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Until recently, Ambitious.Bio was a scarce known startup head’s down in stealth, building for revolutionary times in AI and biology. But last month, Ambitious landed on the world stage with its first product: Corpus, a record-setting dataset finding never before-seen what some describe as the key to keeping AI-driven drug discovery from running off the rails.
Here, life sciences magazine @Thescientistllc @sneha_khedkar has the story.
Here, life sciences magazine @Thescientistllc @sneha_khedkar has the story.
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Here's the thing about using AI for writing - if you're someone who actually enjoys writing. (Or, at least, gives a damn about the rhythm of a sentence or the feeling a sentence can evoke.) It can feel about as generic and bland as the women's section of a Kmart. It can take a very well-written draft, rework it, and make it SEEM good. When in reality, AI stripped away all the personality and depth that makes a person's writing style (their voice), distinct. I liken it to the wave of women with "Instagram face." Having broken teeth is actually becoming "cool again" in New York, maybe elsewhere, in response to the Instagram-induced blandness of beauty and perfect filter faces. Using AI for writing is a lot like that.
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It just comes to mind, because I wonder, at what point will everyone in the world be "cool" with AI tools in creative fields, in the way everyone is "cool" with the Internet? Ten years? Seven? Or, will it always be polarizing in a judgemental way within fashion and the arts. E.g., Writer rooms in the LES or never-worn gatherings in Brooklyn where respectable people will 100% assign values to a person that are fundamentally untrue, at the slightest glimmer of up-skilling.
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Again, this calls forward another epic scene: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know..." - J.R.R. Tolkien, Gandalf
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I'm in North Asheville, NC right now and OMG it is full blown Golden Hour everywhere- we look.
Totally enchanting.
Totally enchanting.
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Sonia Hendrix retweeted
This is perhaps one of the great ironies of our time: China is increasingly shaping the future of AI, yet very few people in the West have the faintest idea how its key thinkers see it - its philosophers, sociologists or ethicists.
As is too often the case, we - much like the me our own AI debate covers every possible view, when much of it springs from the same cultural soil, built on assumptions about what defines us that we don’t even know we’re making.
Take for instance the assumption that intelligence is a key part of what makes us human. It’s so intuitively obvious to us that we literally named our species after it - Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man").
If you think about it, just this assumption explains a large share of the anxiety: if intelligence is what makes us human, then artificial intelligence - or super intelligence - threatens the very thing that makes us us: we’re about to compete with artificial or super “us”. No wonder this feels existential.
But China has a tradition of thought as old as ours, if not older, and every bit as rich and sophisticated, which never placed intelligence at the core of what makes us human, and so meets the thinking machine from a completely different starting point.
Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”.
Sounds pretty important to hear him out, don’t you think?
Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines.”
You could even go back to antiquity, when, in many ways, we started asking questions about AI.
Did you know, for instance, that Aristotle, in the Politics, imagined a world where “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them”, and wondered about the social order consequences of this (mostly whether slaves would still be needed)?
There are Chinese equivalents to this. For instance, in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist classic, you’ll find a similar thought experiment, with a completely different worry attached. An old gardener is watering his vegetables by hand, hauling water out of a well jar by jar. A visitor shows him a labor-saving device, and the gardener turns it down for the reason that whoever uses machines ends up with 机心 (jīxīn), a “machine-heart” - a mind that schemes, calculates and loses its simplicity. “It is not that I do not know [the machine],” he says, “but I should be ashamed to use it.”
Two labor-saving machines, two very different questions: where Aristotle wondered what automation would do to the social order, the Zhuangzi wondered what it would do to us, on the inside. Which, you’ll notice, is exactly Liu Yongmou’s worry, more than two thousand years earlier.
In fact, as we’ll see, 心 (xīn), the heart, is a motif that runs deep through the Chinese AI debate. It appears both in the fear, from Zhuangzi to Liu Yongmou, that machines could give us a “machine-heart” and its mirror image: the ambition to give machines a heart of their own. Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, wants “to set a heart for machines” (为机器立心, wèi jīqì lì xīn).
“Heart” in the Chinese sense, that is, which differs totally from the Valentine's Day fluff we’ve reduced it to. 心 (xīn) means heart and mind at once: it’s where we feel but also where we think, tell right from wrong and care for others.
And, crucially, it’s in the heart that the quality Confucianism sees as the very definition of a human being takes root: 仁 (rén). We need two words to translate it, “benevolence” and “humaneness”, but in Chinese they’re one and the same: to be benevolent is to be human. It’s not about intelligence.
This is the entire point of my new article: to step out of our well for a moment and peer over the edge of China's.
What you’ll find there will, I think, surprise you, with questions you’d never thought to ask: from Zhao Tingyang warning that AI’s bad consequences can at least be fought, but that “humanity may die of all the good things AI creates”, to whether the fear that AI will make us “useless” rests on the false premise that a person is worth what they’re useful for.
A premise that a 2,300-year-old Taoist tree, which survived precisely because it was useless, demolished long ago. Could our predicted uselessness turn out, much like that tree’s, to be our saving grace?
Chinese thinkers’ answers to these questions are, I think, among the most interesting anyone has given to the defining question of our time. Whether or not you agree with them, they’re the intellectual backdrop of a country shaping much of AI, and with it our future: you might as well know what they think.
Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/whats-left-f…
As is too often the case, we - much like the me our own AI debate covers every possible view, when much of it springs from the same cultural soil, built on assumptions about what defines us that we don’t even know we’re making.
Take for instance the assumption that intelligence is a key part of what makes us human. It’s so intuitively obvious to us that we literally named our species after it - Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man").
If you think about it, just this assumption explains a large share of the anxiety: if intelligence is what makes us human, then artificial intelligence - or super intelligence - threatens the very thing that makes us us: we’re about to compete with artificial or super “us”. No wonder this feels existential.
But China has a tradition of thought as old as ours, if not older, and every bit as rich and sophisticated, which never placed intelligence at the core of what makes us human, and so meets the thinking machine from a completely different starting point.
Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”.
Sounds pretty important to hear him out, don’t you think?
Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines.”
You could even go back to antiquity, when, in many ways, we started asking questions about AI.
Did you know, for instance, that Aristotle, in the Politics, imagined a world where “the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them”, and wondered about the social order consequences of this (mostly whether slaves would still be needed)?
There are Chinese equivalents to this. For instance, in the Zhuangzi, a foundational Taoist classic, you’ll find a similar thought experiment, with a completely different worry attached. An old gardener is watering his vegetables by hand, hauling water out of a well jar by jar. A visitor shows him a labor-saving device, and the gardener turns it down for the reason that whoever uses machines ends up with 机心 (jīxīn), a “machine-heart” - a mind that schemes, calculates and loses its simplicity. “It is not that I do not know [the machine],” he says, “but I should be ashamed to use it.”
Two labor-saving machines, two very different questions: where Aristotle wondered what automation would do to the social order, the Zhuangzi wondered what it would do to us, on the inside. Which, you’ll notice, is exactly Liu Yongmou’s worry, more than two thousand years earlier.
In fact, as we’ll see, 心 (xīn), the heart, is a motif that runs deep through the Chinese AI debate. It appears both in the fear, from Zhuangzi to Liu Yongmou, that machines could give us a “machine-heart” and its mirror image: the ambition to give machines a heart of their own. Zhu Songchun, who heads the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, wants “to set a heart for machines” (为机器立心, wèi jīqì lì xīn).
“Heart” in the Chinese sense, that is, which differs totally from the Valentine's Day fluff we’ve reduced it to. 心 (xīn) means heart and mind at once: it’s where we feel but also where we think, tell right from wrong and care for others.
And, crucially, it’s in the heart that the quality Confucianism sees as the very definition of a human being takes root: 仁 (rén). We need two words to translate it, “benevolence” and “humaneness”, but in Chinese they’re one and the same: to be benevolent is to be human. It’s not about intelligence.
This is the entire point of my new article: to step out of our well for a moment and peer over the edge of China's.
What you’ll find there will, I think, surprise you, with questions you’d never thought to ask: from Zhao Tingyang warning that AI’s bad consequences can at least be fought, but that “humanity may die of all the good things AI creates”, to whether the fear that AI will make us “useless” rests on the false premise that a person is worth what they’re useful for.
A premise that a 2,300-year-old Taoist tree, which survived precisely because it was useless, demolished long ago. Could our predicted uselessness turn out, much like that tree’s, to be our saving grace?
Chinese thinkers’ answers to these questions are, I think, among the most interesting anyone has given to the defining question of our time. Whether or not you agree with them, they’re the intellectual backdrop of a country shaping much of AI, and with it our future: you might as well know what they think.
Enjoy the read here: arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/whats-left-f…
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📌 HIPAA Safe Harbor standards, anyone? Ambitious.Bio sure did get the memo.
Data rights: All our tissue samples are acquired from consented donors through established procurement partnerships with IRB-approved protocols. Proteus holds full commercial rights to the derived data, including rights to sublicense for research and model training purposes. Data is de-identified in accordance with HIPAA Safe Harbor standards.
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Adidas just wrapped a "Future of Three" fashion presentation in Shanghai, prompting media coverage and a flurry of social mentions. I came across this surprisingly good take on ARCH about what the popular campaign also revealed, according to the author.
Setting aside the ing "sameness," which shouldn't happen if done right, I am fascinated by each market's behavioral differences, and agree that this approach would play incredibly well in the US.
Setting aside the ing "sameness," which shouldn't happen if done right, I am fascinated by each market's behavioral differences, and agree that this approach would play incredibly well in the US.
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Sonia Hendrix retweeted
ai agents will change your life bro. you go from spending the entire work day on your phone and computer to spending every waking hour on your phone and computer. from managing a team of people to managing a bunch of agents who are always up to some bs. i haven’t slept in a week
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📍 the-scientist.com/how-cadavers-a…
“There are people waiting for cures right now,” said Hudson. “If we have any hope of providing better products to people faster and at prices that don't bankrupt folks…better data collection is the only route.” - @Lizziehudson
“There are people waiting for cures right now,” said Hudson. “If we have any hope of providing better products to people faster and at prices that don't bankrupt folks…better data collection is the only route.” - @Lizziehudson
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🧌 In a recent video, narrator James Stewart describes the phenomenon (“some as tall as the Empire State Building”) that form between Taiwan and the Philippines before rolling across the South China Sea. Watch below, and learn more about these mysterious monsters.
surfer.com/news/internal-…
surfer.com/news/internal-…
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Happenings @wef: "The inaugural Annual Meeting of Global Future Leaders, held in collaboration with the Government of the United Arab Emirates, brought emerging leaders under 40 together with more established decision-makers to prepare for what comes next." weforum.org/media/wef-to-c…
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Thank you @axios for featuring @meetviabot!
Viabot is a leading autonomous robotics startup with commercially-deployed RaaS robots cleaning 25 million square feet of outdoor enterprise properties across the US on a daily basis. #physicalAI #TechnologyNews
Viabot is a leading autonomous robotics startup with commercially-deployed RaaS robots cleaning 25 million square feet of outdoor enterprise properties across the US on a daily basis. #physicalAI #TechnologyNews
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