Good morning! Hope y’all have a great week as our resident LLMs keep having issues with DEI.

Gemini generates a diverse cast of “1943 German soldier[s]” 🥊

Honestly this is probably a good opportunity as any to talk about diversity and representation in LLMs and other AI models after the above missteps of Google’s Gemini. Though this seems like a hilarious overreaction on the part of Google to generate more diverse images, it actually signals a deep problem of the AI models in general. As AI models consolidate and make connections between large sums of data, the underlying societal biases embedded within the datasets emerge. This will be an enormous problem, occurring through perpetuating stereotypes, generating certain races in response to certain actions/events, or having an implicit bias when evaluating unrelated responses.

Google has obviously thought a lot about this problem and have tried to implement a solution in the example above. Though slightly poorly executed, it represents a good general direction to consider as we come to depend on these systems more without thinking about the potential implicit biases they contain.

Figure AI raises $675M for general humanoid robots - what percentage of construction sites will be autonomous in the next 5 years?

Humanoid robots storm back into the conversation again with Figure AI, the hot new robotics AI startup having a massive $675 million funding round. Big names like Nvidia, OpenAI, Amazon, and Microsoft all pile in on this funding round, snagging up a spot to dictate the future of this company. Though the hype is undeniable, the true value proposition of the company remains to be known amidst competitors like Boston Dynamics with both Spot and Atlas as well as Tesla’s Optimus platform. Though many companies and many many dollars are flowing into this endeavour, the true path to technical feasibility is still unknown. Many are just speculative bets at this point in time.

With respect to the construction industry, however, there is extreme potential to upend the entire labour chain of a construction project. Why large GC firms are not jumping into these bets would also be great question to dig into more.

Lightning Round

• Google open sources the model and its code technology used to create Gemini as Gemma

• EGBC’s call for presenters at the AGM is coming up

Quick Tips

• Quick career tip - keep an updated list of all the things you did and your achievements as soon as they happen. The specific outcome are much easier to jot down immediately than 6 months later.