AMD said on Tuesday it plans to buy an artificial intelligence startup called Nod.ai as part of an effort to bolster its software capabilities.
In its race to catch rival chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA.O), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) plans to invest heavily in the critical software necessary for the company's advanced AI chips. Through more than a decade of work, Nvidia has built a powerful advantage in the AI chip market through the software it makes, and the software developer ecosystem.
AMD has vowed to invest in and build a unified collection of software to power the various chips the company makes ...
... Enter Forever Voices AI, a startup that offered to create an AI version of Caryn so she could better serve her overwhelmingly male fan base. For just one dollar, Caryn’s admirers could have a 60-second conversation with her virtual clone.
During the first week, Caryn earned $72,000. As expected, most of the fans asked sexual questions, and fake Caryn’s replies were equally explicit. “The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue,” she told Insider. Her fans knew that the AI wasn’t really Caryn, but it spoke exactly like her. So who cares? ...
“Replika is for anyone who wants a friend with no judgment, drama or social anxiety involved. ...
Many Reddit posts argue that AI relationships are more satisfying than real-life ones — the virtual partners are always available and problem-free. “Gaming changed everything,” said Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who has spent decades studying human interactions with technology. In an interview with The Telegraph, Turkle said,“People may let you down, but here’s something that won’t. It’s a voice that always comforts and assures us that we’re being heard.” ...
The idea is to go beyond generic AI chatbots to create a true personal agent that leverages the company’s unique data set and the inferred preferences of individual users, said Ian Morris, the Likewise CEO, in an interview Thursday morning.
Bad news for anyone using Unreal Engine for VFX or animation. Epic Games has confirmed that it will begin charging industries outside gaming to use of the 3D graphics engine next year. Fees will be charged on a per-seat basis.
Speaking at Unreal Fest 2023, CEO Tim Sweeney has confirmed that Unreal Engine will become “a licensable piece of software like Maya or Photoshop” with a subscription-based pricing model. Studios using it for non-gaming work like animation, VFX and visualization will be charged through a “seat-based enterprise software licensing model” (also see our pick of the best 3D apps).
... Ben Colman, CEO of Reality Defender, says his company’s detection tools are unevadable in part because they’re private. (So far, the company’s clients have mainly been governments and large corporations.) With publicly available tools like GPTZero, anyone can run a piece of text through the detector and then tweak it until it passes muster. Reality Defender, by contrast, vets every person and institution that uses the tool, Colman says. They also watch out for suspicious usage, so if a particular account were to run tests on the same image over and over with the goal of bypassing detection, their system would flag it. ...
The purpose of Writer isn’t to write for you, she says, but rather to make your writing faster, stronger, and more consistent. That could mean suggesting edits to prose and structure, or highlighting what else has been written on the subject and offering counterarguments. The goal, she says, is to help users focus less on sentence-level mechanics and more on the ideas they’re trying to communicate. Ideally, this process yields a piece of text that’s just as “human” as if the person had written it entirely themselves. “If the detector can flag it as AI writing, then you’ve used the tools wrong,” she says. ...
Mollick, who teaches entrepreneurship at Wharton, not only allows his students to use AI tools—he requires it. “Now my syllabus says you have to do at least one impossible thing,” he says. If a student can’t code, maybe they write a working program. If they’ve never done design work, they might put together a visual prototype. “Every paper you turn in has to be critiqued by at least four famous entrepreneurs you simulate,” he says. ...
“I think that came out of Covid,” Amiton continued. “People reevaluated what the purpose of work even is, and if you can use ChatGPT to make your life easier, and therefore have a better quality of life or work-life balance, then why not use the shortcut?” ...
I noticed that his framing of GPTZero/Origin was shifting slightly. Now, he said, AI-detection would be only one part of the humanity-proving toolkit. Just as important would be an emphasis on provenance, or “content credentials.” The idea is to attach a cryptographic tag to a piece of content that verifies it was created by a human, as determined by its process of creation—a sort of captcha for digital files. Adobe Photoshop already attaches a tag to photos that harness its new AI generation tool, Firefly. Anyone looking at an image can right-click it and see who made it, where, and how. Tian says he wants to do the same thing for text and that he has been talking to the Content Authenticity Initiative—a consortium dedicated to creating a provenance standard across media—as well as Microsoft about working together. ...
It’s a subtle but meaningful distinction: Human writing may not be better, or more creative, or even more original. But it will be human, which will matter to other humans. ...
... The agreement regarding screenwriters' rights and AI was likely reached because Hollywood studios have reason to be financially concerned about AI and copyright. After all, a creation written by artificial intelligence cannot be protected by copyright, and studios are often the owners or co-owners of these rights. By ensuring that credit for writing always goes to a human, even when AI is involved in the process, studios are also protecting their interests and, therefore, stand to benefit from this agreement. ...
... Something is going on -- or not going on, as the case may be -- in the training of artificial neural networks that is causing huge gaps in cognition. The neural networks will forget all their old information while learning new things -- and then they will proceed to freeze. ...
They eschewed a conventional neural network -- one that constantly adjusts its synapses (the links between neurons) until it is able to find a solution -- for a 'spiking' one that they thought most closely resembles the human brain.
A 'spiking' network sends an output only after receiving a whole bunch of signals over time and therefore shifts around much less data and uses much less power and bandwidth, according to the researchers. In doing so, it is able to re-activate neurons involved in learning old tasks. It seemed to work.
The spiking neural network was capable of performing both tasks after undergoing sleeplike phases. ...
Meanwhile, more recently, researchers from Ohio State University steered clear of sleep while tackling the same problem of catastrophic forgetting in deep-learning neural nets. ...
In what may just be one of the more curious ironies of our times, Shroff and his colleagues found that algorithms, much like humans, were able to remember much better when fed with very different tasks in succession instead of a series of similar tasks. ...
The Ohio State researchers discovered that dissimilar tasks should be introduced very early in the continual learning process for the AI to learn new things as well as tasks similar to old ones. ...
The Themed Entertainment Association (TEA), a non-profit representing compelling places and experiences worldwide, has announced details of the Artificial Intelligence and Experience Creation session which will be taking place at the Storytelling, Architecture, Technology, and Experience (SATE) conference in North America.
The event is taking place 12 – 14 October in Kansas City, Missouri. The theme for 2023 is Origins and Influencers: The people, places and ideas that shape our industry....
The session will ask questions such as: Is artificial intelligence an exciting new tool for designers and makers of immersive worlds? Or is it merely a means to shortcut creativity? And how will all of this affect the real visitor experience? What are the long-term repercussions, and how can we protect (and foster) original concepts? ...
... The company describes the device as a "screenless, standalone device and software platform built from the ground up for AI." It's powered by an "advanced" Qualcomm Snapdragon platform and equipped with a mini-projector that takes the place of a smartphone screen, along with a camera and speaker. It can perform functions like AI-powered optical recognition, but is also supposedly "privacy-first" thanks to qualities like no wake word and thus no "always on" listening." ...
In any case, we'll learn more when it's fully unveiled next month on November 9.
... “Robert Basiuk from Borneo Adventure (Sarawak), during WiT Indie, said that while bookings for his company’s experiences changed from fax machine to online booking, his best-selling product fundamentally did not change for the last 30-40 years. It is still experiencing the heart of Borneo in all its splendour. Likewise for breakfast in the wild by Mandai Zoo, no change except for the different animals.”
What’s changed is how consumers search and take in information which has gone from words to pictures to videos – “from Google to Facebook to TikTok”.
“As content creator operators to content delivery people (OTAs), we cannot ignore the changing trends and the various platforms that our customers are choosing to discover us. The fortunate thing is that consumers now want authenticity which means it’s much easier to create the videos. There are also plenty of tools outside to help you with videos.”
