⤴⤵ Up Wing/Down Wing #26

A curated selection of pro-progress and anti-progress news items from the week that was

In case you missed it .. .

🎭✨ Ben Affleck’s wise words on AI (Monday)

🧠 Supporting America's smartest kids: A Quick Q&A with … political scientist Charles Murray (Tuesday)

✨ 📈 The AI Paradox: When will artificial intelligence boost US economic growth? (Thursday)

🛰 The story of the US Space Force: A Quick Q&A with … defense policy analyst Todd Harrison (Friday)

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Up Wing Things

🤖 Startup creating AI-controlled robots is now worth billions. Physical Intelligence, a robotics startup in San Francisco, is developing AI-powered robots with human-like dexterity and an understanding of the physical world. Using large-scale training data and advanced models akin to GPT, their robots are mastering tasks like folding clothes and cleaning kitchens. Founded by experts from UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Google, PI raised $400M from investors including OpenAI and is now valued at over $2 billion.T he company aims to revolutionize robotics by combining vision-language models with physical learning, enabling them to generalize and adapt to new tasks. (Wired)

🎖️ Trump is looking to startups like Anduril to revamp the US military. President-elect Donald Trump consulted Trae Stephens, chair of defense startup Anduril, on modernizing US military operations, emphasizing cost-cutting and advanced technology. The meeting between Trump and Anduril signals Trump’s plan to shakeup the defense sector: 

Trump has promised to revamp the US defense establishment, cutting wasteand modernizing how weapons are made and procured. Anduril, valued at $14 billion in its most recent funding round, makes underwater vehicles,surveillance tools and autonomous weapons systems, and sees itself as an alternative to more established military contractors.

Supported by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Trump aims to reform procurement processes by favoring innovative contracting firms. (Bberg)

🍅 Tomatoes can be both big and sweet now thanks to CRISPR. Scientists have used CRISPR to deactivate two specific genes in tomatoes, boosting sugar levels by up to 30 percent without reducing size or yield. A study published in Nature highlights the potential to enhance flavor and sugar storage in fruits. These engineered tomatoes could reduce costs for products like tomato paste and improve supermarket varieties often criticized for bland taste. Researchers believe this breakthrough could also apply to other crops, leveraging wild species' genetic diversity to enhance domesticated varieties. (Nature)