Latest news with #DavidHolz
Mint
20-05-2025
- Business
- Mint
Mint Primer: A robot for every 3 humans: What happens to us?
The number of humanoid robots in use could reach three billion by 2060. With the global population projected at 10.07 billion that year (source: Worldometer), that's one robot for every three of us. What might this shift mean for human employment, identity and purpose? What do the stars foretell about robots? Humanoid robot ownership could touch 3 billion units by 2060, says a new Bank of America (BofA) report. Midjourney founder David Holz predicts 1 billion humanoids on Earth by the 2040s and 100 billion in the solar system by the 2060s—an idea endorsed by Elon Musk. Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla sees 1 billion bipedal robots by 2040. Also read | Elon Musk unveils plans to launch Tesla robotaxis and humanoid robots in Saudi Arabia Morgan Stanley forecasts sales of 900,000 units by 2030. Macquarie expects 6.3 million robots and a $139 billion market by 2035. Citigroup projects a $7 trillion market by 2050, while Goldman Sachs sees a $38 billion market by 2035 as robot density surges. Why are they all so bullish? As human labour costs rise, humanoid robots are becoming cheaper—and global investments are surging, from $308 million in 2020 to $1.1 billion in 2024, according to Bain & Co. These robots can now walk, jump and are getting smarter with advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI. BofA predicts they'll take 20% of industrial and 50% of service jobs by 2060, and even outnumber cars. SNS Insider values the market at $2.21 billion in 2023, projected to reach $76.97 billion by 2032, with Japan, China and the US leading adoption in elder care, defence, retail, manufacturing and logistics. Also read | Musk's humanoid robots are here but they won't help around the house How much do humanoid robots cost? BofA says humanoid robot hardware will cost $35,000 per unit by end-2025, dropping to $13,000-17,000 by 2030-2035 due to scale and improved components. Meanwhile, the robots-as-a-service (RaaS) model that offers access via cloud-based subscriptions is making robots more affordable for smaller firms that can't bear high upfront costs. How will this impact the workforce? Bain & Co. expects robots to handle a wide range of physical tasks at costs equal to or lower than human labour within five years. Raising a child costs $100,000-300,000 and takes 20 years in the US (RethinkX), while a humanoid robot could be deployed in a year for the price of a budget car. By 2035, a million robots could enter the workforce for just $10 billion. Macquarie predicts robots may become as essential to families as cars, with widespread home use expected from the late 2030s to 2050s. Also read | Meta reportedly begins investment in humanoid robots, setting up a showdown with Elon Musk's Tesla A C-3PO in every home sounds pretty good... Something like the Star Wars droid could be yours for a price. As the young prioritize work-life balance, firms may get humanoid robots to fill labour and skill gaps. But AI-powered humanoids such as Tesla's Optimus, Boston Dynamics' Atlas, Xiaomi's CyberOne and India's Vyommitra raise questions on accountability, legal status (Hanson Robotics' Sophia is a Saudi citizen), rights and the potential for bias. Futurist Ray Kurzweil believes humans could achieve a million-fold intelligence by 2045 with chips embedded in our brains.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Yahoo
Midjourney releases its first new AI image model in nearly a year
Midjourney, one of the earliest AI image-generating services on the web, has released its first new AI image model in nearly a year. Dubbed V7, the model, which began rolling out in alpha around midnight Eastern on Friday, comes a week after OpenAI debuted a new image generator in ChatGPT that quickly went viral for its ability to create Ghibli-style photos. Midjourney's is not a Ghibli-optimized model — at least not officially — but nonetheless generates aesthetically pleasing works, at least to this reporter's dilettante eye. To use it, you'll first have to rate around 200 images to build a Midjourney "personalization" profile if you haven't already. This profile tunes the model to your individual visual preferences; V7 is Midjourney's first to have personalization switched on by default. Once you've completed that task, you'll be greeted with a togglable V7 on Midjourney's website and, if you're a member of Midjourney's Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. In the web app, you can quickly select the model from the drop-down menu next to the "version" label. Midjourney CEO David Holz described V7 as a "totally different architecture" in a post on X. "V7 is [...] much smarter with text prompts," Holz continued in an announcement on Discord. "[I]mage prompts look fantastic, image quality is noticeably higher with beautiful textures, and bodies, hands, and objects of all kinds have significantly better coherence on all details." V7 is available in two flavors, Turbo and Relax — the former of which is more costly to run — and powers a new tool called Draft Mode that renders images at 10x the speed and half the cost of the standard mode. Draft images are lower-quality than standard-mode images, but can be enhanced and re-rendered with a click of the mouse. A number of Midjourney capabilities aren't available yet for V7, according to Holz, including image upscaling and retexturing. Those will arrive in the near future, he said — possibly as soon as within two months. "This is an entirely new model with unique strengths and probably a few weaknesses" Holz wrote on Discord. "[W]e want to learn from you what it's good and bad at, but definitely keep in mind it may require different styles of prompting. So play around a bit." In my brief testing, V7 adhered reasonably well to the prompts I gave it. Granted, I didn't have time to really put the model through the ringer. Midjourney is an unusual operation. Started in 2022 by Holz, who co-founded PC peripheral company Leap Motion, it hasn't taken a dime of outside money. In late 2023, Midjourney was reportedly expecting to bring in around $200 million in revenue. Recently, the San Francisco-based firm said that it was establishing a hardware team to work on undisclosed projects, and it continues to train previously announced models for video and 3D object generation. Several lawsuits accuse Midjourney of infringing on the rights of millions of artists by training AI tools on images scraped from the web without the consent of the images' creators. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Sign in to access your portfolio
