Meta unveils 'breakthrough' mind-reading experiment

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Welcome back, Superhuman. Meta once had plans to release a literal “thinking cap” that’d be able to read your mind. While that never panned out, the tech giant might have just come up with something even better: An experimental platform that can type out your thoughts without requiring any brain implants.

Today’s Insights

• Sutskever’s new startup, Altman’s claims, and Cursor’s new features

• Frontier: Meta’s latest AI experiments

• Tutorial: How to stylize images with Whisk

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s mysterious startup could now be worth $20B: Safe Superintelligence (SSI) looks set to land a massive funding round after securing $1B last September — potentially quadrupling its valuation in a matter of months. The secretive company has no products and no revenue to speak of. Instead, it’s going all-in on just one thing — being the first to safely reach AGI. Considered one of the top computer scientists in the field, Sutskever helped co-found OpenAI but left last year to start his own venture.

2. Sam Altman makes notable revelations in new blog post: Altman argued that AI scaling laws are still in good health and we can expect gains in performance for the foreseeable future. Based on these observed gains, he argues that “we see no reason for exponentially increasing investment to stop in the near future.“ The blog also appeared to hint that OpenAI is working on a new software engineering agent, which the company expects to be “particularly important.“

3. Cursor’s coding agent gets new upgrades to help developers build faster: Cursor Agent now comes with reasoning capabilities that can read and write code, search your codebase, run terminal commands, and more. Users can also incorporate rules to control how Agent behaves. You can check out the full list of new features here. Cursor has been a hit with software developers in recent months, evidenced by its rapid growth over the past year.

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FROM THE FRONTIER

Meta’s research division unveils mind-reading typist, household robotics model, and more

Research shows that around 80% of AI projects fail. That hasn’t stopped companies like Meta from investing billions into experimental divisions, where hundreds of engineers have free reign to try out different ideas, even ones that have little chance of success. That’s because every once in a while they come across a major breakthrough that makes it all worth it.

Meta’s research team, Meta AI, just unveiled some of its latest experiments, including some that could eventually make their way to Meta products:

• PARTNR: A toolkit designed to teach robots how to collaborate with humans on different household chores, like doing the dishes or folding laundry.

• Language Technology Partner Program: In collaboration with UNESCO, Meta is asking volunteers to send in recordings of rare languages, which will be used to build open-source translation models.

• Brain-to-text: In a pair of “breakthrough” studies, a model was able to type out entire sentences on behalf of patients by reading their minds. The experiments were completely non-invasive, using a magnetic scanner to monitor subjects’ brain waves with 80% accuracy.

• Neurological insights: The research gives scientists more clues about how the brain processes information, suggesting we take in sentences in their totality before breaking them down into words, syllables, and letters. This finding could in turn help us build models with more sophisticated linguistic capabilities.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to stylize your images using Google Whisk

• Go to Google AI Labs, open Whisk experiment, and sign up.

• Click ‘Start from scratch’ and upload your subject and scene images, now choose your style.

• You’ll get multiple consistent variations of your image generated with AI.

• Add different scenes (backgrounds) and styles to get your custom styles.

• Once generated, refine your prompt by adding additional details in the prompt box.

(Note: Google Whisk may not be available in some regions yet, but you can join the waitlist to secure access as soon as it launches)

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🧑‍🎨 Artistic Exchange: AI design platform Krea unveiled a new tool that lets you chat with its image and video generator just as you would a chatbot, speeding up the creative process and giving you more control over your generations.

🏈 Pay to Play: OpenAI debuted its first TV ad at the Super Bowl last night, taking viewers through humanity's major inventions through animated dots – in reference to ChatGPT’s cursor dot.

🚗 Practice Makes Perfect: Apple researchers taught a self-driving car to navigate roadways without any human data. Instead, the vehicle learned from its own mistakes, eventually going 17.5 years without an accident during simulations.

📐 Proof Prodigy: A new study shows that Google’s AlphaGeomoetry2, which was trained on 300M synthetically generated theorems and proofs, scored an 84% on the geometry problems in the International Mathematical Olympiad, enough to earn it a gold medal.

📽️ Restored Reels: AI video editing startup Topaz Labs is building a new feature called Project Starlight that can transform old, grainy footage into high-resolution clips.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

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✅ Minduck Discovery: An AI-search platform that fuels your curiosity with interactive Mind Maps, curating essential information and structuring it for easy understanding.

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PROMPT OF THE DAY

Business Plan

Prompt: Can you help me draft an executive summary for my business plan? Please use the following details. The business name is [business name]. It is a [industry] business that [description and unique selling proposition]. The target market is [description of your target market]. My business aims to [needs/problems your business addresses]. It is different from competitors because [how your business stands out]. In the next [X] years, we aim to [revenue projections]. We also hope to [describe any other key metrics/KPIs]. Using this information, can you help me draft an executive summary?

_{Source: Aytekin Tank / Forbes}

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

🤓 Teach Me Your Ways: Builder McKay Wrigley shared how he used ChatGPT’s new Deep Research feature to teach himself a new marketing channel from scratch.

🪦 RIP Figma? EvertArt founder Pietro Schirano kicked off a controversy on X by tweeting: “There is legitimately no reason to use Figma anymore.” New AI-powered design tools like Vercel V0 are disrupting existing products and the comments provide insights into where the space may be heading.

🕰️ Turbulent Times: Venture Capitalist Avichal argued that software engineering jobs are drying up fast and that the days of abundant engineering jobs may be gone for good. He goes on to share his forecast for what’s next.

🧑‍💻 Vibe Coding: Inspired by Andrej Karpathy’s thoughts on “vibe coding“, builder Riley Brown released a 30-minute tutorial teaching non-coders how to build their own AI apps from scratch.

🤔 Claude’s Curiosity: AI researcher Joscha Bach was intrigued by Claude’s response when he asked the chatbot what it wanted to know about life in the months since its April 2024 knowledge cutoff.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Super Bowl Watch Party

Midjourney Prompt: futuristic and ver bling room, colour photograph, science fiction, in the style of Russ Mayer, --ar 16:9

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