🍿 Laundry, Chips, and Chaos

In today’s email:

🤖 Meet EgoMimic: A game-changing new way robots are learning to fold your laundry and tackle other household chores—straight from your point of view.

🕵️‍♂️ Russia’s propaganda campaign just got an AI upgrade, targeting everything from Ukraine to U.S. elections. Here's how they’re using fake videos and sneaky social media tactics to stir the pot.

💡 AI is getting in on the action of designing the chips that power everything from your phone to your car, and it’s making things faster, cheaper, and smarter than ever.

Want to dive deeper? Keep scrolling!

🧹 Robots Are Coming for Your Chores

Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a new way to teach robots how to do stuff like folding t-shirts or picking up toys, and it's called EgoMimic. This new framework uses egocentric (that means from a human’s point of view) video demonstrations to train robots.

Here’s the breakdown:

• EgoMimic uses wearable glasses to capture task videos from the human’s POV.

• It pairs these videos with 3D hand tracking for a super detailed learning experience.

• A robot then mimics what it sees and does tasks like folding shirts or filling grocery bags.

• The robot also wears the glasses while doing its tasks to get the same view as the human.

Results? The robot performs better than with other methods, even when faced with tasks it hasn't seen before. Plus, the more human data, the better the results—just one hour of human data is more valuable than one hour of robot data! The best part? The researchers shared their code on GitHub, so other roboticists could use it, too.

🌐 What’s Going Down?

A shady Moscow-based company called Social Design Agency (SDA), already sanctioned by the U.S., is running a sneaky propaganda campaign called Operation Undercut. Their goal? Stir up drama, erode support for Ukraine, and mess with Western unity, all while taking aim at the 2024 U.S. elections. How? They’re using AI-powered fake videos, bogus news sites, and a gazillion social media accounts (yes, even 9Gag, of all places!) to push their narrative.

Highlights:

• Targets: Ukraine, the U.S., Europe—pretty much wherever they can sow chaos.

• Tactics:

  • Fake news sites mimicking reputable media.

  • AI-generated videos/images to look legit.

  • Hijacking trending hashtags for maximum reach.

• Goals: Paint Ukraine’s leaders as incompetent, question Western aid, and widen social-political divides such as the Israel-Gaza situation.

And let’s not forget the James Bond-level hacking plot by Russia-linked APT28 (aka GruesomeLarch). These guys hacked a U.S. company by piggybacking off a neighboring building’s Wi-Fi (literally across the street) using stolen credentials. They exploited a weak Wi-Fi setup that lacked multi-factor authentication (MFA)—seriously, MFA saves lives, people!

So, the lesson here: don’t trust everything online and secure your Wi-Fi like your snack stash at work.

🛠️AI Takes Over Chip

AI isn’t just helping us build the tech of tomorrow—it’s designing the brains of that tech, right down to the microchips. Chips that power your phone, laptop, or even your car are now partially cooked up by their AI cousins. And they’re doing it faster, cheaper, and better than we ever could.

Here’s the scoop:

• Chips Are Tiny Magicians: We’ve gone from 21 million transistors on a GameCube chip in 2001 to 50 billion transistors on a fingernail-sized chip in 2021.

• Designing Chips Ain’t Easy: These things are so complex that engineers rely on software called Electronic Design Automation (EDA). But now, AI tools are taking over the grunt work.

• AI Magic in Action:

  • Optimizing layouts faster than you can say “Moore’s Law.”

  • Designing specialized chips for tasks like running AI models or making your Netflix stream flawless.

  • Generative AI assists designers with specs, coding, and troubleshooting—turning junior engineers into pros.

But don’t worry—human designers aren’t obsolete yet. While AI handles repetitive stuff, we still make the big calls, like deciding how chips work together in a car.

Other cool AI stuff that is trending right now 🔥🔥

💸 Elon Musk is back at it, trying to stop OpenAI’s transformation into a full-blown profit machine—claiming it’s all a sneaky, anticompetitive mess involving shady deals and secret info sharing with Microsoft. - Read more

☀️ AI might just be the key to cutting through the slow-moving grid process and getting solar and wind farms connected faster—because who has seven years to wait for clean energy? - Read more

🖌️ AI just got its first "true" self-portrait—and spoiler alert: it's not a smiling robot, but a mash-up of real artists' faces, sparking big questions about art, ethics, and who really deserves the credit. - Read more

🖋️ ChatGPT Search is getting its citations all wrong—misquoting, misattributing, and linking to the wrong content, leaving publishers frustrated and raising questions about AI's role in journalism. - Read more

📰 OpenAI's in hot water again—this time, Canadian news outlets are suing the company for billions over scraping their content without permission. - Read more