‘Nearly a century and a half of innovation and construction is coming to a close. MegaBuilds shares this fantastic video about the long, long road to completing Barcelona’s incredible basilica.…’ (via Boing Boing)
‘If your vision of a dystopian future included robot monks presiding over ancient rituals, Kyoto University has brought that vision one step closer to reality. A research team from the university, in collaboration with the tech ventures Teraverse and XNOVA, recently unveiled a new AI-integrated robot monk — the Buddharoid — at the Shoren-in temple in Kyoto.
The Buddharoid is designed to support the Buddhist clergy as Japan’s religious infrastructure faces a steady decline. It utilizes a system called BuddhaBot-Plus, a specialized generative AI derived from OpenAI’s ChatGPT that has been trained extensively on sacred Buddhist scriptures. This allows the robot to provide spiritual guidance on personal and social issues, like a real monk would.
Beyond its conversational capabilities, the Buddharoid uses hardware — developed by China’s Unitree Robotics — to mimic the specific movements of a monk, including a slow gait, bowing and the gassho gesture of placing palms together in prayer.…’ (via Tokyo Weekender)
‘Less than 24 hours before the deadline in an ultimatum issued by the Pentagon, Anthropic has refused the Department of Defense’s demands for unrestricted access to its AI.
It’s the culmination of a dramatic exchange of public statements, social media posts, and behind-the-scenes negotiations, coming down to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s desire to renegotiate all AI labs’ current contracts with the military. But Anthropic, so far, has refused to back down from its two current red lines: no mass surveillance of Americans, and no lethal autonomous weapons (or weapons with license to kill targets with no human oversight whatsoever). OpenAI and xAI had reportedly already agreed to the new terms, while Anthropic’s refusal had led to CEO Dario Amodei being summoned to the White House this week for a meeting with Hegseth himself, in which the Secretary reportedly issued an ultimatum to the CEO to back down by the end of business day on Friday or else.…’ (via The Verge)
