Your next favorite gadget could be a Robot 🤖

Refactored

Good Afternoon. Welcome to the Friday’s edition of Refactored. Today we’ve got news about robotics, ChatGPT and a special image from Pentagon.

Reading time is 4 minutes. Let’s dive in!

Main Thing ☕️

Your next favorite gadget could be a Robot

What: Microsoft demonstrated controlling robots with simple text commands using ChatGPT interface, signaling a major paradigm shift in how robotic systems are developed.

Why it matters: There are 3 key components to building a usable robot.

• Hardware: Physical components including sensors and hardware to enable mobility and perform tasks.

• Software: to perform basic operations and control the hardware. For instance, to parse signals from sensors to walk, maintain balance, avoid obstructions etc. Just like what brain is to your body.

• Usability: Now that you have a Robot with basic hardware and software, you want to be able to use it by giving instructions to perform some tasks.

Until now, Usability had been lagging behind. Every task had to be written as code by engineers for the robot to understand. But with ChatGPT, you could command the robot in simple plain english!

Big Picture: Robots are already mainstream in manufacturing and packaging industries, but they are expensive, specialize in only one task and are difficult to reprogram. But all the components required for a humanoid-shaped robot have matured just enough to make them practical. We’re now waiting for a company to put them together and iron out the finer details.

Tesla is famously the only big tech company working on it, with an ambitious plan for a mass-production robot to be ready by 2023, costing almost as much as a tesla car. But we know that’s not happening anytime soon (cough cough cybertruck).

Tech Roundup

JP Morgan: Employees at JP Morgan are no longer allowed to use OpenAI's ChatGPT at work. Amazon and Accenture have banned it as well.

Core reason behind the ban is OpenAI's privacy policy: data entered by users 'can' be used by OpenAI to improve it’s services. The ban blocks employees from giving away confidential and sensitive data to the chatbot.

Qualcomm: demonstrated a local AI image generation model deployed on mobile that can generate an image from text in less than 15 seconds, as compared to 60 seconds on iPhone.

Why it matters: AI systems are already running tasks in background on your phone. Example, you can copy a photo's subject without background on iOS, or remove people from background in Pixel. Faster AI models will enable next generation of apps and features.

Quick Bites

• 14000: Number of employees in Amazon petitioning their CEO to reverse return-to-office mandate.

• FBI: is recommending use of Adblocker to protect yourself from online fraud. If you’re on Chrome/Firefox, we suggest using ‘Adblock Plus’.

• Voice Passwords: AI can be used to break into your bank accounts by duplicating the ‘voice password’, a service offered by banks in the US and Europe.