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Week in tech: Is the Tesla humanoid bot around the corner?

According to reports, Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot, first announced in August 2021, could go on sale as soon as the end of next year

FILE: Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter, gestures as he attends a conference in Paris in June 2023.(Reuters)

By Team Lounge

LAST PUBLISHED 27.04.2024  |  12:00 PM IST

A recap of what made news in the world of science and technology.

Microsoft unveils Phi-3 small language models

Tech giant Microsoft announced its Phi-3-mini small language model on 23 April with the aim of making artificial intelligence (AI) accessible to more people. In a news announcement, the company said: “Large language models (LLMs) have created exciting new opportunities to be more productive and creative using AI. But their size means they can require significant computing resources to operate... While those models will still be the gold standard for solving many types of complex tasks, Microsoft has been developing a series of small language models (SLMs) that offer many of the same capabilities found in LLMs but are smaller in size and are trained on smaller amounts of data." The Phi-3-mini is part of the Phi-3 family of open models -- the most capable and cost-effective small language models available, the company’s announcement said, explaining that SLMs are designed to perform well for simpler tasks, are more accessible and easier to use for organizations with limited resources and they can be more easily fine-tuned to meet specific needs. The Phi-3-mini will be available in the Microsoft Azure AI Model Catalog and on Hugging Face, a platform for machine learning models, as well as Ollama, a lightweight framework for running models on a local machine, the company added further.

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Tesla bot around the corner?

Tesla’s Optimus robot could go on sale as soon as the end of next year, its CEO Elon Musk said earlier this week. According to a Reuters report, Musk told investors on a conference call on 23 April that he guessed the Tesla robot, called Optimus, would be able to perform tasks in the factory by the end of this year. Musk has said in the past that robot sales could become a larger part of the Tesla business than other segments, including car manufacturing, the report further added. Optimus is said to be a general-purpose robotic humanoid. It was first announced at Tesla's Artificial Intelligence Day event in August 2021, and a prototype was shown in 2022.

Japan’s ‘moon sniper' survives third lunar night

Japan’s moon lander – dubbed the moon sniper – survived another two-week lunar night and woke up for a third time, the Japanese space agency said on 24 April. The Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (or SLIM) had touched down on the lunar surface in January. However, the unmanned spacecraft landed at an awkward angle that left its solar panels facing the wrong way. Surprisingly, the probe was revived in late February once the lunar night, which lasts about 14 Earth days, came to an end. “Despite facing temperatures as low as -130 degrees Celsius (-200 degrees Fahrenheit), it repeated the feat late last month and transmitted new images back to Earth... On Wednesday, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said it had succeeded again in communicating with the probe after it woke up for the third time," an AFP report explained.

Compiled by Nitin Sreedhar, with inputs from agencies.

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