AI News - March 2025

A quick overview of interesting AI News for the Yate and Sodbury U3A's monthly AI News meeting held on March 13th 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.

Notable that from now on the 'Introduction to AI' course we run now uses these News sessions to replace classes 5 and 6 as the topics in them (humanoid robots, self driving cars, ethics, futures) are now discussed every month as topical.

[1] Midjourney (image) + Runway (animation) + Suno (song)

A gentle start - this is a personal project to demonstrate the ease with which anyone can produce simple videos at minimal cost. My website for this is www.avideobook.com.


[2.1] Grok 3 enters the scene with a bang! www.grok.com

Grok 3 was created in a record short time by Elon Musk's xAI venture. It is a 'thinking' model, going into the top of the leaderboard by several measures. The free version is available to everybody at the moment as an App for Apple and Android. Modes include: Storyteller, Romantic, Conspiracy, Unhinged and Sexy.

I asked: "In the past 4 weeks what are the 5 most significant things to have happened in AI from the viewpoint of a UK based non technical person who is nevertheless broadly aware of the AI scene."

Grok 3 DeepSearch thought for 1 min 41 seconds, showing its very extensive 'thinking' as it went through consulting many sources. It came up with a full report with references, and these points:

[a] It seems likely that the introduction of the AI Regulation Bill in the House of Lords on March 4, 2025, is a significant step toward regulating AI in the UK, aiming to establish an AI Authority.
[b] Research suggests that cross-party committees and creators are opposing the government's AI training opt-out plans, with ... over 48,000 creators protesting, highlighting a controversy over creators' rights.
[c] The evidence leans toward Chinese propagandists using ChatGPT to generate critical articles, as reported by OpenAI, raising concerns about AI misuse for misinformation.
[d] A BBC study found AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini distorting and misleading on current affairs, published on February 11, 2025, which could affect public trust in AI.
[e] xAI, led by Elon Musk, released Grok 3 on February 26, 2025, a new AI model, which might interest those following AI advancements, though its practical impact is still emerging.

[2.2] Driver talks to Grok 3 about SpaceX while in a Tesla Self Driving car

[3] Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei (Claude.AI) guesses 2026 or 2027 for AI much smarter than humans

Executives in all of the top companies are starting to describe the emergence of very powerful AI - and they have the advantage of seeing the very latest versions which are not yet ready for release.


[4.1] 'Vibe coding' is not a fad - 'It's time to accelerate'

Discussion with Garry Tan President & CEO 'Ycombinator'. One area very intelligent AI has a significant effect is in writing computer code. Suddenly the top coders are talking about 'vibe coding' - similar to doing a sport and being 'in the zone'.


[4.2] 'Vibe working' - create things just by asking for them

Ethan Mollick creating a 3D town to play with in four prompts and describes this as 'vibe working'.


[5.1] Can you run faster than a humanoid robot?


And here is a typical humanoid robot runner.


[5.2] Can you fight better than a (Unitree) humanoid robot?

It is easy to predict that robot-robot contests will soon be a regular attraction.

[5.3] Would you want to own a (Unitree) robotic dog? Only about £ 2,000.

[5.4] In China robotics quickly moving into elderly care and companionship.

The new generation of robots offers a lot in care situations where staff are difficult to find and expensive.

[5.5] Humanoid robots do not have to be human adult sized.

Very soon friendly smaller robots will be helping out in mnay everyday tasks.

[6.1] AI Assistants in healthcare - Microsoft Dragon Copilot

Essentially an AI with relevant training helping complete form filling while 'surfacing' relevant information.

[6.2] AI 'Co Scientist' from Google - multi AI agents

Initially producing deep research but soon no doubt able to conduct its own physical experiments.

[6.3] Manus - from China and leading the way with powerful AI Agents

[6.4] Sakana's AI Scientist publishes peer reviewed paper

Sakana AI is a Japanese company whose 'AI Scientist' did the work on a project and then published it.

[7.1] Tesla (supervised) Full Self Driving in China (Hangzhou)

[7.2] Tesla (supervised) Full Self Driving in China (Guangzhou)

[7.3] Tesla (supervised) Full Self Driving in Chinese rush hour (Changzhou)

[8.1] AI's Oppenheimer moment

Christopher DiCarlo on the significance of this moment in time.

[8.2] AI's MAD equivalent - Mutual Assured AI Malfunction

Atomic weapons brought us the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. Now a new term is proposed.

[9.1] Chinese Humanoid Robots grow ever more humanoid

Just as in the Sci-Fi movies, most of the robots you meet will look like people.

[9.2] Chinese Humanoid Robots will prepare you a nice salad

Dobot is designed to work with you.

[9.3] Your Humanoid Robot will become very special to you - like a pet

Not only will there be a lot of robots in the home, yours will share your memories and preferences and will become very special. Want to create a clothing line for household robots? Maybe this domain name is what you need: www.electronfashion.com for humanoid robot clothes [leads to a sales link - owned by silverAIproject].

[10.1] OpenAI aiming at producing specialist writing AI tools

Sam Altman provides what he suggests is high quality writing by a research version aimed at that skill.

[10.2] OpenAI promising the next stage is AI that creates

By autumn the suggestion is you will ask ChatGPT to create interesting things for you.

[11.1] Local Meta Ray Ban project

Very positive feedback from first user, now need to extend to others.

[11.2] Meta's next generation of smart glasses

In development with Envision and others for aid to visually imapired

[11.3] AI aiding speech

Reading brainwaves and decoding into speech.

[11.4] Projecting sheet music to smart glasses

Not sure of the application, but a sign of things to come.

[12.1] And finally ...

[12.2] and 'birthing the descendants of humanity'