Hello and welcome to Techscape. In this week’s edition: 23andme files for bankruptcy, Nvidia provides for a merger of AI and robotics, and AI allows fictional creation to the rhythm of social media.
The 23andme genetic test company filed for bankruptcy on Monday. The CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki resigned after several attempts to take over. Once evaluated up to $ 5.8 billion in 2021, the company’s financial failure is the final to a long decline.
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My colleague Julia Kollewe reports::
23andme said late Sunday that he had started voluntary procedures for Chapter 11 before the United States bankruptcy court for the Missouri’s eastern district of “facilitating a sales process to maximize the value of its activities”.
The losses, which provides saliva -based test kits to customers to help them follow their ancestry, added that it worked as usual throughout the sales process. “There is no change in the way the company stores, manages or protects customer data,” he said.
I understand the desire to ensure customers that there is no “change” in business as usual at 23andm, but the company’s declaration has an unhappy involvement. At the end of 2023, the company disclosed That the pirates had access to personal data of 7 million customers, including their genomes. Shortly after the foray, the pirates proposed to sell the names, addresses and genetic heritage belonging to 1 million customers 23andme with an Ashkénaze Jewish heritage on a dark dark forum. Although hacking does not only target Jewish customers, the proposed sale has given a dark example of what the malicious inhabitants of the net could do with the information of 23andme customers.
A 23andm participant, a man in Florida who discovered the Jewish inheritance ashkénaze in his test, summed up the imbalance in compromise: “I did not know that my family was potentially going to be a target. I may have put my family and myself in danger for something I did out of curiosity more than anything. ”
The question for 23andme customers is what will happen to the mine of genetic data that 23andm has raised in its years of spindle collection in tubes.
The ultimate promise of 23andme – Personalized medicine according to your unique genetic code – has not yet concluded. In the meantime, knowing the exact rupture of your genetic ancestry is more a novelty than medical necessity, and it is not a good deal. Sometimes the test reveals that you are British, which Left at least one guardian writer clearedAnd you are after giving your DNA.
The question for 23andme customers is what will happen to the mine of genetic data that 23andm has raised in its years of spindle collection in tubes. During the weekend, the California Attorney General Rob Bonta urged the users of the company to ask him to “delete your data and destroy any sample of genetic material held by the company”, just like their law under the law of the state.
More on 23 and
Science fiction fabric
A series of convergent developments in technology last week pointed out a nose pointed as a hunting dog.
Nvidia Organized its developer conference in San Jose, California, announcing new, more powerful chips that will offer greater computer capacity to artificial intelligence. The AI activity, if the Chinese Deepseek model serves as a bell, learns to maximize the results it derives from this computing power.
As in any good science fiction blockbuster, an adorable side character made an appearance during the conference. A droid inspired by Star Wars named Blue Dadie on stage alongside Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, during his speech to say hello. Disney has teamed up with Nvidia to design and present the new bot, which holds in its brain software to model and treat physics of its environment. Nvidia also announced an AI intended for robots, which also takes its name from a Disney franchise, Groot N1.
Nvidia’s announcements occur while various AI companies make their first public incursions into agent models, which can take care of tasks. By early opinion, these products are Not yet very follower.
But excitement I for the advent of general artificial intelligence (AG) increases, and real preparations occur. More and more people who are not CEOs from the IA company soon anticipate the arrival of this powerful and versatile technology. Ben Buchanan, Joe Biden’s AI advisor, gave an interview At the beginning of this month on the way the United States had planned the widespread arrival of Ag under the previous administration. Shortly after, a columnist from Times Tech wrote why He came to believe the media threw.
An agentic AI with the acting capacities connected to the brain of a robot – baby is a humanoid in good faith, and it is a possibility that becomes easier to imagine even without the help of Isaac Asimov.
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Tesla has trouble while Elon Musk laughs at the White House
New entertainment: use AI to illustrate short fiction on Instagram
This week on my iPhone, I scroll the videos of @ Holyfool36 On Instagram.
Created by a 26 -year -old Island man named Dylan (he refused to give his family name), the account publishes charming, retro and slightly frightening videos daily. They usually have 90 seconds. Dylan said he was inspired to create videos with Dark Fantasy works (Clark Ashton Smith), Elden Ring and other Dark Souls games, and analog horror videos on YouTube. Far from AI Sols, videos offer intelligent information from absurd and convincing stories in the form of occult instructions. The human touch is obvious, although AI is the means of production. I appreciate them.
“I write myself because I was born with the faculties to do it. I use the AI to make the images because I do not have these faculties. It is a way to reach an end,” he said.
The account has accumulated more than half a million followers since its launch in the first half of 2024. It earns money via Tiktok advertisements and Merch sales, according to Dylan, but he kept his job full in Tech.
“I went from an amateur to an internet niche micro-cele bridge!” He pointed out. His fiancée also launched an AI art page.
Dylan’s creative process involves several AI tools. He asks Dall-E to make the first draft of the image in his head, then manages the result via Midjourney to give him the retro video game. If the story he writes requires animation, he uses Kling, although most of Holy Fool videos consist of collages of fixed images. All his equipment has the same background music, a simple electronic synth melody and the same narrative voice, which he generated and personalized with Elevenlabs.
The artists of the United States and the United Kingdom have spoken out by hundreds against the use of AI in the arts and what they consider to be theft by technology giants which fold the law of intellectual property. Their point is right. Just last week, The Atlantic has created a way for authors to search for Libgen, a pirated book database, for their work. Many have found their books there. The meta-employees would have downloaded the database from Peer-to-Peer file sharing networks, a question currently in question in copyright action against the company on how he created his IA model, in particular to find out if the chatbot was trained on material protected by copyright. Messages between Meta The personnel revealed in discovery on the download of the database is overwhelming. The employees said that the work protected by copyright of license authors would be too expensive and slow, so they turned to darker means to access gigantic quantities of texts and received Mark ZuckerbergPersonal approval to do so, according to court documents. Meta is worth 1.51 TN and the personal fortune of Mark Zuckerberg weighs $ 202 billion.
However, none of these artists and authors do what the silly idiot is. None fills a fictitious universe with short daily videos. Why would they do it? To create content at speed, an Instagram flow without AI would be a full -time job. For many influencers, this is the case, but these video creators use their own faces and make videos on their real life. Animating fictitious videos so quickly and publishing them for free does not give an interesting return on investment. All this to say – there does not seem to be a lost workforce in the creation of this type of videos, no artist who would be earning his life but which has been replaced by AI. The creation of new types of serialized fiction seems to me to be a case of positive use for AI.