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GPT-4 is able to buy stuff on Amazon, researchers say

Still, ChatGPT operates in a mostly siloed fashion. It can’t yet venture out “into the wild” to execute online tasks. For example, if you wanted to buy a milk frother on Amazon for under $100, ChatGPT might be able to recommend a product or two, and even provide links, but it can’t actually navigate Amazon and make the purchase.

Why? Besides obvious concerns, like letting a flawed AI model go on a shopping spree with your credit card, one challenge lies in training AI to successfully navigate graphical user interfaces (GUIs), like your laptop or smartphone screen.

But even the current version of GPT-4 seems to grasp the basic steps of online shopping. That’s the takeaway of a recent preprint paper in which AI researchers described how they successfully trained a GPT-4-based agent to “buy” products on Amazon. The agent, dubbed the MM-Navigator, did not actually purchase products, but it was able to analyze screenshots of an iOS smartphone screen and specify the appropriate action and where it should click, with impressive accuracy.

NASA partner unveils the “iPhone” of robots

Apptronik, a NASA-backed robotics company, has unveiled Apollo, a humanoid robot that could revolutionize the workforce — because there’s virtually no limit to the number of jobs it can do.

“The focus for Apptronik is to build one robot that can do thousands of different things,” Jeff Cardenas, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told Freethink. “The best way to think of it is kind of like the iPhone of robots.”

The challenge: Robots have been automating repetitive tasks for decades — instead of having a person weld the same two car parts together 100 times a day, for example, an automaker might just add a welding robot to that segment of the assembly line.

AI-powered noise-filtering headphones give users the power to choose what to hear

Noise-canceling headphones are a godsend for living and working in loud environments. They automatically identify background sounds and cancel them out for much-needed peace and quiet. However, typical noise-canceling fails to distinguish between unwanted background sounds and crucial information, leaving headphone users unaware of their surroundings.

Chat GPT can now speak and sing in real time | DW News

ChatGPT 4O can now speak and sing in real time. It can even view the real world through your phone’s camera and describe what’s happening in real time.


The AI race has just shifted into high gear, with US artificial intelligence pioneers OpenAI rolling out its new interface that works with audio and vision as well as text. The new model, called GPT-4o, has gone beyond the familiar chat-bot features and is capable of real-time, near-natural voice conversations. The developer OpenAI will also make it available to free users.

ChatGPT was already able to talk to users, but with long pauses to process the data. It often seemed a bit sluggish. This was because the feature required three internal applications, the company explained: transcribing the spoken text, processing and generating, and converting the response to speech. This caused delays.

We talk to computer scientist Mike Cook from the renowned Kings College London about the new Chat GPT-4o development.

#artificialintelligence #chatgpt #openai.

Good vibrations: New tech may lead to smaller, more powerful wireless devices

What if your earbuds could do everything your smartphone can do already, except better? What sounds a bit like science fiction may actually not be so far off. A new class of synthetic materials could herald the next revolution of wireless technologies, enabling devices to be smaller, require less signal strength and use less power.

The key to these advances lies in what experts call phononics, which is similar to photonics. Both take advantage of similar physical laws and offer new ways to advance technology. While photonics takes advantage of photons – or light – phononics does the same with phonons, which are the physical particles that transmit mechanical vibrations through a material, akin to sound, but at frequencies much too high to hear.

In a paper published in Nature Materials (“Giant electron-mediated phononic nonlinearity in semiconductor–piezoelectric heterostructures”), researchers at the University of Arizona Wyant College of Optical Sciences and Sandia National Laboratories report clearing a major milestone toward real-world applications based on phononics. By combining highly specialized semiconductor materials and piezoelectric materials not typically used together, the researchers were able to generate giant nonlinear interactions between phonons. Together with previous innovations demonstrating amplifiers for phonons using the same materials, this opens up the possibility of making wireless devices such as smartphones or other data transmitters smaller, more efficient and more powerful.

Advancing Atomic Clocks: Unlocking Precision With Quantum Superradiance

Superradiant atoms offer a groundbreaking method for measuring time with an unprecedented level of precision. In a recent study published by the scientific journal Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Copenhagen present a new method for measuring the time interval, seconds, that overcomes some of the limitations that even today’s most advanced atomic clocks encounter. This advancement could have broad implications in areas such as space exploration, volcanic monitoring, and GPS systems.

The second, which is the most precisely defined unit of measurement, is currently measured by atomic clocks in different places around the world that together tell us what time it is. Using radio waves, atomic clocks continuously send signals that synchronize our computers, phones, and watches.

Oscillations are the key to keeping time. In a grandfather clock, these oscillations are from a pendulum’s swinging from side to side every second, while in an atomic clock, it is a laser beam that corresponds to an energy transition in strontium and oscillates about a million billion times per second.

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