Snap, owner of the video messaging app Snapchat, has partnered with the Louvre on a free program called Egypt Augmented, which will give users an interactive deep dive into the museum’s renowned Egyptian treasures using augmented reality (A.R.).
The experience, designed by Snap’s own A.R. Studio, leverages the technology to bring iconic works like the Chamber of Ancestors and the Dendera Zodiac to life in dynamic ways. Viewers scan the QR codes posted near the chosen artworks, open up Snapchat’s camera, and see these ancient artworks in a new light. The technology will virtually restore faded paint, revealing “shapes, materials, colors, and decorations” of selected works that have faded to bare stone over the years, according to the press release.
... Response times to employees’ questions on the chatbot were found to be about five seconds or less, which compares with around 15 minutes when a human helper responded, according to a spokeswoman for the company. Early tests show the chatbots are around 90% accurate. ...
“Security has to be a business differentiator, security has to be part of your strategic plan to grow your business,” he said. Belknap said he is looking into other ways generative AI could help his cybersecurity team defend the company against hackers, such as by detecting malware. ...
When the final version of the chatbot is released, LinkedIn plans to track how many of its interactions with employees require little to no human engagement, according to the spokeswoman for the company. ...
OpenAI is developing an AI tool that can identify images created by artificial intelligence — specifically those made in whole or part by its Dall-E 3 image generator. Calling it a “provenance classifier,” company CTO Mira Murati began publicly discussing the detection app last week but said not to expect it in general release anytime soon. This, despite Murati’s claim it is “almost 99 percent reliable.” That is still not good enough for OpenAI, which knows there is much at stake when the public perception of artists’ work can be impacted by a filter applied by AI, which is notoriously capricious. ...
TechCrunch writes that in addition to achieving something closer to 100 percent accuracy across the board, OpenAI is also concerned about “the philosophical question of what, exactly, constitutes an AI-generated image.”
Artwork wholly generated by DALL-E 3 is an obvious example, “but what about an image from DALL-E 3 that’s gone through several rounds of edits, has been combined with other images and then was run through a few post-processing filters?” muses TechCrunch. ...
The usefulness of an OpenAI AI image detector optimized for Dall-E 3 may be limited if it cannot spot pictures generated by competing technologies like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Firefly, Digital Trends points out, adding that “anything that can highlight fake images could have a positive impact.” ...
Not all porn stars are resisting the technology. In August, adult performer Brandi Love partnered with AI developer Forever Voices to create a Telegram chatbot. Other actors using AI to create AI companions include Amouranth, Caryn Marjorie, Lena Moon, and Adriana Chechik.
Fake actors, however, are another matter entirely.
“We can't compete with AI images of girls as these figures are ‘perfect’ in the viewer's eyes,” Tate said. “They aren't real, but there is already a market for fans interacting with these AI models.” ...
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's second AI forum todaycentered on a need for more government funding in AI research, according to Axios. The closed-door forum drew academics, CEOs of smaller AI firms, civil society groups, and venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz and John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins.
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As reported by Axios, participants stressed a need for increased government funding for AI research in the areas of data, modeling, and education.
Outside of the meeting, Schumer told reporters that a minimum of $32B is required for government initiatives, like a National AI Research Resource.
During the forum, Steve Case, co-founder of AOL and CEO of Revolution, called for fostering competition in AI to prevent Silicon Valley's monopoly.
MIT AI researcher Max Tegmark said there was reluctance to discuss regulating artificial general intelligence and "superintelligence" in forthcoming advanced AI models.
With this exhibition, Infinity Experiences—a joint venture of PHI Studio and Felix & Paul Studios—is tackling a big issue in the 360 video space: how to distribute content and get your experiences in front of an audience. While the number of people who own VR headsets is increasing, the awareness of — and therefore, demand for — narrative and 360 content remains low. As a result, there has been little incentive for the major players to monetize 360 and narrative the way they have monetized games. This leaves innovative and accomplished creators in a sticky situation; they want to continue to pioneer, but struggle to find a business plan that allows them to build a library that will entice an audience and in turn incentivize monetization. ...
Today, a startup called Atom Computing announced that it has been doing internal testing of a 1,180 qubit quantum computer and will be making it available to customers next year. The system represents a major step forward for the company, which had only built one prior system based on neutral atom qubits—a system that operated using only 100 qubits.
The error rate for individual qubit operations is high enough that it won't be possible to run an algorithm that relies on the full qubit count without it failing due to an error. But it does back up the company's claims that its technology can scale rapidly and provides a testbed for work on quantum error correction. And, for smaller algorithms, the company says it'll simply run multiple instances in parallel to boost the chance of returning the right answer. ...
... If you’ve gotten this far, here’s the payoff: If today’s large language models are capable of some amount of reasoning, however elementary, it could yield what could be years of rapid advances in the abilities of generative AIs.
In part, that’s because language isn’t just another medium of communication, like pictures or sound. It’s a technology humans developed for describing absolutely everything in the world we can conceive of, and how it all relates. Language gives us the ability to build models of the world, even absent any other stimuli, like vision or hearing, says Aguera y Arcas. ...
That is why a large language model can write fluently about the relationship between, say, two colors, even though it has never “seen” either of them, he says. ...
...we might soon have AI-based assistants that are completely personalized to data specific to us. Google is already attempting a first version of this—an update to its Bard generative AI allows it to search and synthesize across all of your emails, calendar items and documents, as long as they are already in Google’s system—but it’s primitive and prone to error. ...
Between the invention of the steam engine and the debut of the locomotive, more than a century elapsed. Meanwhile, a new science was born, which in turn became the midwife of countless other advancements essential to the Industrial Revolution. If the development of generative AIs conforms to this pattern at all, its near future will include transformative inventions—AIs expert in different subjects, truly personal assistants—followed by years of refinement, mad scrambles to harness and benefit from these new technologies, and possibly another sort of Industrial Revolution. But rather than a revolution predicated on energy and matter, this one will be based on the manipulation of data and insight. ...
PhilNote; This sounds like incredible hardware, and our friend Andrew Shulkind was the driving force.
... The resulting Big Sky camera fea-tures an 18K sensor that measures 77.5mm x 75.6mm (3.05"x2.98"); the system is capable of capturing images at 120 fps and transfer-ring data at 60 gigabytes per second. ...
An additional complication was that the audience’s natural vision inside the Sphere places the most important part of the image in the lower quarter of the screen; this is the most comfortable viewing angle, one that doesn’t require craning your neck to look up. There is still a considerable amount of image above the audience’s head, though — so, when a typical scene is shot, the camera must be con-stantly tilted at 55 degrees to capture an angle of view that fills the entire screen, with the “center” of the action framed through the lower edge of the lens. ...
For Sphere, the team had to create a 165-degree-horizontal-angle-of-view fisheye lens with an edge-to-edge performance exceeding 60-percent MTF at 100 line-pairs — an extraordinary feat for any photographic lens. The result is a lens the size of a dinner plate, ...
The Sphere Immersive Sound system, developed in partnership with the German company Holoplot, involves 167,000 speakers that direct sound to the audience like a laser beam — and with nearly the same precision. The system not only delivers delay-free and echo-free sound to all seats, but it can also create wholly immersive 3D audio by placing a sound in any position in 3D space. ...
Further, the system can deliver an entirely different soundtrack, in various languages, to different positions in the theater. So, within a small group of seats, one viewer can listen to a French soundtrack while the neighboring viewer hears English — both in perfect sync with the picture. ...
Sphere currently has 10 Big Sky cameras, and there are more coming. ...
Our goal is to use this technology to take people to new places they haven’t been before and make them feel as if they had been,” Shulkind concludes. “For movies, 4K is good enough. With Sphere, good enough isn’t good enough anymore.”
This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI
What’s happening: A new tool lets artists make invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways.
Why it matters: The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless.
How it works: Nightshade exploits a security vulnerability in generative AI models, one arising from the fact that they are trained on vast amounts of data—in this case, images that have been hoovered from the internet. Poisoned data samples can manipulate models into learning, for example, that images of hats are cakes, and images of handbags are toasters. And it’s almost impossible to defend against this sort of attack currently.
