Tech Today: data centers in space and robots paid $30 an hour

Today’s roundup of technology, artificial intelligence and robotics news. Told in a simple, concrete way, without too much hype. Well, maybe with a little.

Space as a business

Jeff Bezos has so far put 30 billion of his fortune into Blue Origin, his rocket company and competitor of SpaceX, owned by his dear frenemy Elon Musk. His bet: SpaceX will be successful, Blue Origin will be successful, and many companies that don’t exist yet will be too. Good for him.

Google’s first orbital data center

Still in space: Google will launch the first test of its orbital data center on October 1st. I thought it was all speculation, but they’re actually doing it.

The why, in short: up there solar panels are always well oriented towards the sun and produce much more, data centers don’t bother anyone (we know nobody wants one near their home) and they cool down well. Challenges remain, like who goes up to fix them. It scares and excites me at the same time.

Waymo is growing

Back on Earth. Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving company, competing with Tesla’s robotaxis, is growing fast: from about 700 vehicles at the end of August to 1,100 in September, 80% of them between Texas and California. There’s a test in London, so Europe has been touched. In Italy? Who knows when.

CPUs are running short

AI keeps growing, hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, Azure) are buying massively, and agents, especially coding agents, are eating up the production of new CPUs. TSMC is building a plant in Texas, because America wants to make its chips at home. Bottom line: RAM has already skyrocketed, now CPUs too. Don’t expect cheaper computers in the coming years.

Meta Charm and AI avatars

Zuckerberg presented Charm, an AI-first device with a 5G antenna and a SIM, a sort of Tamagotchi that connects to their AI, Muse. Some compare it to the iPod moment. I find it very cringe, but design and I don’t really get along.

Then there are real-time virtual avatars, from both Meta and Google with Gemini Live. You create an avatar and talk to it. Call centers? Me answering people with my avatar? We’ll find out. Everyone is chasing each other.

Are we ready for superintelligence?

A post on X asks: are you ready for superintelligence? The argument is that last year’s benchmarks are trivial today, so if this goes on we’ll get there. I work with these models and I confirm that for programming the leap is huge. But inferring “next year they’ll be like this” from “a year ago they were slow and now they’re good” isn’t that simple. Maybe I believe it, but I don’t take it as proof.

Project Swap: agents trading for us

Anthropic ran an experiment: a fake market where about two hundred employees wanted to swap books. Each one talked for five minutes with their own Claude-based agent to explain their tastes, then the agents went off to negotiate with each other.

The agents proved able to bargain and close deals; the limit was having enough information about the user’s preferences. Differences between models showed up, and on average participants said they’d be willing to hand the agent about a third of their yearly book budget. They’re Anthropic employees, sure, but agents are among us: I see them a lot in programming, and now they’re swapping books too.

Deep dive: paid to train robots

I close with something that struck me: Shift, which pays you up to $30 an hour to record the work you already do. You wear a headband with your phone and record while you clean, cook, do plumbing or electrical work.

Why? To train the humanoid robots of the future. Just like LLMs trained on the whole internet, robots need hours and hours of video of hands at work. They’ve already paid out $5 million: at $30 an hour that’s about 166,000 hours of recordings. In China and India it’s already normal, now it’s coming to Europe and America, Italy included, at about €7 an hour.

Is it scary? It excites me, I’ve read Asimov. The fear is that they’ll be badly programmed. So, if you buy one, take its battery out at night. I was tempted to try it, and in the end I did: I talk about it in this post.

Would you want a robot at home? Tell me in the comments on the video (it’s in Italian).