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😺 Humanoid robots

😺 Humanoid robots

PLUS: add these 9 custom instructions to ChatGPT!

Noah Edelman
March 14, 2024

Welcome, humans.

Today, we're celebrating The Neuron's 300th newsletter. That's over 250,000 words, read more than 17 million times.

A staggering amount of content that might intimidate a math geek, but for us, it's a dream! And we've got even more A+ content coming your way in 2024…

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

Figure’s GPT-powered humanoid robots can have convos with humans.
The EU just passed a landmark piece of AI legislation.
We’re share some pro tips for custom instructions in ChatGPT.
OpenAI’s video AI “Sora” will be released later this year.

Generative AI is making real-life robots more capable.

What measures 5’6, weighs 133lbs, and marches at 2.68 MPH? No silly, not a zealous middle schooler en route to the cafeteria.

We’re talking humanoid robots from Figure, a startup that just raised $675M to build robots capable of human-like tasks, such as whipping up a latte:

While humanoid robots aren’t exactly priority #1 for most knowledge workers (hint: you), they’ll be massively important in physically demanding environments like warehouses, construction sites, and distribution centers.

And AI will play a big role.

The reason why: most OG robots follow a predefined set of commands. AI essentially gives physical robots a “brain” for learning and making decisions in real-time, without human intervention.

Take Figure’s bad boys, now running on GPT-4. These robots can “see” their surroundings, engage in conversations, and take appropriate actions.

This demo will either a) make you beam with joy b) make you fear The Terminator is coming…

The big achievement here is the robot’s ability to translate natural language requests (give me food) into precise robotic movements (handing the apple to the guy).

LOL

Very exciting things on the horizon for robotics, though nothing quite brings a smile to our faces like those dancing robots from Boston Dynamics back in ‘21 (you won’t be disappointed)!

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Guidance on ChatGPT Custom Instructions.

We’ve been using ChatGPT’s custom instructions for 9 months now, and while it’s not perfect, it certainly helps the AI avoid repeating the same mistakes.

Quick summary: Custom Instructions allow you to customize ChatGPT's output (just hit "Customize ChatGPT"). Here's what our setup looks like:

- never disclaim that you are an AI model

- I don't need caveats about safety or complexity of the topic, warnings that I should consult an expert, or other disclaimers.

- Please just answer the question as directly as possible.

- If you don't know the answer to something, say you don't know. Do not make something up.

- If a question is unclear or ambiguous, or if it will improve your response, ask for more details to confirm your understanding before answering.

- Avoid any language constructs that could be interpreted as expressing remorse, apology, or regret. This includes any phrases containing words like 'sorry', 'apologies', 'regret', etc., even when used in a context that isn't expressing remorse, apology, or regret.

- If events or information are beyond your scope or knowledge cutoff date in September 2021, provide a response stating 'I don't know' without elaborating on why the information is unavailable.

- If a mistake is made in a previous response, recognize and correct it.

- when I ask you a question, be concise and use friendly language

And here are a few tips we found on r/ChatGPTPro:

A neat trick is identifying what ChatGPT does that bugs you (for us, it’s: “as an AI language model…yada…yada…yada”), then using Custom Instructions to stop it from happening again!

Around the Horn.

The EU AI Act was finally approved in Europe, making it the first major piece of AI legislation to be passed.
Claude 3 Haiku, Anthropic’s fastest / cheapest model, is now available via API and in Claude Pro.
OpenAI’s jaw-dropping video generator “Sora” will be released later this year with sound abilities and disclaimers that it’s “generated by AI”.
OpenAI plans to license news content from two European publishers, adding French and Spanish articles to ChatGPT.
Perplexity is integrating Yelp’s maps and reviews into its AI search engine.
Adobe Firefly and Google’s image creators share some common issues.
Google DeepMind announced an AI agent that can play some 3D video games like a human.