Latest Robots: VB Daily | May 31 - Elon Musk weighs in on AGI, here's what others think

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The Lead 🗞️

[1] Elon Musk weighed in on artificial general intelligence — should companies care?

[2] How NLP is overcoming the document bottleneck in digital threads

[3] Nvidia's AI-powered supercomputers advance nuclear fusion research

The Follow 📰

[1] Yesterday, Elon Musk entered the charged Twitter debate on whether artificial general intelligence (AGI), or the ability for AI to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can, is imminent.

Of course, Musk's tweets should always be taken with truckloads of salt. The world's richest man is also known for some of the world's worst Twitter takes, from manipulating Tesla stock to giving Kanye West's 2020 presidential run his "full support" — not to mention the recent "will he or won't he," regarding his deal to buy Twitter itself.

Still, Musk's comments, as usual, couldn't be simply ignored. In a new post on his Substack, Gary Marcus, author of Rebooting.AI and a big (some say controversial) driver of the AGI critique on Twitter, wrote an open letter to Elon Musk, offering to place a $100,000 bet on whether AGI would appear by 2029. >> Read more.

[2] Enterprises are increasingly adopting new digital technologies to help streamline and automate the design and manufacturing of physical products. Digital twins help organize and share much of this technical data. Digital threads connect changes to this data across a product or processes lifecycle.

However, some of the most crucial manufacturing data is managed as PDF documents and handwritten notes, also known as "unstructured data." At the Digital Twin Summit, executives from XSB, an industrial artificial intelligence (AI) company, explained how natural language processing (NLP) techniques are bridging the gap between text documents, digital twins and digital threads. >> Read more.

[3] The world's fastest and most powerful high-performance computing (HPC) supercomputers are front and center at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) which runs from May 29 to June 2 in Hamburg, Germany. As part of the ISC event, Nvidia will provide insight into its latest HPC systems and the use cases they enable.

"HPC plus AI is really the transformational tool of scientific computing," Dion Harris, lead technical product marketing manager for accelerated computing, said in a media briefing ahead of ISC. "We talk about exascale AI because we do believe that this is going to be one of the key pivotal tools to drive scientific innovation and any data center that's building a supercomputer needs to understand how their system will perform from an AI standpoint." >> Read more.

A message from Amplitude

Meet the top product leaders across the globe

Organizations everywhere have adopted a product-led approach to win in today's hyper-competitive environment. With this, a new generation of product leaders have become the most influential people in business. More than 800 nominations poured in, but in the end, only 50 people—ten winners, 40 finalists—can be called the Product 50.

Read on to see who made it to the Product 50, the definitive list of boundary-breaking product leaders transforming industries around the world. And catch many of these leaders at Amplify, the #1 product and growth conference, this week from May 24-26 in Las Vegas and online. Register today.

The Buzz 🐝

Michiko I. Wolcott, CMC

@Michiko_Wolcott

You may give everyone a car, but not everyone should drive. Rather, access to its benefits should be universal; even those who can't drive generally can ride. Are you trying to democratize #Analytics through universal permission to drive or universal access to its benefits? #Data

7:00 AM - 31 May 2022

Rachael Tatman

@rctatman

Alright, fine: it's getting enough traction that I think I need to address this paper as a certified Grumpy Linguist in NLP.

(I generally try to avoid peer reviewing students in public but at this point it's definitely *already* very public, so 🤷‍♀️.)

https://t.co/mD6zceqnup

12:59 PM - 31 May 2022

A message from Amplitude

Today's product leaders must drive business growth

"It's not enough today to develop product roadmaps, design release schedules, and push out new features," says Justin Bauer, Chief Product Officer at Amplitude. "Today, product teams are tasked with driving business growth." More than 800 nominations poured in, but in the end, only 50 people—ten winners, 40 finalists—can be called the Product 50. See the whole list here.

Sources Say

Sources say 33% of orgs don't have a digital focus on accessibility.

According to the Valuable 500, 54% of companies have an active disability inclusion accessibility policy.

The research does overall reveal encouraging progress toward disability inclusion across all business processes, from recruitment to advertising, with 81% of respondents declaring an improvement on their pre-pandemic disability strategies. Despite the progress, there is much work to be done. >> Read more.

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