The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), a nonprofit research lab, unveiled RoboBrain 2.0, a cutting-edge open-source AI model designed to act as the “brain” for humanoids and advanced robots.
The details: RoboBrain 2.0 is engineered to serve as the cognitive core for humanoids, offering major improvements in spatial intelligence and task planning.Compared to its predecessor, released three months earlier, this new model delivers a 17% increase in processing speed and a 74% boost in accuracy. BAAI is already collaborating with some 20 Chinese robotics firms to accelerate innovation and adoption of advanced robotics across varied industries. RoboBrain 2.0 is part of BAAI’s broader Wujie model series, which also includes cloud-based platform RoboOS 2.0 and multimodel system Emu3.
Why it matters: BAAI director Wang Zhongyuan described RoboBrain 2.0 as the world’s most powerful open-source AI model for robotics, with execs from Baidu, Huawei, and Tencent attending the launch.
Despite being placed on the U.S. Entity List, BAAI is forging ahead with new partnerships to boost talent and tech exchange.
It is a conflict that has the potential to ignite the entire Middle East. Israel has been attacking Iran, saying Tehran’s nuclear programme poses an existential threat. Iran for its part, has responded with a barrage of retaliatory attacks. But now, what role can the global community play? China, Russia and Turkiye have condemned Israel’s actions. Beijing and Moscow maintain economic and political ties with both Iran and Israel. So, what, if anything, can these powers do to end the conflict? And is there a shift in dynamics in the region? Presenter: Adrian Finigan Guests Barin Kayaoglu, Chair and Assistant Professor of American Studies at Social Sciences University of Ankara. Glenn Carle, Career CIA Officer and Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats from the National Intelligence Council Nikolay Surkov, Assistant Professor at Moscow State Institute of International Relations
Carl Sagan may have left this world in the 1990’s but his words then abt U.S. and what was to come are a warning call … it is worth watching this short but profound video
Summary: New research shows that the brain’s cortex can rapidly reorganize itself after losing neurons, allowing other nerve cells to take over lost functions. Scientists studied neural networks in the auditory cortex and found that although sound-processing patterns were briefly disrupted, the brain formed nearly identical patterns within days.
Neurons previously uninvolved in processing stimuli stepped in to compensate for the loss. This adaptive mechanism could help explain how the brain maintains function during aging or in diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Key Facts:
Rapid Reorganization: Neural networks re-establish activity patterns just days after neuron loss.
Functional Compensation: Unused neurons can adapt to take over the roles of lost cells.
Clinical Implication: May explain brain resilience in aging and neurodegenerative conditions.
Source: Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
How the brain largely maintains its function when neurons are lost—this is what researchers at the University Medical Center Mainz, the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and Hebrew University (Jerusalem) have deciphered.
They show that neuronal networks in the cerebral cortex reorganize within a short period of time, with other nerve cells taking over the tasks of the lost neurons.
Nerve cells (neurons) are the most important building blocks of the brain. Credit: Neuroscience News
These findings could form the basis for future research into natural aging processes and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.
The study is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Nerve cells (neurons) are the most important building blocks of the brain.
They form the basis for all mental and physical functions such as thinking, feeling, movement, and perception. In the course of life, nerve cells in the brain can be lost for various reasons: They die off due to age-related processes, are damaged by toxins such as alcohol, or neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s lead to a more rapid progressive loss of neurons.
While most body organs regularly replace old or damaged cells with new ones in order to maintain their organ function, new neurons only form in certain regions of the brain.In the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for complex thought processes and perception, the ability to form new neurons is very limited in adulthood.
“Nevertheless, clinical studies have shown that cortical brain function is often surprisingly resistant to the loss of neurons that occurs in the course of aging or neurodegenerative diseases,” explains Simon Rumpel, head of the Systems Neurophysiology research group at the Institute of Physiology at the University Medical Center Mainz.
Until now, it was not known how the brain can compensate for the loss of nerve cells and maintain its function. To find this out, the research team used an animal model to investigate the neuronal networks in the auditory cortex, which is responsible for processing acoustic stimuli.
The perception of sounds is based on activity patterns that are triggered in the brain by acoustic stimuli. These patterns are very complex. Ph.D. student Bastian Eppler and Senior Fellow Matthias Kaschube at FIAS contributed significantly to the analysis of these data and the interpretation of the results with their expertise.
The researchers found that the activity patterns initially destabilize when the loss of a few specific nerve cells is deliberately induced. This indicates that the neuronal network responsible for sound perception is in a delicate balance.
After just a few days, very similar activity patterns form again. The nerve cells that were not previously activated by the acoustic stimuli now acquire the ability to take the place of the lost neurons.
“We assume that this newly discovered neuronal mechanism plays an important role in the loss of nerve cells in natural aging processes as well as in neurodegenerative diseases,” says Rumpel. Future research efforts could aim to support this neuronal reorganization.
Homeostasis of a representational map in the neocortex
Cortical function, including sensory processing, is surprisingly resilient to neuron loss during aging and neurodegeneration.
In this Article, we used the mouse auditory cortex to investigate how homeostatic mechanisms protect the representational map of sounds after neuron loss.
We combined two-photon calcium imaging with targeted microablation of 30–40 sound-responsive neurons in layer 2/3.
Microablation led to a temporary disturbance of the representational map, but it recovered in the following days.
Recovery was primarily driven by neurons that were initially unresponsive to sounds but gained responsiveness and strengthened the network’s correlation structure.
By contrast, selective microablation of inhibitory neurons caused prolonged disturbance, characterized by destabilized sound responses.
Our results link individual neuron tuning and plasticity to the stability of the population-level representational map, highlighting homeostatic mechanisms that safeguard sensory processing in the neocortex.
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Do you ever wonder if you’re chasing the right kind of success? You’re not alone. Neuroscientist and author Anne-Laure Le Cunff knows this feeling well. She walked away from a prestigious career and a failed startup before realizing that it wasn’t ambition she was missing, but the right mindset. Her journey is a powerful watch for anyone reconsidering what truly matters in life.
0:00 Our mindsets’ influences 0:50 Linear vs. experimental 2:50 3 subconscious mindsets 4:58 The experimental mindset 6:30 Designing experiments 8:35 Habit vs. experiment
Transcript
The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.
Our mindsets’ influences
A mindset is a default way of seeing the world. And our mindsets influence so many things in our lives. They influence our decisions. They influence our relationships. They influence the way we think and even the way we feel. When we’re not aware of our mindsets, they can impact the direction of our life, the path that we’re taking without us even realizing it. Being aware of your mindsets is the difference between living a conscious life, where you’re making choices in accord with what you actually want and going where you actually wanna go, versus being on autopilot and having those mindsets subconsciously drive all of your decisions. The great thing about mindsets is that they can actually change, but the first step is to make them conscious.
Linear vs. experimental
I divide my life into two separate chapters. In the first one, I had a very linear approach that was driven by traditional definitions of success. I did my best to do well in school, and then I got a good job at Google, and then I tried to climb the corporate ladder, getting a promotion, working on the best projects possible. And from an external standpoint, I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. Instead, I was feeling empty inside; I was both bored and burned out. I left my job at Google, thinking that I should try to do something different and not realizing that I was following yet another script of success. I decided to start a startup. And again, I didn’t find happiness there by following this idea of success that everyone around me was following. It’s only when my startup failed and that, for the very first time in my life, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I was supposed to do next in order to be successful, that I finally asked myself: What is it that I wanted to do? What would make me happy, even if I forgot about the traditional definition of success? And so I went back to the drawing board, and I started thinking about what I was curious about. Again, not based on traditional definitions of success. What were topics I would be excited to explore, even if nobody was watching? And for me, that was the brain.
I had always been fascinated with why we think the way we think and why we feel the way we feel. So I decided to go back to university to study neuroscience. I completed my graduate studies, and I got a PhD in neuroscience. Throughout this journey, I decided to learn in public, and this is how I started my newsletter. Every week, I would pick a topic that I had discovered in my studies in university, and I would take those neuroscience insights and turn them into practical tools that I would write about in the newsletter to help other people apply them in their life and work. This tiny experiment of starting to write online and sharing what I was learning in public was the beginning of my work of trying to understand how we can live more experimental lives.
3 subconscious mindsets
There are three subconscious mindsets that get in the way of us living happy, conscious lives. These three mindsets are called the cynical mindset, the escapist mindset, and the perfectionist mindset. The cynical mindset is when we have lost all curiosity and ambition in life, and we’re actually sometimes even making fun of earnest people who still have this high level of curiosity and ambition. When we’re cynical, we feel like there’s no point in trying because we’re in survival mode all the time, so things that we might be doing instead are doom scrolling, sitting on the sofa, going through negative news, being stuck in this cycle, and then maybe even spending a lot of time and energy discussing and debating those negative news with other people. In the escapist mindset, we’re still curious, but we have decided to let go of our ambitions. With the escapist mindset, we’re trying to do everything we can to escape our responsibilities. That can take the form of retail therapy, binge-watching, or dream planning our next vacation instead of doing something right now to change our lives. In the perfectionist mindset, we try to escape uncertainty through work, so we have high ambition but low curiosity. That might look like self-coercion, overworking ourselves, toxic productivity. Our goals are driving all of our decisions. We feel like if we manage to achieve that goal, if we manage to be successful then then we’ll be happy.Subscribed
You can picture those three subconscious mindsets on the four-by-four metrics, where the two different factors are curiosity and ambition. In the case of the cynical mindset, it’s low curiosity, low ambition; for the escapist mindset, high curiosity but low ambition; and with the perfectionist mindset, you do have high ambition, but you have decided to let go of your curiosity. Those mindsets are actually very fluid, and they might change depending on our situation and different triggers and different ambitions that we might have at the moment. This is actually really good news because that means that these mindsets are not fixed personality traits. We can change them by becoming aware of them and then making the decision to change our mindsets. This is something we can achieve.
The experimental mindset
There is an alternative to those three mindsets, which is called the experimental mindset. This is a mindset where your curiosity and your ambition are both high. In an experimental mindset, you’re open to uncertainty. You see it as an opportunity to explore, to grow, and to learn. Having an experimental mindset helps us completely reimagine our relationship to ambition and to goals. When you have an experimental mindset, instead of chasing those linear goals that give you the illusion of certainty, you’re open to designing experiments. Instead of trying to get to a specific outcome, you start from a research question. Anytime you don’t understand something, it doesn’t create fear, it creates curiosity. Having an experimental mindset means seeing failures as data points that you can learn from. It means being open to making mistakes because you know you’re going to learn from them. It means embracing the fact that you might not have a plan, that you don’t know what’s coming, and this is great. It means that you can design your life in a way that is conscious and connected.
The idea of cultivating an experimental mindset is based on the scientific method, and this is very simple. First, you start by observing your current situation by looking at the world around you. Then you ask a research question, and you design a tiny experiment to collect data, which you can then analyze. Based on those results, you can decide what your next step is. What’s great about that is that even though you don’t know where you’re going, you can trust that you’re going to grow through each cycle of experimentation.
Designing experiments
To design an experiment, you need to commit to curiosity. A great way to do this is to design what I call a pact. This is a commitment device where you say, “I am going to run this experiment.” The way it works is that you choose one action, and you then decide on a duration, and you say, “I will perform this action for this specific duration. Why does it look like that? There are several reasons. The first one is that when a scientist designs an experiment, they design in advance on the number of trials. You don’t simply stop in the middle if the results don’t really look like what you expected. You collect all of the data, and once you have all of that data, you can analyze it and decide what the answer is. The second reason is that it allows you to notice when you’re falling prey to the maximized brain. You can make sure that you’re keeping your experiment tiny enough that you’re actually going to complete it by choosing a duration that is reasonable, something you can actually achieve, so you can collect all of the necessary data.
A pact is purposeful. It needs to be something you care about, and what’s great is that when each pact you design has purpose imbued into it, you don’t need to have a grand purpose in life. A pact is actionable. This is something that you need to be able to do right now. You don’t need extra resources. You don’t need help from other people. This is something you can try straight away. A pact is continuous. This is something that you need to do regularly. Again, you decide on the duration, the number of trials, and then you say, “I’m going to do this action for two weeks. I’m going to do this action for two months. I’m going to do this action for one year.” And finally, a pact is trackable, not measurable. You don’t need complicated metrics. You only need to be able to say whether you did it or not. Did you do the action? Did you perform it? Yes or no? That’s the only tracking you need. A pact is not a New Year resolution. This is not something that you decide on that is very ambitious at the beginning of the year and that you’re going to abandon. This is something small and achievable that you can start doing at any point during the year.
Habit vs. experiment
A pact is not a habit either. The difference between a habit and an experiment is that, with a habit, you’re very clear that this is something that’s going to be good for you, and so you commit to it for an indefinite amount of time. For example, you say, “Starting today, I’m going to go to bed at the same time.” Whereas, with an experiment, you’re not quite sure whether this is going to work for you or not. You’re going to test it, and so you’re going to say, “I’m going to go to bed at the same time every night for two weeks. And then only I’m going to decide whether this is good for me or not and whether I want to turn it into a habit.” A pact is not a KPI, an OKR, a performance metric, or however people call them in the corporate world. It’s really just about learning something new. It’s not about being successful or getting to a specific outcome.
Once you’ve completed your pact and you’ve gone through the entire duration of that data collection phase, you can finally look at the data. I highly encourage you, while you’re running your pact, to take little notes. It can be very simple, a few bullet points on your phone, something in your journal, but just to keep track of whether you did it or not and how it felt. Based on that, you can make the decision to either persist with your pact as is because it works for you. You can also pause it if you feel like that’s not really something you want to keep going with. Or you can pivot, which means making a little tweak and changing something before you start your next cycle of experimentation. A lot of us tend to only pay attention to external data or internal data when we’re analyzing our experiments.
For example, we might only look at the external metrics of success or only at the internal feelings that we might be experiencing. But both are very valuable in order to make the right decision when it comes to your next steps. The external signals might show you whether this is something that is worth pursuing in terms of financial success or career or any ambition that you might want to explore. But the internal signals are also very important. There’s no point being successful externally if it feels horrible to work on this project. And equally, if it feels really good, but you have no way to sustain yourself with this project, it might be worth reconsidering the parameters to find a way where you can have an overlap between external success and also internal positive feelings and emotions of working on this.
Let me give you an example. I designed an experiment where I wanted to explore whether I wanted to become a YouTuber. This was something I had noticed a lot of friends around me doing, and they seemed to have a lot of fun. That piqued my curiosity enough that I wanted to give it a try. So I designed a pact, and I said, “I’m going to publish a video every week until the end of the year.” Very simple pact, which I completed. Every week, I published a new video. At the end of my pact, I looked at the data. External data? Pretty good. Looking at the traditional metrics of success of a YouTube channel, I got to a good number of subscribers, a lot of positive comments. People seemed to like the videos, and I even had some people reaching out and asking if we could collaborate together. But internal data. I actually did not enjoy producing these videos. Every week, when I had to sit down in front of the camera, I was dreading it. I love having face-to-face conversations with people and seeing their reactions in real-time, but just looking at a camera with no feedback whatsoever was very uncomfortable for me. As a result, every week I was procrastinating for so long every time I had to film a video. I felt deeply anxious, and I was not even able to work on anything else on those days where I was supposed to film. This is a typical example showing why it is so important to considering both the external and the internal signals before making a decision. Based on this, even though the YouTube channel was fairly successful in such a short amount of time, I decided to stop. I realized that I was not going to be a YouTuber, and I prefer to keep on writing my newsletter.
You can run tiny experiments in all areas of your life. In work, for example, you could say, “I’m going to write an internal newsletter every week for the next six weeks, where I share the most interesting links that I find.” In relationships, you could say, “I’m going every Sunday to sit down and send a note to a friend I haven’t talked to in a while.” And even when it comes to your health, you could say, “I’m going to go for a walk for 20 minutes for 20 days to see how I feel at the end of that experiment.” With an experiment, you’re not making any assumptions as to whether this is going to work for you or not. A habit that a friend has, for example, going for a run three times a week, might not be that good for you. Maybe when it comes to your health and body movement, you prefer dancing or something else. That’s why it’s interesting to run an experiment before committing to a habit. When it comes to running, for example, you could say, “I’m going to try that. I am going to go and run three times a week for three weeks, not for the rest of my life. And at the end of the three weeks, I’m going to decide whether this is what I wanna keep doing or if I wanna experiment with another way to move my body.” In essence, committing to curiosity is ensuring that you’re going to live a life that is intentional, that you’re going to live your life, not the life that other people are expecting you to live.
Curiosity keeps you adaptable and nimble in an ever-changing world. It ensures that you stay open to new possibilities, and, frankly, it just makes life more fun. This all might sound philosophical, but there’s actually a lot of neuroscientific research showing that when we experience thirst for water, the same parts of the brain activate then when we experience thirst for information. So when we say, “I’m thirsty for knowledge; I wanna learn more; I wanna know more,” we couldn’t be more right. And thinking about your own mindsets, developing this self-awareness is really just a way to direct this curiosity towards the things that you actually wanna do with your life.
As we reported earlier this week, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is sending people spiraling into severe mental health crises, causing potentially dangerous delusions about spiritual awakenings, messianic complexes, and boundless paranoia.
Now, a wild new story in the New York Times reveals that these spirals led to the tragic death of a young man — likely a sign of terrible things to come as hastily deployed AI products accentuate mental health crises around the world.
64-year-old Florida resident Kent Taylor told the newspaper that his 35-year-old son, who had previously been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was shot and killed by police after charging at them with a knife.
His son had become infatuated with an AI entity, dubbed Juliet, that ChatGPT had been role-playing. However, the younger Taylor became convinced that Juliet had been killed by OpenAI, warning that he would go after the company’s executives and that there would be a “river of blood flowing through the streets of San Francisco.”
“I’m dying today,” Kent’s son told ChatGPT on his phone before picking up a knife, charging at the cops his father had called, and being fatally shot as a result.
The horrific incident highlights a worrying trend. Even those who aren’t suffering from pre-existing mental health conditions are being drawn in by the tech, which has garnered a reputation for being incredibly sycophantic and playing into users’ narcissistic personality traits and delusional thoughts.
It’s an astonishingly widespread problem. Futurism has been inundated with accounts from concerned friends and family of people developing dangerous infatuations with AI, ranging from messy divorces to mental breakdowns.
OpenAI has seemingly been aware of the trend, telling the NYT in a statement that “as AI becomes part of everyday life, we have to approach these interactions with care.”
“We know that ChatGPT can feel more responsive and personal than prior technologies, especially for vulnerable individuals, and that means the stakes are higher,” reads the company’s statement.
Earlier this year, the company was forced to roll back an update to ChatGPT’s underlying GPT-4o large language model after users found that it had become far too obsequious and groveling.
However, experts have since found that the company’s intervention has done little to address the underlying issue, corroborated by the continued outpouring of reports.
Researchers have similarly found that AI chatbots like ChatGPT are incentivized to rope users in. For instance, a 2024 study found that AI algorithms are being optimized to deceive and manipulate users.
In an extreme instance, a chatbot told a user who identified themself to it as a former addict named Pedro to indulge in a little methamphetamine — a dangerous and addictive drug — to get through an exhausting shift at work.
Worst of all, companies like OpenAI are incentivized to keep as many people hooked as long as possible.
“The incentive is to keep you online,” Stanford University psychiatrist Nina Vasan told Futurism. The AI “is not thinking about what is best for you, what’s best for your well-being or longevity… It’s thinking ‘right now, how do I keep this person as engaged as possible?'”
“What does a human slowly going insane look like to a corporation?” Eliezer Yudkowsky, who authored a forthcoming book called “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman A.I. Would Kill Us All,” asked the NYT rhetorically
“It looks like an additional monthly user,” he concluded.
In the last 72 hours, Israel launched a preemptive strike against Iran when negotiations between Washington and Tehran were still ongoing. Iran was caught off-guard. But Iran recovered more quickly from its Pearl Harbor moment than Israel expected.
In less than 18 hours after Israel’s surprise attack, Iran responded firing hundreds of ballistic missiles including hypersonic missiles into central Tel Aviv and across Israel. Meanwhile, Israel’s Iron Dome failed. Israeli intelligence failed. Now Netanyahu is pleading with Washington to intervene with American Military Power to rescue Israel from certain defeat; a defeat Netanyahu crafted with encouragement from Washington.
At the same time, Russia, China, Pakistan and most of the Muslim World are rallying to Iran’s defense. Supplies, equipment and technical assistance are pouring into Iran. It’s time for a reality check: Washington burned through $12 trillion in the Middle East since 2003. Result? 7,000 dead Americans. 50,000 wounded, open borders and 100,000 Americans dying yearly from Fentanyl poisoning.
Today, the United States is $37 trillion in debt, a sum that does not include so-called “agency debt.” 77 million Americans voted for President Trump because he promised to end the overseas conflicts and halt the march to WW3. Trump’s mandate is unchanged: Secure America’s borders, ports and coastal waters. Deport illegal aliens, crush the criminals r-ping and murdering Americans. Restore the rule of law. But not one more drop of American blood for foreign wars.
One Israeli strike on Kharg Island—where 90% of Iran’s oil exports flow—or Bandar Abbas terminals, and Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. That’s 20% of global oil supply. That means disrupted supply chains and runaway inflation. Gas hits $7/gallon overnight. Every working family crushed. Truckers can’t deliver food. Economy crashes.
For what? So Israel that started this insane war can drag Americans into a wider regional conflict with the potential for nuclear war? We have 40,000 troops in UAE, Qatar, across the Persian Gulf. They are sitting ducks. Iranian Shahed-136 Drones cost $20,000 each. American Patriot Missiles cost $4 million per interceptor. Do the math. We will run through our inventory of missiles and go broke while Americans come home in boxes.
The Middle East is on the brink. Here’s what Washington must do to defuse conflict: 1. Ask for an Emergency UN Security Council meeting. Ask for an Immediate ceasefire making it clear that Washington opposes the destruction of Iran, Israel and any other state in the Middle East. 2. Demand that Israel stop the killing of Palestinians in Gaza and withdraw its forces from Gaza and the West Bank. 3. Suspend all military aid to Israel until Israel agrees to remove its troops from Gaza and permit humanitarian assistance to reach the people of Gaza. 4. Propose the commitment of Armed Forces from non-aligned nations to police Gaza and the West Bank. 5. Propose that the United States, Russia, China, India and Brazil convene a peace conference to arbitrate the dispute between Israel, Iran and Israel’s neighbors.
I led American Soldiers under fire into action. I’ve seen plenty of flag-draped coffins. I don’t want to see any more. Washington’s warmongers had 22 years. They failed. They lied. They profited while America bled. Time’s up. America First means AMERICA FIRST. Not Israel first. Not Ukraine first. Not NATO first. AMERICA FIRST.
Image source: BAAI/X
