Gemini umbrella. Setting aside the fact that Gemini also happens to be the name of the Winklevii Twins' embattled crypto trading platform, rebranding everything under Gemini feels like a smart move. As The Verge points out, Google has a notorious habit of giving its products extremely confusing names. If it hopes to streamline its AI tools to encourage public adoption and brand awareness, a sleek catch-all invoking the powerful underlying AI model is a far better strategy.

Even so,it's painfully apparent that Google is still playing catch-up maybe not on the technological side, but certainly in cultural cachet. And that's something requiringa littlemore than a rebrand to fix.

More on Google AI: AI Search Engine Bungles Facts When Profiled by The New York Times

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Google Renames Its Forgettable AI in Fight to Stay Relevant - Futurism

Tenacious D

Colorado-based space company Sierra Space showed off its Dream Chaser spaceplane, stacked on top of its cargo module, at NASA's Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, last week.

The design of the spacecraft, a private space plane that's set to visit the International Space Station for the first time later this year, is vaguely reminiscent of NASA's Space Shuttle, albeit with plenty of rounded edges and sleek, aerodynamic wings that look straight out of a "Star Wars" movie.

The vehicle, dubbed "Tenacity," stands 55 feet tall on top of its cargo module, and is meant to launch vertically on top of the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket, which carried Astrobotic's perished lunar lander into orbit during its maiden voyage earlier this year.

Upon its return and blistering reentry through the Earth's atmosphere, the vehicle can glide through the air using its wings to safely return cargo and eventually crew members as an alternative to parachutes and ocean landings.

If all goes according to plan, Tenacity will make its maiden voyage to the ISS without any crew on board as part of a demonstration mission in the first half of this year.

Before then, both it and its cargo module will be put through the wringer at the testing facility to ensure that the vehicles can survive the extreme environments of outer space.

"All the testing we've done over the last six years as well developmental testing, all the autonomy and aerodynamics the remaining testing is the environmental testing of what the vehicle will see on the launch pad during the Vulcan ride up," Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice told reporters during the event last week, as quoted by Space.com.

"The testing is associated with replicating the environment of space, the vacuum of space; that's going to be done in the thermal vac chamber," he added.

NASA's commercial crew partnerships have already resulted in the successful deployment of SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft, which has completed seven operational crew missions to the space station to date. The company's Dragon spacecraft has also completed 29 uncrewed missions to the orbital lab.

In other words, Sierra Space has some steep competition when it comes to ferrying cargo and astronauts into the Earth's orbit.

More on Sierra Space: Dream Chaser Spaceplane Ready for NASA Tests

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Sierra Space Reveals "Star Wars"-Looking New Spaceship - Futurism

"My working hypothesis is that this was an ancient ocean world." Water World

Ever since NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully dropped off samples taken from the asteroid Bennu in September, scientists have been poring over results from the precious cargo, the largest cache of its kind ever returned to Earth.

Preliminary results released in October suggested the samples contained both carbon and water, the "building blocks of life on Earth," as NASA put it in atriumphant announcement at the time.

Now, the team lead behind the groundbreaking mission is willing to go even further, suggesting the possibility that Bennu was once part of a water-rich planet or pseudoplanet billions of years ago.

"My working hypothesis is that this was an ancient ocean world," principal investigator Dante Lauretta,a planetary science professor at the University of Arizona, told New Scientist.

The OSIRIS-REx mission has been a resounding success, with Lauretta revealing that the probe brought back almost twice the amount of samples than the 60 grams NASA initially aimed for.

Lauretta is basing his latest hypothesis on still-unpublished results of a recent analysis. He claims the thin and bright crust of Bennu's otherwise dark rock is made of a rare calcium and magnesium-rich phosphate, the same material that's been found to shoot from the vents on the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus, a moon that's widely believed to be an ocean world with a vast reservoir of liquid water beneath a thick shell of ice.

Lauretta thinks Bennu may have been part a similar space rock, albeit only half the size. And other experts seem to be tentatively agreeing with that conclusion.

"There are indeed similarities between the mineralogy of Bennu and what has been found on Enceladus," University of Washington postdoctoral researcher Fabian Klenner told New Scientist.

More on Bennu: NASA Finally Rips Lid Off Stubborn Asteroid Sample

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Sample From Distant Asteroid Shows Signs of Originating on Ocean World - Futurism

"I remember wondering, as sweat poured down Mark Zuckerberg's pasty and rounded face, if he was going to keel over right there at my feet." Back in the Day

Before channeling his anxiety into martial artsand doomsday prepping, Meta-formerly-Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was a panicked, sweaty mess and at least one of his employees tried to warn a reporter about it.

In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, as published byNew York Magazine, veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher recounted many of her favorite anecdotes and encounters throughout her decades-long career.

One such story involved her now-infamous 2010 interview with a visibly sweaty and much younger Zuckerberg, who apparently was the subject of a discussion she had with a Facebook executive years prior.

"'He has panic attacks when he's doing public speaking,' one Facebook executive had warned me years before," the writer explained. "'He could faint.'"

Indeed, as Swisher described the notorious interview, she was fairly concerned about the young man's well-being.

"I remember," Swisher wrote, "wondering, as sweat poured down Mark Zuckerberg's pasty and rounded face, if he was going to keel over right there at my feet."

Filmed at the All Things Digital conference hosted by the publication of the same name that Swisher founded, Zuckerberg is clearly uncomfortable being grilled about privacy. At one point, Swisher even asks him if he wants to take off his hoodie in a clear effort to help him cool and calm down.

"No," Zuckerberg responded, "I never take off the hoodie."

In the years after that ignominious exchange, Zuckerberg was, as theNew York Times reported back in 2018, given literal charm lessons to help him appear less anxious on camera but that doesn't mean that energy has disappeared.

Instead, the CEO has throughout the years invested in all sorts of increasingly-expensive coping mechanisms. In 2019, for instance,Business Insider revealed in a deep dive into Facebook's intensive security practices that Zuckerberg not only had guards posing as security guards but also was said to have a "panic chute" built to help him escape from his company's headquarters if need be.

At some point in the past five years or so, Zuckerberg began channeling his uneasiness in a different direction: by getting super into mixed martial arts and other extreme sports, which a different group of executives warned recently could lead to his untimely demise.

Nevertheless, some of that old paranoid Zuck remains, as evidenced by what is perhaps the ultimate testament to the man's anxiety: his $100 million doomsday bunker on Kauai that lives on the grounds of his top-secret island compound that has its own luxury food sources.

More money, as the old saying goes, brings more problems but it also brings more, uh, extreme solutions for anxiety, apparently.

More on Zuckerberg:Mark Zuckerberg Still Bleeding Money on Metaverse

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Facebook Exec Warned Zuckerberg Might Have Panic Attack and Faint - Futurism

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A rival to trendy weight loss drug semaglutide has been shown to drastically improve blood pressure after 36 weeks of taking the medication, according to a new study published in the journal Hypertension.

The active ingredient is called tirzepatide, developed by the big pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, which the Federal Drug Administration approved a few months ago for weight loss under the brand name Zepbound. Tirzepatide already has approval as a Type 2 diabetes medication under the name Mounjaro.

For the study, an international team of scientists sponsored by Eli Lilly looked at the blood pressure of 494 patients at the start of the study and then measured their blood pressure at the 36-week mark,with readings done throughout a 24-hour period for more granular data.

Of the cohort, 155 received a placebo while the rest got tirzepatide at varying amounts of 5, 10 or 15 milligrams dosage.

The results at the end of the study were significant. Participants on tirzepatide experienced a reduction in systolic blood pressure that's the first number in a blood pressure reading, which gauges the pressure inside arteries during a heartbeat of anywhere between 7.4 to 10.6 millimeters lower versus being in the placebo group.

Results were more mixed for the bottom number, diastolic blood pressure, which measures pressure between heart beats. It showed a smaller decrease -- except at the highest dose of tirzepatide, which was associated with a small increase.

Doctors have long focused on the systolic number because a higher reading of the systolic is correlated with increased stroke and heart disease.

Whether the lowered blood pressure was directly caused by the tirzepatide or a side effect of the weight loss it caused is an open question.

"One could also hypothesize that weight loss permitted more exercise or improved sleep/reduced sleep apnea, any of which could additionally lower blood pressure," said University of California, Los Angeles doctor and cardiac researcher Benjamin Ansell,who wasn't involved in the research, told The New York Times.

Regardless, Eli Lilly may look at this study as a feather in its cap as it tries to take on rival Novo Nordisk, which makes semaglutide and markets it under Ozempic for diabetes management and Wegovy for weight loss.

Big money is riding on these studies because Novo Nordisk is now the most valuable company in Europe due to the popularity of semaglutide as well as substantial public health benefits, if research keeps showing positive health outcomes to the new drugs.

More on weight loss drugs: The Pharma Company Making Ozempic Is Worth Five Times What OpenAI Is

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Mounjaro Patients Show Hugely Improved Blood Pressure - Futurism

Over the weekend, multi-hyphenate entrepreneur Elon Musk made an unusual appearance on the Los Angeles red carpet for the premiere of "Lola," a small indie flick co-directed by American actress Nicola Peltz.

Pictures show the mercurial CEO posing for pictures next to Peltz and her father Nelson Peltz.

The bizarre cameo by the second richest man in the world at the premiere of a tiny movie that barely anybody's ever heard of left plenty of questions unanswered. Doesn't Musk have more important matters to attend to? Why this movie in particular?

While we don't have any definitive answers, there's a good chance the billionaire was trying to cozy up to Peltz's father, an activist investor who's taken direct aim at Disney CEO Bob Iger who also happens to be one of Musk's biggest enemies lately.

When asked by a FabTV reporter on the red carpet why he was attending the event, Musk had an intriguing answer.

"Im just here with friends... Thinking about what companies to acquire," he answered, quickly walking away from the reporter while audibly chuckling to himself.

To be clear, Musk stopped far short of announcing that he was about to buy Disney but given his recent fight with Iger and Peltz's position on the matter, it's not exactly a stretch to conclude he was making a veiled reference to the international media conglomerate.

Before we go on, let's unpack Musk's ongoing fight with Disney's leadership.

After Musk made some brash antisemitic remarks late last year on his social media echo chamber X last year, even more advertisers including Disney fled for the hills.

During the subsequent New York TimesDealBook Summit, Musk made his position on the matter clear, literally telling X advertisers to go "fuck" themselves.

At the time, he singled out Iger as well: "Hey Bob, if youre in the audience," he added.

In December, Musk escalated his personal attack, arguing in a tweet that Iger "should be fired immediately," in reply to a tweet alleging that sex exploitation material on Meta was "sponsored" by Disney.

His hatred for Iger is shared with Peltz, who has attempted to shake up Disney's board with his hedge fund Trian Partners. In December, he proposed himself and former Disney CFO Jay Rasulo as director candidates to replace two current board members.

Blackwells chief investment officer Jason Aintabi, who's currently working on his own Disney board coup, accused Peltz of focusing "his efforts on soliciting endorsements from Elon Musk who doesnt own a single Disney share, and is aggrieved at Disney for withholding advertising dollars from his struggling social media platform," in a letter to shareholders, as quoted by Variety.

Aintabi may have a point. Musk is seemingly throwing his weight behind Peltz and his hedge fund, which could help explain his mystifying appearance at the premiere over the weekend.

In a mid-January response to a tweet by the account for Restore the Magic, a Trian-backed lobbying effort, Musk doubled down.

"Brutal track record," he wrote, two days after Disney formally rejected Trian's nomination for Peltz and Rasulo. "Shareholders have been incredibly poorly served by the Disney board!"

Per Variety, Trian controls roughly $3 billion worth of Disney shares, the majority of which is owned by former Marvel chief Ike Perlmutter, who also has a vendetta against Iger.

Just this week, days following Musk's red carpet appearance, Disney released a perplexing animated video, talking duck and all, in which the company encouraged shareholders to reject Peltz's attempts to take over the company.

Outside of Peltz's coup, Musk recently announced he's footing the legal bills for a complaint recently filed by former "The Mandalorian" star Gina Carano, who's accusing Disney of discrimination and wrongful termination.

In her complaint, Carano alleged she was let go back in 2021 because of voicing her right-wing beliefs. Disney fired her after she made troubling comments about trans people and compared being a Republican to being Jewish during the Holocaust.

That's strikingly similar to bizarre comments Musk recently made. Following his antisemitic antics last year, the billionaire has flown to Israel and attended an event near the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, during which he argued that the Holocaust wouldn't have happened if social media was around.

His support for Carano is part of Musk's broader crusade against the media conglomerate.

"Please let us know if you would like to join the lawsuit against Disney," he tweeted on Tuesday.

But could Musk really be serious about making moves to acquire the company? Realistically, it seems incredibly unlikely. Such an action would require an astronomical amount of funds of roughly speaking four times the amount it took for him to buy Twitter. The board would also have to agree to such an arrangement after seeing Twitter's value crater under Musk's bizarre rule.

Still, he's playing with a lot of money. Disney's market cap is around $180 billion, not far from Musk's net worth of $198.8 billion.

More on Musk: Tesla Is Officially the Worst-Performing S&P 500 Stock of the Year

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Wait, Did Elon Musk Just Hint He's Going to Buy Disney? - Futurism

Tesla's having an absolutely rotten year so far.

Last month, the EV maker's stock tanked, plunging almost 25 percent in January. And this month it isn't faring much better.

In fact, as Quartz reports, the company is now officially the worst-performing stock in the S&P 500, a market index tracking the 500 largest companies in the US, despite the average stock in it actually being up by four percent over the same period.

That puts the Elon Musk-led company even below Boeing, which has also had an abysmal start to the year, with regulators investigating a glaring technical oversight by the company that forced an emergency landing in early January when a large piece of a jet blew off mid-flight.

As usual, Tesla's self-annointed "Technoking" is very much to blame. Musk's absurd antics, especially when it comes to his social media echo chamber X, have done little to appease investors and are actively alienating potential allies with antisemitic comments, platforming neo-Nazis, and arguing that Black people are unfit to be pilots.

Musk has also been repeatedly making headlines for his alleged use of drugs. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that Oracle cofounder and former Tesla board member Larry Ellison asked him to come to his Hawaiian island to "dry out from the drugs" and that others around Musk had implored him to go to rehab.

To many investors, Tesla is a massive wasted opportunity.

"The cost of Elon's behavior is really hurting shareholders and it's really unfortunate because the reason we're holding the stock is the long-term potential of Tesla is immense," long-term shareholder and investment manager Ross Gerber told Yahoo Finance.

"Theres been a brand deterioration around Musk and thats whats created a black cloud around Tesla," analyst Dan Ives told Bloomberg last month.

Musk's self-inflicted woes also include his expansive promises around "Full Self-Driving,"a full-functioning version which he's been promising for a full decade now. The reality, though, has been rocky, with only an expensive and half-finished version available amid several related recalls affecting millions of Tesla vehicles over the last year.

Meanwhile, Tesla is doing damage control to make sure the situation doesn't continue spiraling out of control.

During the company's Q4 earnings call last month, Tesla warned that volume growth "may be notably lower" this year compared to last year and that a cheaper "next-generation vehicle" wouldn't be available until next year.

Then there's some considerable competition, particularly from China, ready to eat Tesla's lunch.

Musk, however, is doubling down and has even threatened investors that he could pull AI projects away from the company unless he gets a 12 percent stake bump, a massive rise in his net worth.

As a result, Gerber accused him of "blackmailing the Tesla shareholders" in an interview with CNBC last month.

"Where in the world does paying a CEO $30 billion make any logical sense in the modern world, who already has a $150 billion stake in the company?" he added.

Put simply, it feels a lot like Musk could be taking Tesla down with him.

Will shareholders stick around to find out whether he'll finally make good on his word? Given Tesla's stock performance this year, many of them are getting wary of his antics and are finally starting to jump ship.

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Tesla Is Officially the Worst-Performing S&P 500 Stock of the Year - Futurism