AI & Machine Learning — Posts

28 posts on "AI & Machine Learning" by Shlomo Strauss — bilingual writing on technology, science, and business.

• Volvo's new update highlights the DFRS European road safety network — Europe's DFRS system shares real-time hazard data across different automakers to create a collaborative network designed to prevent traffic accidents.
• How Flock AI cameras became a controversial mass surveillance tool — Flock's AI security cameras have evolved into a massive surveillance network, raising serious concerns about predictive policing and privacy rights.
• The acoustic smartphone network defending Ukraine from drones — Ukraine uses thousands of old smartphones to detect drone acoustics, enabling cheap interceptions that shift the economic balance of warfare.
• Building self-improving AI through rapid iteration cycles — Applying rapid iteration principles to AI allows developers to build automated systems that continuously review and improve their own code.
• The biology of forest recovery after severe wildfires — Specialized fungi and fire-adapted plants use the heat and smoke of wildfires to trigger rapid ecological regeneration in scorched forests.
• Power Grid Anomalies Expose Transnational Crypto Laundering — A Chinese crime syndicate's hidden Bitcoin mining and money-laundering operation was dismantled after algorithms detected power grid anomalies.
• The Foxconn worker who built a $70 billion manufacturing giant — Founded by a former factory worker, Luxshare now assembles the Apple Vision Pro and is raising billions to expand into AI server infrastructure.
• The dopamine trap of building useless AI projects — The ease of generating code with AI creates a dopamine loop of unused projects, highlighting the need to focus on fundamentals and real value.
• The structural flaws driving OpenAI toward collapse — Without its own infrastructure, OpenAI's growing user base deepens its debt, risking a collapse that could trigger a broader tech recession.
• An autonomous AI system turns bug reports into deployed code — A newly developed AI reporting tool analyzes user feedback to automatically provide tech support, write code, and deploy software updates.
• An Island Experiment in AI Governance and Digital Twins — British startup Sensay is launching a social experiment on a tropical island, using AI digital twins of historical figures to govern a new state.
• Google's TurboQuant Algorithm Cuts AI Memory Needs by 8x — Google's open-source TurboQuant algorithm uses polar coordinates to compress AI memory requirements by eightfold without losing accuracy.
• Agentic browsers and open-source platforms make a surprisingly — Pairing mature open-source platforms with an agentic AI browser bridges the gap between an empty self-hosted stack and a fully configured, working system…
• Fiber-optic cables and AI are finding hidden water leaks underground — A British startup repurposed existing fiber-optic infrastructure and AI models to detect water pipe leaks, saving over 700 million liters of water…
• Musk's AI empire: custom chips, space servers, and a closed-loop — From Dojo 3 supercomputers in orbit to xAI merging with SpaceX, the piece maps how Musk is assembling a self-contained AI pipeline that no competitor…
• Google's AI game demo wiped billions off gaming stocks — but is the — Google's Project Genie demo triggered a sharp sell-off in major gaming stocks, but the real AI threat to the industry likely comes from code-generation…
• How Nvidia quietly sought pirated data from Anna's Archive to train — An internal Nvidia email revealed the company pursued access to Anna's Archive's illegal dataset for AI training, exposing the ethical compromises driving
• Jevons Paradox and Baumol's Effect: what AI will do to the economy — As AI cuts the cost per token, Jevons Paradox predicts demand will surge far beyond current levels, while Baumol's Effect explains why your plumber's…
• An AI model links different fingerprints from the same person — Trained on 60,000 prints from a government database, an AI model matched different fingers belonging to the same person with 77% accuracy, challenging…
• What a pasta machine reveals about how neural networks see images — A pasta machine splitting one image into smaller copies turns out to be a surprisingly clear model for how convolutional filters and AI image generation…
• Automating SEO for thousands of products with AI and Make — A Make automation pipeline using ChatGPT or Claude rewrites product titles and descriptions at scale, updating thousands of store listings in one click…
• Google's Genie 2 generates playable game worlds from a single image — Google's Genie 2 turns a single image into a navigable game environment, and may soon help studios cut the years and millions required to ship a AAA title.
• Your router's Wi-Fi signals can map your movements through walls — Researchers trained a model on paired Wi-Fi signals and camera footage, enabling human presence and movement detection through walls without any camera.
• Inside Elon Musk's GPU cluster: how large language models are trained — A step-by-step breakdown of how language models learn — using Musk's massive GPU cluster as a starting point to explain forward passes, loss calculation,…
• Google's Add Me feature puts the photographer back in the group photo — Google's new Add Me feature for Pixel devices uses AI to merge two separate shots into one group photo that includes everyone, even the photographer.
• Google's AI tool lets anyone design a custom font from scratch — A new AI-powered tool from Google Research lets designers and developers generate entirely new typefaces, opening up broad possibilities for web…
• Apple's on-device AI strategy may finally give Apple Silicon a reason — By betting on privacy-focused, on-device AI with its new openELM model, Apple may have found the killer use case that finally justifies its powerful…
• Why Apple is paying Shutterstock $50 million for AI training data — Apple's deal with Shutterstock is the latest sign that data ownership has become a defining economic advantage in the AI era, reshaping the value of…