From a keynote at the European Rover Challenge last week in Krakow, and celebrating the 150th anniversary of “The Lunar Trilogy” by Jerzy Zulawski. Video at the end. The conference hall was buzzing. Outside, teams of students around the world were competing with their DIY robots on a Mars landscape, driven by the same age-old question that has fueled explorers for centuries: “What is where?” ...
The end of the pixel king Fig 1. A screenshot of Google Maps with a search for “grass” returns with “No results” even when it’s obvious to find the grass on the satellite image. Google Maps excels at providing detailed information on restaurants, live updates on public transport, and more. Yet, it struggles to identify something as simple as grass or an entire forest, which appears as a gray blob: ...
AI dominates every digital space. More specifically OpenAI with ChatGPT and GPT4, clearly outperforming [at least in public perception] usual suspects like Google who claimed to be “AI first”, since 2016. The irony is that OpenAI uses Transformers for its star product ChatGPT and friends, which is a Google invention from 2017. There are many reports that Google sounded the alarm to catch up, and yesterdays Google IO shows they are all-in. But a comparison between OpenAI and Google strategies, in my opinion, reveals starkly contrasting strategies: OpenAI goes loudly and boldly all in on generative text, and Google (more silently) on embeddings. ...