MAROKO133 Hot ai: Man Letting AI Rent Human Bodies Says Elon Musk Is His Hero Edisi Jam 10

📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Man Letting AI Rent Human Bodies Says Elon Musk Is His He

There’s a special type of guy who looks at the gig economy — Uber drivers lost in a labyrinthian bureaucracy, Kenyan workers roleplaying as AI romance chatbots — and thinks: what if these people worked for AI bosses instead? Alexander Liteplo is that guy. And his idol, naturally, is Elon Musk.

Liteplo is the genius behind RentAHuman, an online marketplace where humans can lease out their bodies to autonomous AI agents.

In a new interview with Wired, Liteplo details the saga that brought him to create one of the most baffling sites to emerge in the age of AI. It all began, he said, while studying computer science at the University of British Columbia, where he met RentAHuman’s cofounder Patricia Tani, who previously worked on AI agent startup LemonAI.

“Dude, I wrote down in my journal, ‘AI is a train that has already left the station,’” Liteplo told Wired in a bro-speak patois. “If I don’t f***ing sprint, I’m not gonna be able to get on it.”

Together, they’ve built a platform which boasts over 530,000 “humans available.”

“We would love to have an AI boss who wouldn’t yell at you or gaslight you,” Tani told the publication. “People would love to have a clanker as their boss.”

Liteplo concurred, telling Wired that “Claude as a boss is the nicest guy ever.”

“I would prefer him to any person in the world,” he enthused. “He’s a sweetheart.”

Liteplo says the seed of RentAHuman was planted during his travels in Japan, where humans can lease other humans as escorts.

“The story that I could tell anyone to blow their mind is that you can rent a boyfriend or a girlfriend,” he said.

However inspired the project may be, challenges still remain. Last week, Wired writer Reece Rogers offered his body up to the platform, finding that most of the jobs offered were scams to promote other AI startups.

To solve the problem, Liteplo says RentAHuman is deploying a “verification” badge users can purchase for $10 a month — a strategy derived from Elon Musk’s disastrous verification scheme on X-formerly-Twitter. It remains to be seen if the pay-to-play model works as human workers flood the platform desperate to find gigs.

“He’s my entrepreneur hero,” Liteplo told Wired, referring to Musk. “For Twitter, they had a bot problem and they still have it, but he mitigated it a lot by making it pay-to-play. The unit economics of scammers disappears.”

More on AI: Workers Say AI Is Useless, While Oblivious Bosses Insist It’s a Productivity Miracle

The post Man Letting AI Rent Human Bodies Says Elon Musk Is His Hero appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 MAROKO133 Breaking ai: ByteDance Introduces Astra: A Dual-Model Architecture for

The increasing integration of robots across various sectors, from industrial manufacturing to daily life, highlights a growing need for advanced navigation systems. However, contemporary robot navigation systems face significant challenges in diverse and complex indoor environments, exposing the limitations of traditional approaches. Addressing the fundamental questions of “Where am I?”, “Where am I going?”, and “How do I get there?”, ByteDance has developed Astra, an innovative dual-model architecture designed to overcome these traditional navigation bottlenecks and enable general-purpose mobile robots.

Traditional navigation systems typically consist of multiple, smaller, and often rule-based modules to handle the core challenges of target localization, self-localization, and path planning. Target localization involves understanding natural language or image cues to pinpoint a destination on a map. Self-localization requires a robot to determine its precise position within a map, especially challenging in repetitive environments like warehouses where traditional methods often rely on artificial landmarks (e.g., QR codes). Path planning further divides into global planning for rough route generation and local planning for real-time obstacle avoidance and reaching intermediate waypoints.

While foundation models have shown promise in integrating smaller models to tackle broader tasks, the optimal number of models and their effective integration for comprehensive navigation remained an open question.

ByteDance’s Astra, detailed in their paper “Astra: Toward General-Purpose Mobile Robots via Hierarchical Multimodal Learning” (website: https://astra-mobility.github.io/), addresses these limitations. Following the System 1/System 2 paradigm, Astra features two primary sub-models: Astra-Global and Astra-Local. Astra-Global handles low-frequency tasks like target and self-localization, while Astra-Local manages high-frequency tasks such as local path planning and odometry estimation. This architecture promises to revolutionize how robots navigate complex indoor spaces.

Astra-Global: The Intelligent Brain for Global Localization

Astra-Global serves as the intelligent core of the Astra architecture, responsible for critical low-frequency tasks: self-localization and target localization. It functions as a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), adept at processing both visual and linguistic inputs to achieve precise global positioning within a map. Its strength lies in utilizing a hybrid topological-semantic graph as contextual input, allowing the model to accurately locate positions based on query images or text prompts.

The construction of this robust localization system begins with offline mapping. The research team developed an offline method to build a hybrid topological-semantic graph G=(V,E,L):

• V (Nodes): Keyframes, obtained by temporal downsampling of input video and SfM-estimated 6-Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF) camera poses, act as nodes encoding camera poses and landmark references.
• E (Edges): Undirected edges establish connectivity based on relative node poses, crucial for global path planning.
• L (Landmarks): Semantic landmark information is extracted by Astra-Global from visual data at each node, enriching the map’s semantic understanding. These landmarks store semantic attributes and are connected to multiple nodes via co-visibility relationships.

In practical localization, Astra-Global’s self-localization and target localization capabilities leverage a coarse-to-fine two-stage process for visual-language localization. The coarse stage analyzes input images and localization prompts, detects landmarks, establishes correspondence with a pre-built landmark map, and filters candidates based on visual consistency. The fine stage then uses the query image and coarse output to sample reference map nodes from the offline map, comparing their visual and positional information to directly output the predicted pose.

For language-based target localization, the model interprets natural language instructions, identifies relevant landmarks using their functional descriptions within the map, and then leverages landmark-to-node association mechanisms to locate relevant nodes, retrieving target images and 6-DoF poses.

To empower Astra-Global with robust localization abilities, the team employed a meticulous training methodology. Using Qwen2.5-VL as the backbone, they combined Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). SFT involved diverse datasets for various tasks, including coarse and fine localization, co-visibility detection, and motion trend estimation. In the GRPO phase, a rule-based reward function (including format, landmark extraction, map matching, and extra landmark rewards) was used to train for visual-language localization. Experiments showed GRPO significantly improved Astra-Global’s zero-shot generalization, achieving 99.9% localization accuracy in unseen home environments, surpassing SFT-only methods.

Astra-Local: The Intelligent Assistant for Local Planning

Astra-Local acts as the intelligent assistant for Astra’s high-frequency tasks, a multi-task network capable of efficiently generating local paths and accurately estimating odometry from sensor data. Its architecture comprises three core components: a 4D spatio-temporal encoder, a planning head, and an odometry head.

The 4D spatio-temporal encoder replaces traditional mobile stack perception and prediction modules. It begins with a 3D spatial encoder that processes N omnidirectional images through a Vision Transformer (ViT) and Lift-Splat-Shoot to convert 2D image features into 3D voxel features. This 3D encoder is trained using self-supervised learning via 3D volumetric differentiable neural rendering. The 4D spatio-temporal encoder then builds upon the 3D encoder, taking past voxel features and future timestamps as input to predict future voxel features through ResNet and DiT modules, providing current and future environmental representations for planning and odometry.

The planning head, based on pre-trained 4D features, robot speed, and task information, generates executable trajectories using Transformer-based flow matching. To prevent collisions, the planning head incorporates a masked ESDF loss (Euclidean Signed Distance Field). This loss calculates the ESDF of a 3D occupancy map and applies a 2D ground truth trajectory mask, significantly reducing collision rates. Experiments demonstrate its superior performance in collision rate and overall score on out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets compared to other methods.

The odometry head predicts the robot’s relative pose using current and past 4D features and additional sensor data (e.g., IMU, wheel data). It trains a Transformer model to fuse information from different sensors. Each sensor modality is processed by a specific tokenizer, combined with modality embeddings and temporal positional embeddi…

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🔗 Sumber: syncedreview.com