Willi Schroll

Tucker Carlson asks Kevin O’Leary the one question AI enthusiasts can’t answer: What happens to people when machines can do everything better than humans? Kevin O’Leary responds: We can’t let China win the AI race. Tucker points out that taxpayers are being “forced” into the AI agenda, left with “no choice” but to leap forward. O’Leary laughs and says taxpayers can say no. Then Tucker points to a glaring example where they already tried to say no, and O’Leary is forced to take the conversation elsewhere.

To understand how the public attitude toward AI has changed, watch the 1-minute video below of a commencement speech in Florida: Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive, was booed by the students when she mentioned AI during her commencement speech at the University of Central Florida's College of Arts and Humanities. Not everyone thinks this way, but a dose of skepticism toward the tech industry is always welcome. Especially when many in AI are trying to sell a promise of an 'idyllic' future where robots control human work, relationships, emotions, and cognition. The future should be human, BY humans, and FOR humans.

Take five minutes to understand how a company has already successfully extracted usable electrical energy from the vacuum of empty space.

Is the (academic?!) audience booing to the plain facts or are they tired of the phrases and hype? Is it panic of possible replacement? And don’t many use AI 24/7? One should interview them. I am curious. Maybe it is a heterogeneous landscape.

Ex Machina is no longer sci-fi. China has finally built it. The company is AheadForm, founded in Shanghai. The product is the world's most hyper-realistic robotic face. Silicone skin you can't tell from human, 25 micro motors hidden underneath pulling the face into real expressions. And RGB cameras embedded inside the pupils so when it looks at you, it actually sees you from where its eyes are. They raised $28.5M to "give AI a head," which is also where the name comes from. AheadForm = a head form. This is the opposite of where everyone else in robotics is focused. Unitree, Figure, Tesla, Boston Dynamics: all about the body. AheadForm chose the face because they think trust is the harder problem to solve, and trust gets decided at the face. The reason nobody else has tried this is the "uncanny valley." It's the creepy zone where a robot looks almost human but not quite, and looking at it just feels wrong even when you can't say why. Most roboticists believed no amount of engineering could make a face realistic enough to escape it. So they gave up and kept robots cartoonish on purpose: big anime eyes, exaggerated features, clearly synthetic. But AheadForm decided to treat it as an engineering bug instead. Add enough motors, tune the silicone, fix the timing, the valley closes. And they're pulling it off. A few crazy details about how this actually works: 1. The robot learns its own face in a mirror. You put it in front of a camera, let it fire every motor randomly, and it watches what its face does and builds an internal map of "if I send command X to motor Y, my eyebrow does this." Same exact process a human baby uses staring into a mirror. The robot teaches itself who it is by experimenting. 2. It predicts your smile 839 milliseconds before you smile. By watching the micro-tells in your face that precede a smile, the robot starts smiling 0.8 seconds ahead, so its smile lands at the same moment yours does. Most robot mimicry happens half a second late, which is exactly why it always feels artificial. 3. The pupils are the cameras. When the robot makes eye contact, the gaze and the sensor are the same physical thing. Most humanoid robots stick the camera on the forehead or chest, so they aren't actually looking at you when their eyes are pointed at you. 4. The founder, Yuhang Hu, did his PhD at Columbia under Hod Lipson. Lipson is the guy who in 2006 built a four-legged robot that figured out it had four legs by experimenting with its own movement, nobody told it the body shape, it discovered it. He has spent 25 years trying to build machines that know what they are. AheadForm is that 25-year research arc productized. 5. NetEase Games already paid them to physically embody a fantasy video game character. That opens up a brand-new category: robotics as the physical embodiment of fictional IP. Every character-rich studio, Disney, Riot, Hoyoverse, Pokemon, Netflix, now has a question to answer about when their characters get bodies. AheadForm believes whoever ships the first robot you'd actually want around your family wins. That's the bet behind the most realistic robot face on earth.

This is the first time in history that anyone can press a few buttons and instantly generate long, intelligible, and convincing text, audio, images, or videos about any topic. It's the definite fall of human cognitive supremacy, and we have NO IDEA how evolution will handle it.