The week's developments in AI, quantum, and biotech, explained | 19.06.24

If you’re enjoying this briefing, sign up here — and share it with a friend. Reading time: ~4 minutes

This week, a humanoid robot named Musashi can now drive cars (sort of), NATO invested €9M into autonomous war robots, and a new ultrasensitive liquid biopsy AI is spotting cancer earlier than ever. Plus researchers have developed a 'synthetic' cell that may be the key to targeted drug delivery.

We cover this, plus the latest tools for upping your prompt game, turning sketches into real images, and in-depth financial analysis.

— Charlie and the Research & Intelligence Team 

🚀You are now able to sign up for the super early bird offer (75% off) to the CogX AI Summit in London on October 7th here.

Innovation and Releases

🤖 NATO invests €9M into autonomous war robots: ARX Robotics is a German startup founded by army veterans, it produces modular robots resembling small tanks, equipped with radar, mine-sweeping devices, or medical stretchers, and are remote controllable.

💡 Black Semiconductor raises €254.4M for graphene-based chips: These chips are much more time and energy efficient, in comparison to their silicon counterparts. The funding is one of the largest for a European chip startup and will bolster its semiconductor sector.

🚀 French AI darling Mistral nearly triples valuation to €5.8B. The Paris-based startup has just secured €600M in funding for its open-source multilingual LLM. Mistral has quickly emerged as a key European competitor to OpenAI, attracting significant investor interest. 

🚗 This humanoid robot can drive cars — sort of. Meet Musashi, a "musculoskeletal humanoid" capable of driving a small electric car. Equipped with two cameras and mechanical hands, Musashi can see the road, operate the car's controls, and navigate.

AI Tools of the Week

🔧 Optimise your prompt game: Hamming Prompt Optimizer enhances task-related prompts, tailored to your needs, using LLMs. 

🎨 Turn scribbles into real images: Scribble Diffusion uses AI to turn your sketches into refined images. 

💰 In-depth financial analysis: BeeBee.AI provides detailed insights into public companies by analysing earnings call transcripts and financial data.

Latest Research

🧬 'Synthetic' cell shown shows key vital signs: Named "the bubble," this protocell can sense chemical signals, reorganise its shape, and shuttle drugs through the body. It mimics the first step in an immune response, paving the way for targeted drug delivery.

🧭 LLMs can robots navigate: By converting visual data into text captions, which is then fed into an LLM, robots can follow complex navigation tasks. While not outperforming vision-based methods, the approach works well in environments with limited visual data.

🔬 Ultrasensitive liquid biopsy AI spots cancer earlier than standard methods, even months before. The tech, called MRD-EDGE, can predict cancer recurrence and monitor tumour response during therapy in lung, melanoma, breast, and colorectal cancer patients.

🧠 How should we think about LLMs in Cognitive Science? Researchers are exploring various methods, including "GPT-ology" for analysing LLMs, using LLMs as computational models of human cognition, and "silicon sampling" for simulating human behaviour.

In case you missed it

LLMs are not just ‘scale’ away from general intelligence: AI won’t be AGI — until it can at least do this.

✍️ Enjoying this newsletter?  Subscribe to our free weekly briefings on Preparing for AI, Cinema & AI, The Race to Net Zero, AI & DeepTech and The Future of Work.

🚀 You are now able to sign up for the super early bird offer (75% off) to the CogX AI Summit in London on October 7th here.