Tools & Platforms
TED Radio Hour : NPR
Illustration by Luke Medina/ NPR/Photo by Andrey Popov/ Getty Images
Futurist Ray Kurzweil’s goal is to not die at all.
A far-fetched idea, and yet those who have followed Kurzweil’s work over the decades know that many of his wild ideas and predictions come true.
Kurzweil was one of the first to forecast how AI would turbocharge human potential. His thought-provoking predictions about digital technology come from over six decades of experience inventing groundbreaking tools that we use today — tools like text to speech synthesis in 1976 and the first music synthesizer in 1983.
Now, 77, the computer scientist is focused on another prediction: that technology will soon make it possible to extend the human lifespan indefinitely.
Extending life through “longevity escape velocity”
“Right now you go through a year and you use up a year of your longevity,” Kurzweil explained in his 2024 TED Talk. “However, scientific progress is also progressing. … It’s giving us cures for diseases, new forms of treatment. … So you lose a year, you get back four months.”
As scientific progress accelerates, Kurzweil thinks the rate of developing treatments will outpace our aging. He calls this concept “longevity escape velocity.”
“For example, I’ve had these two problems, diabetes and heart disease, which I’ve actually overcome, and I really have no concern with them today,” Kurzweil told NPR’s Manoush Zomorodi. “So today I have an artificial pancreas that’s just like a real pancreas. It’s actually external, but it detects my glucose, determines the amount of insulin that I should have, and it works just like a real pancreas.”
With these types of medical advances, every year that someone gets older their health could deteriorate less and less.
“I don’t guarantee immortality. I’m talking about longevity escape velocity, where we can keep going without getting older. We won’t be aging in the same way that we are today,” said Kurzweil.
Is it only a matter of time before your mind merges with AI?
Along with his goal of escaping death, Kurzweil has envisioned a future where AI dramatically alters the way we think and live.
In 1999, in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil predicted that by 2029, artificial general intelligence would match and even exceed human intelligence. And while that may not seem so far-fetched anymore, Kurzweil says there’s one way his prediction is unique:
He claims our minds will merge with AI.
“We’re going to be able to think of things and we’re not going to be sure whether it came from our biological intelligence or our computational intelligence. It’s all going to be the same thing.”
Kurzweil calls this “the Singularity” and predicts a future where nanobots directly connect our brains to the cloud, expanding our intelligence.
“We will be funnier, sexier, smarter, more creative, free from biological limitations. We’ll be able to choose our appearance. We’ll be able to do things we can’t do today, like visualize objects in 11 dimensions … speak all languages,” Kurzweil said in his 2024 TED Talk. “We’ll be able to expand consciousness in ways we can barely imagine.”
As far as Kurzweil is concerned, our minds are already starting to merge with machines and will only continue to do so.
TED Radio Hour‘s special series: Prophets of Technology
Curious to learn more about Kurzweil’s predictions about AI and technology? On TED Radio Hour‘s three-part series, Prophets of Technology, host Manoush Zomorodi speaks with Ray Kurzweil and other scientists, entrepreneurs and experts predicting and shaping our tech future. They share what they’ve gotten right — and wrong — and where they think we’re headed next.
This episode is part one of TED Radio Hour’s three-part series: Prophets of Technology, conversations with the minds shaping our digital world. Part two will be available on Friday, July 18 and part three will be available on Friday, July 25.
This digital story was written by Harsha Nahata and edited by Katie Monteleone and Rachel Faulkner White.
This episode of TED Radio Hour was produced by James Delahoussaye and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and Manoush Zomorodi.
Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Geiran.
Our audio engineers were Maggie Luthar, Jimmy Keeley, Stacey Abbott and Josephine Nyounai.
Talk to us on Instagram @ManoushZ, and on Facebook or email us at TEDRadioHour@npr.org.
Tools & Platforms
AI Flow by TeleAI Recognized as a Breakthrough Framework for AI Deployment and Distribution by Omdia
SHANGHAI, July 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — AI Flow, the innovative framework developed by TeleAI, the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of China Telecom, has been recognized as a key role in the intelligent transformation of telecom infrastructure and services in the latest report by Omdia, a premier technology research and advisory firm. The report highlights AI Flow’s exceptional capabilities in addressing the edge GenAI implementation challenges, showcasing its device-edge-cloud computing architecture that optimizes both performance and efficiency as well as its groundbreaking combination of information and communication technologies.
According to the report, AI Flow facilitates seamless intelligence flow, allowing device-level agents to overcome the limitations of a single device and achieve enhanced functionality. The same communication network can connect advanced LLMs, VLMs, and diffusion models across heterogeneous nodes. By facilitating real-time, synergistic integration and dynamic interaction among these models, the approach achieves emergent intelligence that exceeds the capabilities of any individual model.
Lian Jye Su, Chief Analyst at Omdia, remarked that AI Flow has demonstrated sophisticated approaches to facilitate efficient collaboration across device-edge-cloud tiers and to achieve emergent intelligence through connective and interactive model operations.
The unveiling of AI Flow has also drawn great attention from the AI community on global social media. AI industry observer EyeingAI said on X “It’s a grounded, realistic take on where AI could be headed. ” AI tech influencer Parul Gautam said on X that AI Flow is pushing AI boundaries and ready to shape the future of intelligent connectivity.
Fulfill the Vision of Ubiquitous Intelligence in Future Communication Networks
AI Flow, under the leadership of Professer Xuelong Li, the CTO and Chief Scientist of China Telecom and Director of TeleAI, is introduced to address the significant challenges of the deployment of emerging AI applications posed by hardware resource limitations and communication network constraints, enhancing the scalability, responsiveness, and sustainability of real world AI systems. It is a multidisciplinary framework designed to enable seamless transmission and emergence of intelligence across hierarchical network architectures by leveraging inter-agent connections and human-agent interactions. At its core, AI Flow emphasizes three key points:
Device-Edge-Cloud Collaboration: AI Flow leverages a unified device-edge-cloud architecture, integrating end devices, edge servers, and cloud clusters, to dynamically optimize scalability and enable low-latency inference of AI models. By developing efficient collaboration paradigms tailored for the hierarchical network architecture, the system minimizes communication bottlenecks and streamlines inference execution.
Familial Models: Familial models refer to a set of multi-scale architectures designed to address diverse tasks and resource constraints within the AI Flow framework. These models facilitate seamless knowledge transfer and collaborative intelligence across the system through their interconnected capabilities. Notably, the familial models are feature-aligned, which allows efficient information sharing without the need for additional middleware. Furthermore, through well-structured collaborative design, deploying familial models over the hierarchical network can achieve enhanced inference efficiency under constrained communication bandwidth and computational resources.
Connectivity- and Interaction-based Intelligence Emergence: AI Flow introduces a paradigm shift to facilitate collaborations among advanced AI models, e.g., LLMs, vision-language models (VLMs), and diffusion models, thereby stimulating emergent intelligence surpassing the capability of any single model. In this framework, the synergistic integration of efficient collaboration and dynamic interaction among models becomes a key boost to the capabilities of AI models.
See AI Flow’s tech articles here:
https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.12479
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10884554
AI Flow’s First Move: AI-Flow-Ruyi Familial Model
Notably, TeleAI has just open-sourced the first version of AI Flow’s familial model: AI-Flow-Ruyi-7B-Preview last week on GitHhub.
The model is designed for the next-generation device-edge-cloud model service architecture. Its core innovation lies in the shared intermediate features across models of varying scales, enabling the system to generate response with a subset of parameters based on problem complexity through an early-exit mechanism. Each branch can operate independently while leveraging their shared stem network for computation reduction and seamless switching. Combined with distributed device-edge-cloud deployment, it achieves collaborative inference among large and small models within the family, enhancing the efficiency of distributed model inference.
Open-source address:
https://github.com/TeleAI-AI-Flow/AI-Flow-Ruyi
About TeleAI
TeleAI, the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of China Telecom, is a pioneering team of AI scientists and enthusiasts, working to create breakthrough AI technologies that could build up the next generation of ubiquitous intelligence and improve people’s wellbeing. Under the leadership of Professor Xuelong Li, the CTO and Chief Scientist of China Telecom, TeleAI aims to continuously expand the limits of human cognition and activities, by expediting research on AI governance, AI Flow, Intelligent Optoelectronics (with an emphasis on embodied AI), and AI Agents.
For more information:
https://www.teleai.com.cn/product/AboutTeleAI
Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2729356/AI_Flow.jpg
Tools & Platforms
Tech Philosophy and AI Strategy – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!
As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we’re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle; highlighted links are free for everyone. Additionally, you have complete control over what we send to you. If you don’t want to receive This Week in Stratechery emails (there is no podcast), please uncheck the box in your delivery settings.
On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.
- Who Invests and Why? As Mark Zuckerberg and Meta inflame the already raging talent wars, I wanted to explore if there was a way to understand who was willing to invest to win, and who was not. I came up with two scales: how big is the business opportunity for a given company, and whether or not that company’s philosophy is about helping users, or doing things for them. Not only does this intersection of Tech Philosophy and AI Opportunity explain the actions of Meta and Apple, it also helped me fully rectify some of my long-standing confusion about Google. — Ben Thompson
- Apple Searches for an AI Partner. If Apple isn’t going to pay for AI talent, then they need a partner, which is why Apple is considering a partnership with either Anthropic or OpenAI to power a new version of Siri. For one, thinking about what OpenAI and Anthropic would want from a deal with Apple provides a window into the goals distinguishing two of the leading AI labs in the world. As for Apple, the news highlights the corner that they’ve backed themselves into after several years of failed AI efforts internally and one prolonged and very public failure with last year’s Apple Intelligence rollout. The choices now? Either surrender control and branding to OpenAI, or pay big money to Anthropic (a far cry from collecting $20 billion a year from Google for default search placement). In either case, Apple management will have to leave its comfort zone, and looking at the past few years, perhaps that comfort zone was the problem. — Andrew Sharp
- Is Xi Jinping on His Way Out? Every week I survey the news to prep for Sharp China, and for about two months now, there’s been a steady thrum of rumors concerning the political fate of Xi Jinping. Connecting the dots between Xi’s unexplained absences from public view, a spate of dismissals of powerful generals from the People’s Liberation Army, and a surprise absence at the BRICS summit in Brazil a few weeks ago, various internet sleuths and commentators are wondering whether Xi’s long-unshakeable hold on power may be waning. For the second half of this week’s episode, Sinocism’s Bill Bishop, who’s been studying the CCP for 30 years, explained why he finds the public evidence unconvincing and the rumor ecosystem increasingly frustrating. It was a rollicking conversation, and one that I caveated with my own note: what’s most remarkable to me about this rumor cycle is that because of the CCP’s unbelievable opacity, there is a hard limit on what any expert can conclusively say about the future of anyone in power—even the big man, himself. — AS
Stratechery Articles and Updates
Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber
Asianometry with Jon Yu
Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop
Greatest of All Talk with Andrew Sharp and WaPo’s Ben Golliver
Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson
This week’s Stratechery video is on Checking In on AI and the Big Five.
Get notified about new Articles
Please verify your email address to proceed.
Tools & Platforms
Intel spins out AI robotics company RealSense with $50 million raise
Brian Krzanich, chief executive officer of Intel Corp., right, shows the collision avoidance feature of an AscTec Firefly drone with Intel RealSense cameras during the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Intel is spinning out its artificial intelligence robotics and biometric venture as more companies bet big on automation tools.
The new company, known as RealSense, was announced Friday and comes alongside a $50-million Series A funding round that includes MediaTek Innovation Fund and Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s venture arm that it is also spinning out.
RealSense, which makes the tools and technology for robotics automation, said it plans to use the funding to develop new product lines and meet growing demand worldwide. Nadav Orbach, Intel’s current vice president and general manager for incubation and disruptive innovation, will serve as CEO.
“The timing is now for physical AI,” as the technology gains more use cases and traction, Orbach told CNBC in an interview. “We want to develop new product lines. We see the demand and we see the need, and with where it’s at right now, the right thing for us was to raise external funds.”
Companies across the globe have ramped up investment in the burgeoning robotics space as AI use cases expand.
Morgan Stanley expects the market for humanoid robots to hit $5 trillion by 2050 as tech companies, including Tesla and Amazon, bet big on the technology and automation.
Elsewhere, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called robotics the biggest opportunity for the chipmaker after AI, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff last month claimed AI is handling 30% to 50% of the software vendor’s work.
Intel has undergone a series of cost-cutting plans after the worst year for its stock in decades.
The company axed CEO Pat Gelsinger and cut jobs last year as it struggled to keep up with AI competition. In April, the company said it would sell a majority of its stake in chip subsidiary Altera.
RealSense, formerly known as Intel Perceptual Computing, was created more than a decade ago to investigate 3D vision technology and launched its first product in 2015. The company employs about 130 people across the U.S., Israel and China and caters to autonomous robot manufacturers such as Eyesynth and Unitree Robotics.
Orbach said RealSense is focused on bringing more safety tools to the industry and easy-to-use technology for its customers. Intel will maintain a minority stake in the company.
-
Funding & Business1 week ago
Kayak and Expedia race to build AI travel agents that turn social posts into itineraries
-
Jobs & Careers1 week ago
Mumbai-based Perplexity Alternative Has 60k+ Users Without Funding
-
Mergers & Acquisitions1 week ago
Donald Trump suggests US government review subsidies to Elon Musk’s companies
-
Funding & Business1 week ago
Rethinking Venture Capital’s Talent Pipeline
-
Jobs & Careers1 week ago
Why Agentic AI Isn’t Pure Hype (And What Skeptics Aren’t Seeing Yet)
-
Education3 days ago
9 AI Ethics Scenarios (and What School Librarians Would Do)
-
Education4 days ago
Teachers see online learning as critical for workforce readiness in 2025
-
Education1 week ago
AERDF highlights the latest PreK-12 discoveries and inventions
-
Education4 days ago
Nursery teachers to get £4,500 to work in disadvantaged areas
-
Education6 days ago
How ChatGPT is breaking higher education, explained