Good morning! On a scale of 1 to 10, how close do you think we are to I, Robot? It might be closer than you think.

NVIDIA announces Project GR00T as another step towards humanoid robots 🤖 

Besides market breaking stonks memery and consumer GPUs (graphic processing units - things to render content on your computer screen), a little known fact is that NVIDIA is actually a machine learning research lab powerhouse. A lot of the content from one of my favourite YouTube channels, Two Minute Papers, are actually published from the research labs at NVIDIA. They are absolutely on the cutting edge of things even without taking into account the AI chip market dominance right now.

Project GR00T (Generalist Robot 00 Technology, who tf names these things…) is NVIDIA’s entry into the race to build the “future of labour”. It serves as a foundational model that is able to take text, video, and demonstration (aka you showing it how something is done) as inputs and generates “actions” for the robot to take. These actions are performed and the robot then observes the effects and feeds that back into the model continuously.

In a world where NVIDIA, Figure AI, Tesla, and god knows how many other billion dollar Silicon Valley backed robot startups are trying to replace the human workforce, it begs the question of how the future of work will evolve and how everyday life will function. Are we rapidly moving towards a “post-employment” era?

Mass timber is heating up in Oregon

Figuratively, of course, as timber generally does pretty well due to charring providing a natural heat insulator. But with the International Mass Timber Conference set to start next week, construction professionals from the timber-pro to the timber-curious are all flying down (or up) to attend the event.

In addition, whether to coincide with the conference or not, Think Wood, published a Studio Spotlight of ZGF Studio, a Portland, Oregon local studio that specializes in design with mass timber.

Lightning Round

• Apple published a new paper unveiling MM1, a family of multimodal LLMs - the open source approach is novel from the company that extremely values its secrecy.

• Dell takes promotion off the table for workers that want to stay remote.