AI News - June 2025

A quick overview of interesting AI News for the Yate and Sodbury U3A's monthly AI News meeting held on June 12th 2025 (meetings are second Thursday of month, 1400-1545, St John's Church Centre, Wickwar Road, Chipping Sodbury, UK - all welcome). Note that this is very much a summary to act as background as the topics are discussed in detail at the meeting itself. We also discuss and demonstrate other AI products and services and much more.

From now on the 'Introduction to AI' course we run in Chipping Sodbury uses these News sessions to replace classes 5 and 6 as the topics in them (humanoid robots, self driving cars, ethics, futures) are now relevant to each month's discusions.

[10 June 2025] Sam Altman releases 'o3 Pro', says that we are now past the Singularity

"We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.

Robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day. People still die of disease, we still can’t easily go to space, and there is a lot about the universe we don’t understand.

And yet, we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them. The least-likely part of the work is behind us; the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far."

The blog is linked here and is essential reading: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

[1.1] Google's Veo 3 turns prompts into video with dialogue and much more

Veo 3 can create high-quality videos with synchronized audio, including dialogue, sound effects, and ambient noise, from text or image prompts, offering improved realism, motion handling, and scene consistency. Integrated with Google’s Flow tool, it supports cinematic storytelling with features like camera control, object manipulation, and style consistency, making it a powerful tool for creators, filmmakers, and enterprises, though access is by plans costing up to USD 249.99/month.


[1.2] Veo 3 can produce 3D real world effects

The creator said this works well in a Virtual Reality VR headset.


[1.3] Entertaining clips using Veo 3 are easy to make


[1.4] Veo 3 also provides studio effects like this 'tracking shot'

[2] Movie Scene generation gets ever easier

Several tools allow you to record a person moving and then copy that onto a movie character. This is UnrealEngine which is a game engine doing it in real time.


[3] Using Google Maps Street View to create local movies

Here a glamorous lady decides to have a drink in the George in Chipping Sodbury. The workflow starts with Midjourney for the image, then Google Maps Streetview for the picture of the George pub, then Runway for the movie and Chatterbox TTS for the voice clone.


[4.1] AI Voices are becoming more expressive - ChatGPT

ChatGPT is just rolling out there more expressive voice.


[4.2] AI can now clone voices from just a few seconds of an original - Bland AI

Several companies now make it easy and inexpensive to create a cloned voice.


[5] UK makes an AI Planner to speed up Building

Keir Starmer announced (9 Jun 2025) lots of positive plans to use AI, including this one which does sound rather good. AI can be excellent making sense of unstructured data.


[6.1] First the humanoid robots will take the mundane jobs

Here the Figure robot is turning packages the right way up. The demo apparently went on for an hour.

[6.2] Amazon experiment by home deliveries by humanoid robots

Combined with self-driving delivery vans, these may soon be the norm.

[6.3] In China the retired already have care and company from humanoid robots

This ranges from delivery of food and refreshments to leading exercise.

[6.4] Neo is a humanoid robot from 1x using Redwood AI - training for use around the home

All around the concept of helping with 'chores in the home', a huge market.

[6.5] Optimus has to be ready for the first Mars trip

Elon Musk plans to send a fleet of Starships to mars at the next available window. They will not be manned but will have many Optimus robots to start building the first city.

[7] Google Astra shows what an AI personal assistant can be

This acts like a personal assistant for everyday life, but of course works in the office too.

[8.1] Tesla Robotaxi seen in Austin Texas - June 10th 2025

The first Tesla car bearing a Robotaxi logo, and with no driver, was spotted on the road. This is probably a test rather than the full service. Current plan is that starts June 22nd. Then the first car to drive off the factory flowline and directly to the customer house is planned for June 28th.

[8.2] Uber partners with Wayve - a UK Autonomous Driving company

Hopefully this means that London will also soon be seeing self-driving cars

[8.3] Wayve demonstrate autonomous driving in cities throughout the world

Tesla has by far the most hours of driving data to use in their AI, but Wayve is putting in an impressive performance.

[8.4] Example of Tesla with supervised Full Self Driving

A video that shows how users feel about being in a self driving car

End of June 2025 part 1. Link to June 2025 part 2

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