Integrating Humanoid Robots and AI (Video) – Startup Company Figure raises $675 million in investments from Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI

 

Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

Robotics startup Figure announced on Thursday it raised $675 million in a funding from investors including Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

Sunnyvale, California-based Figure also said it signed a collaboration with OpenAI to develop generative artificial intelligence for its humanoid robots.

The launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI has generated interest in AI, with companies investing million of dollars to cash in on the trend.

Other companies involved in the Figure funding include OpenAI Startup Fund, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures and ARK Invest.  As reported b y Reuters.

Brett Adcock, Figure’s founder and CEO, said the company will use the funding to develop large language models for robotics, ramp up manufacturing and hire more people.

The startup will also move to Microsoft Azure for AI infrastructure and training, Adcock said.

The AI models Figure (see demo in video below) develops will be based on OpenAI’s latest GPT models, and specifically trained on robotics actions data that Figure has collected so that its humanoid robots can talk with people, see things and perform physical tasks, according to Adcock.

“We’ve always planned to come back to robotics and we see a path with Figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models,” said Peter Welinder, vice president of product and partnerships at OpenAI.

Humanoid robots have raised renewed interest from investors as AI-powered software offers more possibilities of how robots interact and work with human. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk predicted a billion humanoid robots on Earth in the 2040s, as the electric carmaker released its latest humanoid Optimus Gen in development.

Bloomberg first reported last week about Figure raising funding and said that Bezos had committed $100 million through his firm Explore Investments LLC and Microsoft is investing $95 million, while Nvidia and an Amazon-affiliated fund are each providing $50 million.

Last month, Figure signed a partnership with BMW Manufacturing to deploy its humanoid robots in the car maker’s facility in the United States.

Figure raised $70 million from investors led by Parkway Venture Capital in its first external round last year.

The integration of robotics and AI is here and will be the future.

Tony

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer Shows Biden How It’s Done!

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.     (Peter Baker for The New York Times)

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg, has a column this morning praising the strategy and work of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in getting out the vote in last Tuesday’s Democratic Primary. Entitled, “The Democrat Showing Biden How It’s Done,” Goldberg describes “Whitmer’s fierce defense of abortion rights and her comfort talking about the subject at a time when it’s moved to the molten center of American politics.”  The column goes on to describe that no matter who Biden and the Democrats are talking to about issues,  abortion rights should be front and center.  Whitmer sees real weakness in Trump’s messaging  especially how he likes to brag about setting the repeal of Roe v. Wade in motion by virtue of his U.S. Supreme Court appointees.  She concludes that voters need to perceive Trump as “the major threat” to abortion rights.

Below is Goldberg’s entire column.

Worth a read!

Tony

————————————————————————————-

The New York Times

March 1, 2024

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

At a Detroit union hall in mid-February, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan gathered representatives from local carpenters and construction unions, along with participants in an apprenticeship program, for a round-table event to draw attention to the ways the Biden administration has helped organized labor. At every seat around the U-shaped table, there was a flier from Whitmer’s Fight Like Hell PAC, but it didn’t address jobs; it was about abortion.

“Donald Trump brags that he was the one who got rid of Roe v. Wade and is marching his party toward enacting a nationwide abortion ban,” it said. When Whitmer spoke, she made sure to hit on reproductive rights, and the economic costs of losing them. “I know in the union hall it’s maybe not the first thing we always talk about,” she said, but when, for over half the population, “the most important economic decision you’ll make in your lifetime is taken away from you, that impacts all of us.”

A month earlier, Whitmer, the co-chair of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign and perhaps his most important Michigan surrogate, told “Face the Nation” that the president should speak more often about abortion, a word he’s been reluctant to use. Now, she was demonstrating how it’s done.

“We’ve got to be comfortable saying abortion is health care, and women deserve health care, and only the woman should be able to make that decision about whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term,” she told me after the union event.

I’d expect Democrats to push Whitmer’s message even harder after Tuesday’s Michigan primary, in which over 13 percent of voters, more than 100,000 people, chose “uncommitted,” largely as a statement of opposition to Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. At a time when the Democratic Party is deeply divided over foreign policy and, to a lesser degree, over immigration, support for abortion rights unites progressives and moderates, if not the culturally conservative Arab and Muslim voters who were trending away from the Democratic Party even before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

Representative Katherine Clark, the House Democratic whip, recently told me she thinks abortion will be “the No. 1 issue” in the election. This new emphasis is quite a turnaround after decades when party leaders treated abortion as a necessary evil and often spoke of it in nervous euphemisms, but it’s the sort of moment a leader like Whitmer seems made for.

There are many reasons that people regularly fantasize about Whitmer replacing Biden on this year’s ticket, and, assuming that doesn’t happen, see her as a likely presidential prospect in 2028. (She insists she’s not interested, but few seem to believe her.) Whitmer is the popular and telegenic leader of a must-win state with a long record of accomplishments, including passing gun safety laws and an ambitious clean energy plan, as well as repealing anti-union “right to work” legislation. When Biden visited Macomb County, Mich., last month to accept the United Auto Workers endorsement, he called her “the best governor in the country.” That might have been a controversial statement — there are, after all, lots of other ambitious Democratic governors — if it didn’t seem so obviously true.

Whitmer manages the neat trick of coming off as both an edgy progressive pugilist and a stolid Midwestern pragmatist. When she was feuding with Trump over pandemic lockdowns, the Detroit rapper Gmac Cash dropped a track dubbing her “Big Gretch,” a nickname that’s stuck. (“All that protestin’ was irrelevant/Big Gretch ain’t tryna hear y’all or the president.”) But as much as the far right abhors Whitmer — nine men are in prison for a plot to kidnap and possibly assassinate her — in her 2022 re-election bid, she won several counties that had gone for Trump two years earlier, including Macomb, historically seen as a bellwether of national political sentiment.

Perhaps the most important thing about her right now, though, is her fierce defense of abortion rights and her comfort talking about the subject at a time when it’s moved to the molten center of American politics. When the Supreme Court decision scrapping Roe, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, came down in June 2022, Michigan still had a 1931 abortion prohibition on the books. Whitmer led the way in making sure it never went back into effect, campaigning hard for a 2022 ballot measure making abortion a state constitutional right. Jessica Mackler, interim president of Emily’s List, said that at a moment when women in Michigan, as well as much of America, didn’t know if they were about to lose their bodily autonomy, and with it the power to shape their own lives, “Gretchen Whitmer was the leader who was standing there saying, ‘I’m going to fight like hell and protect these rights for you.’”

Whitmer first shot to national prominence in 2013, when, as minority leader in the Michigan Senate, she spoke against a bill requiring women to purchase a separate rider if they wanted abortion covered by their health insurance. Democrats called the bill “rape insurance,” and in denouncing it on the Senate floor, Whitmer revealed that she’d been raped in college. “I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy from an attacker,” she said, adding, “I think you need to see the face of the women you are impacting by this vote today.” The bill passed anyway, though 10 years later, as governor, Whitmer would sign its repeal.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, as The Washington Post’s Ruby Cramer reported, Whitmer immediately rushed to tell her daughters, Sherry and Sydney, treating the ruling as a family crisis as well as a political one. “The Whitmer family has been in Michigan for five generations,” wrote Cramer. But, Cramer continued, without the right to control their reproductive destinies — and, in the case of Whitmer’s eldest, who is gay, to marry — “they will probably settle their lives elsewhere.”

That year, running for re-election in tandem with the campaign for a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights, Whitmer held round tables on the subject all over the state. The issue, she said, helped her build a coalition that included moderate Republican women. In our interview, she described the sort of things they told her: “I’ve never voted for a Democrat. I never thought I’d vote for you. But I’m out knocking doors for you. Because you have to win because you’re the only one fighting for this, for this freedom for me and my girls.” Now Whitmer must convince those women, as well as disaffected progressives, that Biden has to win for the same reason.

At first glance, this shouldn’t be hard. Abortion, as we’ve seen in the two years since the Supreme Court scrapped Roe v. Wade, is a powerful electoral motivator. This is especially true when it comes to state ballot measures, which let voters separate their support for reproductive autonomy from their party affiliation; abortion rights have proven popular even in very Republican states. But Democrats have also repeatedly outperformed expectations in congressional elections since Dobbs. Just last month, in the race to fill George Santos’s old seat on Long Island, the Democrat Tom Suozzi won by almost eight points, more than polling had predicted. There were several issues at play in that contest, but abortion was a significant one.

The problem for the general election is that, as the left-leaning polling group Data for Progress recently concluded, “Voters do not currently perceive Trump as a threat to abortion rights.” In a February poll, only 24 percent of voters held Trump responsible for state abortion bans. (14 percent blamed Biden for them.) The group’s earlier research found that only 48 percent of voters, and 63 percent of Democrats, believe Trump would attempt a national abortion ban.

For those who follow politics closely, this might seem bizarre, particularly since Trump has boasted about appointing the Supreme Court judges who killed Roe. But voters evidently have a hard time connecting the louche, impious ex-president with the harsh prohibitions his term in office made possible.

Trump obviously wants to keep it that way. As The New York Times has reported, he has privately voiced support for a 16-week federal abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and life-threatening emergencies, but publicly, he tries to avoid talking about abortion restrictions, recognizing them as a liability.

A 16-week federal ban, it should be emphasized, is not a moderate position. Even with the exceptions Trump supports, it would impose on the entire country the sort of laws that have forced women in Texas and elsewhere to carry doomed pregnancies to term, and made doctors fearful of treating women having late miscarriages until they’re on the verge of death. (All the even more draconian state bans would almost certainly remain in place.) But Republicans would much rather be talking about second-trimester abortions than, say, fetal personhood laws and whether they can be reconciled with in vitro fertilization.

Democrats, however, believe they still have time to link Trump to the barrage of tragic and maddening stories that have emerged since Dobbs. “For 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it, and I’m proud to have done it,” Trump said at an Iowa town hall in January. “Nobody else was going to get that done but me, and we did it, and we did something that was a miracle.” His words, said Mackler of Emily’s List, are “going to be all over the messaging between now and November.”

And since the battle to restore bodily self-determination will stretch beyond that, it’s going to keep reshaping our politics for a long time to come. After the labor round table, Whitmer went down the hall to a conference where a dozen or so volunteers, most of them Black women, were making calls to get out the vote for Biden by talking to Michiganders about abortion rights. “We’re going to fight like hell for our reproductive rights,” Whitmer said to applause. “They’re at risk right now.”

Even women who care deeply about abortion rights sometimes don’t realize this, she said, precisely because Michigan has done so much to protect them. “‘We just secured our rights! They’re at risk again?’” she said, explaining what she sometimes hears from women in the state. “Yes. You get the wrong people in the White House who want to sign a national ban, everything we did last year doesn’t matter.”

 

Alexei Navalny’s funeral draws crowds and defiance – Mourners call for a “Russia without Putin”

Alexei Navalny Remembered

Dear Commons Community,

With Frank Sinatra’s ”My Way’ playng in the background, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was buried yesterday after thousands of defiant mourners gathered for his funeral in Moscow.

Risking arrest by Russian police, mourners clapped and chanted anti-Putin slogans as they paid tribute to Navalny, who died two weeks ago at an Arctic penal colony. He was 47.   As reported by U.S.A. Today.

A short memorial service for Navalny took place in an Orthodox church in southeastern Moscow. He was then interred in a nearby local cemetery, where music from “Terminator 2,” Navalny’s favorite movie, was played at the cemetery, his spokesperson said.

Video streamed online on Navalny’s YouTube channel showed sizable crowds standing in orderly lines and behind barricades set up by police at the church and cemetery.

‘Russia will be free’

Some in the crowd clapped and chanted “Navalny! Navalny!” as the hearse carrying his body arrived at the Church of the Icon of Our Lady Quench My Sorrow.

Others chanted slogans directed at Russian President Vladimir Putin, such as “Russia without Putin,” “Russia will be free,” and “You (Navalny) were not afraid, and we are not afraid.”

There were no immediate reports of arrests.

Russia warns against ‘unauthorized gatherings’

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, urged those gathering in Moscow and elsewhere not to break the law, saying any “unauthorized (mass) gatherings” are violations, according to comments he made to Russian state media.

Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow and heir to his political activism, said earlier in the week she was worried that Putin would order the arrests of anyone who tried to attend her husband’s funeral.  Some in the crowd chanted:  ‘Yulia … is our hope’

“I’m not sure yet whether it will be peaceful or whether police will arrest those who have come to say goodbye to my husband,” Navalnaya said during a speech to European lawmakers in Strasbourg on Wednesday. “You cannot hurt Putin with another resolution or another set of sanctions that is no different from the previous ones, you cannot defeat him by thinking he’s a man of principles who has morals or rules. ”

Putin, she told European leaders, doesn’t operate the way they do.

“You are not dealing with a politician but with a bloody mobster,” she said.

Putin, for his part, has been focused on saber-rattling on international affairs as much as he has on domestic politics. He warned this week that the West faces prospects of a nuclear conflict if it got more involved in its war in Ukraine. The warning was a response to suggestions by France’s president that Western troops could eventually fight alongside Ukrainian forces two years into Russia’s ongoing invasion.

Putin crackdowns on his critics

Putin has passed stringent laws that have marginalized any effective opposition to his rule. Many Russian activists who oppose his government have either fled the country or are themselves imprisoned.

Russian authorities detained about 400 people across 39 cities in the days after Navalny’s death as they attempted to lay flowers and pay their respects at small-scale vigils, according to OVD-Info, a Moscow-based independent human rights group and information service that focuses on political persecution in Russia.

OVD-Info published a photo from inside the church during Navalny’s memorial service Friday that showed his body in an open casket covered with red and white flowers. His mother sat beside it holding a candle. Navalny’s father was also present. It was not clear who else in his family attended the service.

Neither Navalnaya nor her children are thought to have returned to Russia since Navalny’s death.

“I don’t know how to live without you,” Navalnaya posted on X in a final goodbye message to her husband.

‘Sudden death syndrome’?

The exact cause of Navalny’s death has not been independently established. Russian prison authorities say he died of “sudden death syndrome.” But his family and supporters say he was murdered and question why it took more than a week for his body to be released to them. He also joins a growing list of Putin foes who died in mysterious ways including poisoning, falling out of windows, and even in a plane crash.

“He was our hope. He was the same age as my children. I feel like I’m burying my own son,” one mourner outside the Church of the Icon of Our Lady Quench My Sorrow told the BBC, of Navalny.

“He was the only person I could trust. I was dreaming that he would become president. It’s a huge tragedy.”

The Biden administration last week imposed sanctions on more than 500 individuals and entities for Navalny’s death and Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. However, a panel of Russian dissidents in London told reporters on Wednesday they did not think those punitive measures, while helpful, would ultimately do much to harm Putin.

“There is no silver bullet that the Russian opposition or Western governments can employ to stop the war (in Ukraine) and get rid of Putin,” said Vladimir Ashurkov, who helped found Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.

“It’s a matter of consistent work,” Ashurkov said. “Our premise has always been that Putin’s regime may seem stable but it’s becoming more and more fragile and our goal as a professional political organization is to be the most organized political force in Russia when things start to change.”

Navalny was a tragic figure who made the ultimate sacrifice for his country.

Tony

 

Bob Ubell – Online Teaching Is Improving In-Person Instruction on Campus!

Dear Commons Community,

My colleague, Bob Ubell has just published a new column entitled, “Online Teaching Is Improving In-Person Instruction on Campus,” for EdSurge.  He reviews  the current state of online instruction in our colleges and universities and concludes that it is the new normal for how faculty teach and students learn.  Recent developments, much of them brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic which forced most of higher education to adapt to online education, have ushered in a new era of instruction based on technology.  Faculty and students alike have taken to online technology, especially in blended formats to deliver courses.  He concludes (see excerpt below) that the use of technology has improved instruction across the board.  I agree.

His entire column is worth a read!

Tony

 


“When professors teaching face-to-face adopt online pedagogy, the classroom is transformed into a “blended” experience, moving from conventional to active learning. And that helps students turn from passive to engaged participants in their own intellectual excursions.

“Face-to-face instruction is no longer the gold standard,” says Steven Goss, chair of Management and Technology in the business programs at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, where he teaches blended courses. “Faculty who say, ‘I only teach on campus,’ are doing themselves a disservice. Teachers who aren’t thinking about the variety of ways there are to teach aren’t thinking about their full capacity.”

Mitt Romney Says Trump would be a president “so defaulted in character”

Dear Commons Community,

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said on Wednesday night that there’s no chance he’d vote for Donald Trump in November’s election.

“No, no, no, absolutely not,” he said when asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins if he could cast a ballot for the former president.

He said he considers both policy and character when choosing “the person who is the example of the president for my kids and my grandkids.”

Trump’s a mixed bag on policy: Though Romney agrees with much of the former president’s domestic agenda, he said he disagrees with him on foreign policy.

“But there’s another dimension besides policy, and that’s character,” Romney said. “And I think what America is as a nation, what has allowed us to be the most powerful nation on Earth and the leader of the Earth, is the character of the people who have been our leaders, past presidents, but also mothers, fathers, church leaders, university presidents and so forth.”

That’s where Trump falls well short of the mark, he said.

“Having a president who is so defaulted of character would have an enormous impact on the character of America. And for me, that’s the primary consideration.”

Romney didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020, and he said last year he would likely make the same decision at the polls in November should Trump be the nominee.

“It’s pretty straightforward. It’s the same thing I’ve done in the past. I’ll vote for Ann Romney, who’ll be a terrific president,” he said on CNBC, referring to his wife.

Romney and Trump have had a contentious relationship for years. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, delivered a speech in 2016 urging his party to reject Trump, whom he slammed as a “phony” and a “fraud.”

“He’s playing the American public for suckers,” he said at the time.

Romney is retiring from the Senate rather than run for reelection this year.

The Republicans need a few more Romneys to speak their minds!

Tony

 

Nikki Haley can’t win the Republican primary with 40%. But she can expose Trump’s weaknesses!

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump’s campaign has vowed not to talk about her anymore. Many pundits have written her off entirely. But Nikki Haley is still campaigning across the country — and plenty of Republican voters are coming to hear what she has to say.

Before packed audiences in states that will vote on Super Tuesday next week, Haley is making the case she laid out after losing the primary in her home state of South Carolina: Roughly 40% of GOP voters support her over Trump, suggesting their party’s dominant figure is especially vulnerable in a November rematch against President Joe Biden.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“He lost 40% of the primary vote in all of the early states,” she told more than 500 people at a campaign event in the politically mixed suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota, on Monday. “You can’t win the general election if you can’t win that 40%.”

Trump is on the verge of winning several hundred more delegates for the GOP nomination on Super Tuesday and could eliminate Haley by clinching the nomination a few weeks later. But by staying in the race longer than any other major candidate, Haley has highlighted Trump’s political problems with key constituencies in their party and suggested that he is a “sinking ship.”

Trump won about 51% of voters in the Iowa caucuses, 54% in New Hampshire’s primaries and 60% in South Carolina. Haley didn’t come close to winning 40% in Michigan’s primary this week and instead lost to Trump by more than 40 points, 68% to 27%.

But just as she has throughout the primary, Haley did better in suburban areas like Oakland County near Detroit and Ottawa County near Grand Rapids. She also did better in Kent County, where Grand Rapids and a large suburban population is located.

Biden flipped Kent County and improved on Democrats’ 2016 performance in Oakland County on the way to winning Michigan in 2020 and beating Trump in the election.

Richard Czuba, a pollster who has long tracked Michigan politics, said Haley’s results were more significant for understanding a critical swing state in the general election than the campaign to vote “uncommitted” against Biden to protest his handling of the Israel-Hamas war, which drew about 100,000 votes and collected two Democratic delegates.

“This is by far, to me, the one narrative we saw (Tuesday) that will have major implications in November,” Czuba said.

Trump declined to mention Haley, his former U.N. ambassador, after beating her in South Carolina, and his campaign has accused her of deluding voters about her chances.

“She can’t name one state she can win, let alone be competitive in,” spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a recent statement.

Haley indeed resisted naming a state she could win when questioned by The Associated Press and other media. But interviews with three dozen voters at her rallies and AP VoteCast data from the Republican primary suggest several vulnerabilities for Trump heading into a Biden rematch.

About half of Republican voters in South Carolina — including about a quarter of his supporters — are concerned that Trump is too extreme to win the general election, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 2,400 voters taking part in the Republican primary in South Carolina, conducted for AP by NORC at the University of Chicago.

Trump allies have accused Haley of appealing to the left to vote in open Republican primaries. Some 19% of Haley voters in South Carolina identified themselves as Democrats or people who lean Democratic, according to AP VoteCast. But 72% were Republicans or lean toward the GOP.

About 3 in 10 South Carolina primary voters believe he acted illegally in at least one of the criminal cases against him, even though about three-quarters believe the investigations are political attempts to undermine him.

“We’ve been tightening the belt as much as we can, but can’t think about having kids until we can afford it,” said Jonathan Paquette, a 27-year-old contractor from Minnetonka, Minnesota, a suburb of the Twin Cities. ”That’s the kind of discussion this campaign should be about, not about lawsuits and criminal indictments. That doesn’t solve any of our problems.”

Lori Jacobson, a 64-year-old retired lab technician from Monticello, a small town northwest of the Twin Cities, said Trump “repulses me.” She voted for Trump in 2016 but not 2020.

“It’s all about revenge with him,” Jacobson said. Haley, she said, “has a calm that stands in such contrast to him, though she is a very strong woman.”

Across the states where Haley’s post-South Carolina campaign has gone, some voters have picked up on that messaging.

“Forty percent is better than no percent,” said Alyssa Prevo, an Uber driver from Williamston, Michigan, as she waited for Haley ahead of a Monday event in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Prevo, a military veteran, described herself as a longtime Republican, although she said she had voted for Democratic candidates in the past.

“Forty percent is a lot, it’s not a little, even though she lost her home state,” Prevo said. “People focus on the losing, I don’t. She has integrity. And for me, the umbrella, integrity, is everything she has under that.”

Nearly 9 in 10 Haley voters in South Carolina said they would not be satisfied with Trump as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, about 7 in 10 say he does not have the mental capability to serve effectively as president, and about 6 in 10 say they would not ultimately vote for him.

Given the primary race’s current trajectory, the Trump campaign may not have to address Haley again — and they expect that many disaffected Republicans will return to the former president’s side in a Biden-Trump rematch.

Haley could lose any mathematical chance of becoming the nominee in the next few weeks as more states hold “winner-take-all” primaries that would let Trump sweep their delegates even if Haley closes the gap with him.

For now, Haley and her aides say they aren’t planning beyond Super Tuesday. Indeed, Haley has not said where she’ll campaign after those contests. And her campaign has yet to book any television or digital advertising beyond Super Tuesday, according to media tracking firm AdImpact.

“That’s as far as we’ve thought so far,” Haley said Saturday. “We’ve taken it one state, one month at a time, and focused on that — that’s what’s gotten us to this moment is discipline, hard work, being smarter than everybody else and making sure that we do whatever it takes to scrappy as we need, to get to the finish line.”

Good luck, Nikki!  It sound like Super Tuesday or bust!

Tony