News
There is a new “text-to-CAD” product: It was just a matter of time, and now a new family of products (generation of Computer-Aided-Design) has its very first member. The developer zoo.dev has released its LLM-based software for generating files compatible with CAD standards from a textual description.
Why do I say that it was only a matter of time having this? That’s because, in several of my posts, I pointed out that a myriad of startups would leverage the many possible uses of Generative AI without inventing AI itself, just adapting the available infrastructure to a specific use case.Apple is starting to take AI seriously, with important developments: Since a few months ago, Tim Cook has been talking about how they intend to incorporate AI into their products. He said that “many Apple products already have AI in them,” which is, of course, true (for instance, Photos include AI for tagging faces). But recently, a couple of developments have been noticed despite them not being publicized. One is the “Ferret” LLM-based image processing system, which is capable of recognizing objects in a region of an image. The other one is reported in a research article, “HUGS: Human Gaussian Splats,” published in ArXiv and is intended to generate 3D avatars from normal pictures of people. We will find out later what the heck Apple tries to do with it, but for sure, it sounds interesting.
There could soon be a vaccine for cancer: Moderna has announced “better than expected” results for its vaccine, in the trials phase, against cancer. Moderna became well known because of its COVID-19 vaccine, which was very effective and used modern RNA technology –hence its name, “ModeRNA,” you get it. The vaccine is not for every type of cancer, though: it’s intended to treat melanoma, which is the deadliest type of skin cancer. “What,” you’d say, “to treat melanoma”? Aren’t vaccines used for preventing diseases instead of curing them? Well, this vaccine is supposed to be applied after a patient has had a melanoma removed surgically in order to increase the patient’s odds of long-term survival. In any case, we hope that after this, several other cancer vaccines will follow.
This week’s quote
Focusing on AI's future existential risks is a distraction from its current, very tangible impacts.
– Sasha Luccioni, Artificial Intelligence Researcher and Climate Lead at Hugging Face
This week’s product
Microsoft’s Copilot is now available for iOS and iPadOS systems. This is a big deal given the number of people using Apple products, as well as the fact that Copilot is available for free and in many countries.
In case you are not aware, Copilot is a “no frills” implementation of a chatbot very similar to ChatGPT, using either GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 (there is a selection toggle on the interface for selecting; the version with GPT-4 is much slower).
I prefer to use Bard for my everyday use, but hey, it could be a matter of preference.
What is…?
Transparent wood!
Yes, you read well; wood can become transparent or at least translucid using some recently developed technologies.
As reported in Ars Technica, translucid wood was created a long time ago in Germany, but the process was not scalable to make it into production. Now the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden is trying to make an industrial version of the process, which consists of removing the pigments of wood so we can see through.
Researchers say that transparent wood can be applied to houses and buildings, windows, phone screens, domestic lamps, and more.
What I’m up to
This is the 15th SkepTech issue! Thanks for joining me this far.
You noticed the image at the top, which is going to be a regular feature of the SkepTech newsletter, in case you find it illustrative/attractive/non-distracting.
You also remember from the last SkepTech post that I’m going to include in the free version of the newsletter “highlights” from my Medium blog post. Access to the entire story (through a “Friend Link”) will be only for paying SkepTech subscribers.
I’ve set the subscription price as low as Substack lets me do, which is $5 dollars per month or $30 dollars per year –obviously, I advise you to take the yearly option, which is $2.50 dollars per month.
I’m sure you understand that as a content creator (I retired from my full-time job in 2019), I have to be compensated a little bit. That’s why I offer you a way of supporting my work.
Highlights from the blog piece
This article refers to a research paper reporting the work of one of my doctoral students, Edgar Escudero, at the Tecnologico de Monterrey.
In that research, we improved on previous work that used the WiFi waves to detect people between the WiFi emitter and the receiver.
By identifying the disturbance patterns of WiFi waves, we were able to count how many people there were in a room.
In the article, we linked our research with a scandal after Arthur Holland tweeted:
“Ok so it turns out that your WiFi router might soon be able to spy on you”
I explain exactly what we improved in our research, and finally, I discuss the privacy issues raised by this WiFi technology.