High-tech Surgery, AI Breakthroughs & Inner Journeys

This week we cover long-distance surgery, the latest and greatest in AI, and I share a way I reconnect with myself.

Let's get going 🙂

Thing 1 - Long distance surgery

A surgeon operating on a person thousands of kilometers away still feels a bit bonkers. Yet China did it. Doctors in eastern China used their homegrown robot, Toumai, to remove a patient's gallbladder in western China - a mind-blowing 4,650 km apart! 🤯

Think of 5G as a data highway, zipping commands between doctor and robot. Toumai, the four-armed robot surgeon, acts like a skilled assistant. It's equipped with features like a naked eye 3D high-definition view and a high degree of freedom artificial wrist, which provide surgeons with a realistic surgical experience and eye-hand-mechanical synchronization.

The 30-minute procedure called a cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal), was like a real-time surgery video game! Doctors at Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital remotely controlled Tumai in Beijing. This isn't just cool, it's a game-changer for healthcare. Remote areas could get help from top surgeons anywhere. 5G robots like Toumai are breaking down barriers, making sure everyone has a shot at the best medical care.

(source)

Thing 2 - AI of the week

• Cognition Labs introduces Devin, the first AI software engineer
  It passed practical engineering interviews and even completed real jobs on Upwork
• Midjourney dropped a character consistency feature
• xAI open-sourced Grok - Grok-1 is a 314B parameter Mixture of Experts model
• Sam Altman rejoined OpenAI board
• Pika Labs introduced a Sound Effects tool to pair with their video generation
• Covariant AI introduced RFM-1, a Robotics Foundation Model giving robots human-like reasoning capabilities
• Apple announced a multi-modal large language model, MM1 - 30B parameters, making it the largest MLLM so far.

And all this is just scratching the surface!

Thing 3 - The Inner Compass

Many people waste years because they refuse to take a few hours for themselves to deeply self-reflect on what they actually want from life.

It’s natural that you feel lost if you spend all your time listening to society, and forget about your own ability to think independently.

- Orange Book

Orange Book dropping truth bombs.

This is where I find meditation to be super-powerful. Going on a walk in nature and noting down whatever interesting comes to mind can be useful.

When I get back, I take time to go over the notes and extract insights. AI can help at this stage too.

I hope this helps 🙂

Cheers, Zvonimir