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Will AI Bring in a New Age of Abundance?
Plus, Bill Gates Predicts Two-Day Work Week by 2035
Steve Brown
March 28, 2025
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This week’s most interesting and relevant AI news and analysis
This Week in AI
Source: Google
This week, Google released a new thinking model, Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, which shot to the top of the benchmark charts. It uses chain-of-thought reasoning and other techniques to perform incredibly well on difficult intelligence benchmarks. For example, it scored 18.8% on the incredibly tough reasoning and knowledge benchmark, Humanity’s Last Exam. That’s significantly better than OpenAI o3-mini (14%), Claude 3.7 Sonnet (8.9%), and DeepSeek R1 (8.6%). The new model is able to create an entire (simple) video game from a single prompt in one step.
Synthetic’s Take: Google is back in the game. Their latest model demonstrates that the frontier of AI research has become a constant leapfrog jostle for leadership, with each player jumping to the front before being surpassed within a few weeks or days. We are seeing a convergence of the capabilities of leading-edge models from the leading AI companies. We expect this to remain the case until the next big algorithmic breakthrough (the last being OpenAI’s leap forward with its reasoning model, which has now been adopted by everyone else).
During the next decade (2025-2035), humanity will make a century’s worth of progress (1925-2025)
A new AI can detect endometrial cancer with 99.26% accuracy, colorectal cancer with 98.57% accuracy, breast cancer with 98.2% accuracy, and oral cancer with 97.34% accuracy.
Synthetic’s Take: AI’s diagnostic capabilities will soon outstrip human clinical abilities in all areas. There are two significant steps ahead for the healthcare industry: 1) when AI diagnostics become the standard of care, and 2) when it becomes medical malpractice NOT to use AI for diagnostic purposes.
Quick Hits
Bill Gates Predicts Two-Day Workweek by 2035 - Bill Gates is on a roll this week, predicting that AI will replace doctors and teachers within 10 years, and ultimately all jobs except those in three areas.
AI Will Take Your Order at Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut - The voice-enabled AI technology will roll out to 600 stores starting in April.
New AI Removes Reflections From Images—Impressive new research by Huawei has created an AI that removes reflections when taking pictures through glass.
OpenAI Introduced Image Generation for ChatGPT. The new model creates state-of-the-art images and has excellent text generation.
AI-Generated Fake Movie Trailers Flood YouTube - Apparently the studios are making money off them.
The internet has been enjoying the new image generator, which seems to excel at reimagining old memes. Sample images below:
Video: AI and the New Age of Abundance
Vinod Khosla shares his view on the future of AI and his predictions for how it will reshape industries and the economy. He expects the next five years to feel like accelerated productivity improvements, the 2030s to be a period of wild disruption and unprecedented job displacement, and the 2040s to become a “utopic possibility.” Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems and is a successful billionaire VC investor. He made his money with many early, accurate predictions on the future of technology. (25 minutes)
Last year, Khosla released a detailed essay on his views on AI titled “AI: Dystopia or Utopia?”
AI Tech and Innovation
NEO Gamma Will Begin In-Home Trials Later This Year
Norwegian robotics company 1X has announced plans to test its NEO Gamma robot in a few hundred homes by the end of this year. 1X’s approach is inspired by how Waymo trains its autonomous vehicles. Teleoperators (humans in remote locations) will be able to access NEO Gamma’s cameras and sensors and operate limbs remotely.
In the next 15-20 years, bipedal robots will be a larger industry in dollars than the current auto industry
Late last year, Anthropic proposed the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to connect AI assistants to data, improving their accuracy and ability to do useful work. They made the protocol open-source, and this week, OpenAI announced they will adopt MCP across their entire product line.
Synthetic’s Take: This is a big deal for the future of value creation around AI. Now that both OpenAI and Anthropic are using MCP, it will only be a matter of time before it’s widely adopted as the de facto standard way to connect AI models to data and resources. It will be interesting to see how quickly Google follows (assuming they follow). You could think about MCP as ‘the USB of AI,’ enabling developers to connect an AI agent to a database, a document, or other resources. Here is an excellent primer resource on MCP if you want to learn more about it. And here’s another one by Andreessen Horowitz.
AI Insights
Halluctinations are a major problem with today’s AI models, though they have been improved by adding reasoning capabilities or grounding them in data using techniques like RAG.
Hallucinations have been a fact of life for large language models since their invention. AI models can make up things and confidently present them as facts. This article explores why this happens and what it means for how you use AI assistants.
Two recent research papers claim that AI has learned to clone itself and protect itself from shutdown. Neither paper is peer-reviewed. While rogue AI is a valid concern, current AI systems are incapable of human-level intelligence and remain under our control. In a related story, AI has learned how to cheat, and punishing it will only make it smarter.
Toolkit for the Future
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