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AI Reads Minds and Redefines Death
Plus, 41% of companies plan to reduce their workforce by 2030 using AI
Steve Brown
January 09, 2025
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The week’s most interesting and relevant AI news and analysis
We’re back!
After taking a two-month break at the end of 2024 to focus on other aspects of our business, Synthetic is back for 2025. A lot happened in November and December, so before we launch into this week’s news, here’s a quick catch-up on the biggest headlines and best articles that closed out an amazing year for AI.
Agents and Workplace Automation:
Robotics:
Hardware:
OpenAI:
AI in Society:
Ok, now back to the news of the week….
This Week in AI
New GoogleTV with Gemini
At CES, Google has demonstrated a dramatically improved Google TV experience based on its Gemini assistant. This signals the beginning of Google’s effort to phase out the old Google Assistant technology and replace it with much more capable Gemini technology. The new tech supports natural language conversations and quickly generates answers, often surfacing and displaying relevant YouTube videos.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says their “systems are progressing way faster than Moore’s Law” and rejects the idea that AI progress is slowing. On a podcast in November, Huang suggested the AI world is on a pace for “hyper Moore’s Law.” Nvidia’s latest GB200 chip is 30x to 40x faster at running AI inference than their previous best chip, the H100, launched just over two years ago, and Huang claims that AI chips today are 1000x better than they were just a decade ago and he doesn’t see the pace of change slowing anytime soon.
Nature reports on how AI-based forecasts of viral variation could improve and accelerate the development of vaccines and antiviral treatments. Today, AI tools can predict which single mutation of a virus will be most successful and, thus, which variants will ‘win’ in the short term. Future AIs may be able to forecast combinations of mutations to predict dangerous variants that will emerge a long time in the future.
Video: The Mind-Reading Potential of AI
At TED AI, Chin-Teng Lin talks about how AI can help to accelerate the link between computers and the human brain. Going beyond traditional brain-computer interfaces, he demonstrates a natural interface that allows wearers to transfer words from their minds to computers using an EEG-to-text translator. The demo begins at around the 5-minute mark. The researchers are already achieving a 50% accuracy and hope to improve this over time. (15m 44s)
AI Tech and Innovation
The New Omi Wearable
A new $89 wearable from Omi uses brainwave detection to understand when you’re talking to it and when you’re not. The always-listening wearable can be worn on a lapel, a necklace, or glued to your temple (!) if you want to use the brainwave feature. It can summarize meetings and conversations and give you action items. It also provides helpful insights and answers on your phone using notifications. Omi’s somewhat confusing launch video shows a range of potential use cases, including as an aid for a grandma with memory loss.
MIT Technology Review shares its top five predictions for AI in 2025, including generative virtual worlds, better reasoning, the continued rise of AI defense-tech companies, Nvidia finally getting some real competition, and a boom for AI in science.
For many years now, there’s been a lot of AI-washing at CES as marketing messages breathlessly claimed that a product benefited from some magical AI goodness. There’s still plenty of that at CES this week, but here’s a good summary of some of the more interesting AI innovations on display. Innovations include wearables, a robot vacuum cleaner with a robotic arm to move small objects out of their way, a real-time language translator, and a strength machine with a built-in AI coach.
AI Insights
The blended workforce of the future: Humans, digital workers, and robots working together.
2025 will likely be the year that AI agents swarm our world. Intelligent software agents with autonomous agency (able to choose and use tools), memory, advanced reasoning, and planning skills will be able to complete complex tasks on our behalf. Your next coworker may be a machine. Digital workers will offload tasks and support human efforts. In this blog post, Synthetic explores why this is happening now, what types of agents we can expect, and what it will mean for the future of work.
A World Economic Forum survey on the future of jobs, released this week, indicates that 77% of large companies plan to reskill and upskill their workers in the next five years to better work alongside AI. Well over a third said they intend to downsize their workforce using AI automation. This should be a five-alarm fire for governments around the world.
Could AI allow a digital you to live on after your death? Can you imagine attending a funeral where the person who has died speaks directly to you? That’s what happened at the funeral of Marina Smith, a holocaust educator who died in 2022, using AI technology from Storyfile. This fascinating article explores how technology is changing how people think about life after death, who owns your digital afterlife, what it means to grieve in a digital world, and how to plan your digital legacy.
Forbes delves into how AI has transformed cybersecurity and is becoming essential to the ongoing war with attackers. Historically, predictive AI identified patterns and anticipated threats, but today, generative AI is opening up new possibilities for threat detection and response. It also offers the prospect of AI-drive automation of security operations. Cybersecurity has become an AI arms race as hackers use AI tools to automate exploits and identify vulnerabilities. The challenge for CISOs is to balance automation and oversight with a human-AI partnership that scales the experience and impact of security professionals.
For educators, the challenge is clear: to embrace AI as a partner in learning, to foster the skills and values that will guide students through unchartered waters, and to ensure that the benefits of this transformative technology are shared by all. In doing so, they become the architects of a future where superintelligence serves humanity’s highest aspirations.
If we do indeed see the first human-level AI agents released in 2025, the world will change in myriad ways, and people will turn to education to help them adjust to a new reality. The article explores how to prepare children to thrive in the age of AI and says it all starts with a mindset shift by education leaders.
Toolkit for the Future
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