Nvidia's new AI avatar stares at you all the time

Hi everyone! Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

👉 Nvidia is developing an AI avatar that stares at you all the time!

👉 AI is the key to cure difficult diseases

👉 More than 40% of companies have plans to layoff employees by 2030 due to AI advancements

and many more!

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Read time: 5 minutes

What’s going on: Nvidia has created an AI avatar named R2X that can live on your computer’s desktop. This AI assistant looks like a video game character and can help you use your computer programs. You can talk to R2X, show it what's on your screen, and even give it files to work with. It uses popular LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and xAI’s Grok under the hood.

What does it mean: Companies are trying to make AI helpers that feel more like real people. Nvidia thinks that having an AI that looks like a person could make it easier and more fun to use. R2X is a big step in this direction. By combining super-smart AI with super-realistic computer graphics, Nvidia is trying to create a whole new way to use computers.

More details:

• Nvidia has plans to open-source R2X avatars in the first half of 2025.

• Like many other AI assistants, R2X is still considered a prototype and has bugs, its animation might get stuck in odd positions, gives incorrect constructions and hallucinates. In addition, some early testers have found the constant staring of a human-like character at them a bit unsettling.

• Nvidia uses its RTX neural faces algorithm to generate R2X avatars.

• To animate the face, lip, and tongue movement, they are using a new model called Audio2Face™-3D.

What’s going on: Scientists are using AI to find new ways to make medicine, especially for tough diseases like a rare lung disease called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). A company called Insilico Medicine led by Alex Zhavoronkov is using AI to create drugs faster than ever before. They have made a new pill that has shown promising results in initial trials. The discovery of the IPF drug took 18 months, synthesizing and testing 79 molecules, compared to the expected 4 years and 500+ molecules.

What does it mean: AI could help make new medicines quicker and cheaper. It usually takes on average 10 to 15 years and more than $2 billion to bring a new drug to market. Additionally, around 90% of the drugs that go to clinical trials fail. Charlotte Deane, a professor of structural bioinformatics at Oxford University says: “A new era, where AI is at the center of the drug discovery process is emerging” and "We are at the beginning of just how good that might be".

More details: 

• Big tech companies have also tried to use AI to advance medicine. For instance, Alphabet launched Isomorphic Labs in 2021 with the help of Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Demis Hassabis. The company utilizes AI for drug discovery.

• In drug discovery, AI is used in two main steps; First AI mines databases to connect molecular biology with diseases. Second, Scientists use generative models to design molecules that bind to therapeutic targets.

• Insilico Medicine has 6 molecules in clinical trials. Four more molecules cleared for trials, nearly 30 others show promise. All of them were discovered using generative AI.

• Other companies have also developed molecules with AI to treat lymphoma and solid tumors, that are now in early-stage clinical trials.

🚗 Hyundai Motor Group has partnered with Nvidia to accelerate the development of AI technologies for enhancing future mobility solutions, including software-defined vehicles and robotics.

🤖 According to a survey from World Economic Forum, more than 40% of companies have plans to downsize their workforce by 2030 as AI automates certain tasks. (Read the survey)

🎙 Google is working on a new “Daily Listen” feature that automatically generates a podcast based on your Discover feed.

🏦 Global banks will cut about 200,000 jobs in the next 3 to 5 years as artificial intelligence continues to take on tasks currently carried out by human workers.

💰 Blackstone invests $300 million in DDN, AI and data intelligence solutions leader, at a $5 billion valuation.

⚖ A lawsuit filed against Meta claim that Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, gave permission to the team behind the Llama open-source AI models to use copyrighted material and a dataset of pirated e-books and articles for training.

🩺 Hippocratic AI, a startup building generative AI agents for healthcare, raised $141 million at a valuation of $1.64 billion.

💬 OpenAI's latest update for ChatGPT allows users to assign traits like 'chatty' and 'Gen Z' to customize the AI's interaction style.

🧠 Google is streamlining its AI development by integrating more teams into DeepMind to accelerate the transition from research to product development.

Networking using AI

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