[PhilNote: iFlyTek, the realtime translation app partially funded by and with ties to the gov't of China, continues its tech advances for the global market.]
Launching the Super Brain 2030 Plan, a series of strategic initiatives to advance the quality and availability of personal robotics and artificial intelligence solutions to assist families and communities;
Achieving significant and sustainable growth amid the ongoing pandemic and challenging economic trends as the only Chinese A-share company to achieve an annual revenue growth rate of over 25% for 10 consecutive years;
Earning recognition for our outstanding performance in making environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies central to the company's advancement by the Hang Seng Corporate Responsibility Benchmark Index.
2. Gender inequality is happening in the metaverse
3. Want to be a chief metaverse officer? This is what the job looks like
4. Motion trackers could make metaverse avatars more lifelike
More on the metaverse from Agenda
Most internet users don't have a digital identity that they own. However, metaverse users will need one to allow them to move across multiple platforms. This means there will also need to be standards and regulations around creating digital identities.
How can companies make the right investment decisions in the metaverse? They’ll need to understand the competing metaverse visions that are being constructed, and closely monitor the key triggers that will determine whether a particular virtual world is gaining more traction than others.
Warith Niallah, CEO of FTC Publications, is investing millions in Entertainment AI, an artificial intelligence-based system that will help streamline the entertainment industry. This technology controls closed captions, voiceovers, and image creation for television and film projects. With this investment, Niallah is looking to revolutionize the way people create content in the entertainment industry. ...
FTC Publications, Inc. is a multinational media, technology, entertainment, and business services organization with 61 locations around the world founded in 1988. Our Company is divided into divisions dedicated to their individual products and services.
... Meow Wolf took pains to ensure that its arrival in Denverwould benefit the community. Executives worked with local activists to outline commitments around sustainability, wages, and diversity and inclusion. In acknowledgement of Denver’s DIY scene, Meow Wolf created a fund to channel money to local arts groups. And it pledged to devote 40% of its exhibition space to Colorado artists. “If a company says that they want to do good in the world and that they’re a B Corp and that they’re about social impact, they’re expected to walk the walk,” Kadlubek says. The Denver Meow Wolf finally opened in September 2021, having already sold $1 million worth of tickets in the first 24 hours they were available.
This past summer, an eclectic crowd of club kids, burners, D&D types, and even some families turned up at a former junkyard near the Denver museum for Meow Wolf’s annual Vortex music festival. When a wall of clouds rolled down from the Rockies and unleashed a ferocious summer thunderstorm, flooding the concrete yard, they stayed put as a lineup of hyperpop groups, SoundCloud rappers, and techno DJs kept the party going. It wasn’t exactly the nightly “fireworks spectacular” over Cinderella’s castle; it was uncontrolled, unexpected, and altogether human. ...
As it’s grown, Meow Wolf has systematized its creativity. A variety of employees, not just those hired as artists, are encouraged to develop installations to fill the smaller rooms of exhibitions. They can also attend workshops on how to operate 3D printers, vacuum-forming machines, laser cutters, and other manufacturing tools. “It’s about, ‘How do we develop everyone to be an artist?’” says Rich Staib, senior vice president for exhibition design and production. This openness, he says, is very different from what he encountered earlier in his career, working on attractions for Disney and Universal. ...
It’s one of art’s most important functions—helping us grapple with the complexities of existence by allowing us to absorb them in small but powerful doses. And it explains why, as Kadlubek told me, Meow Wolf continues to explore all of the realms of human experience, not just the most commercial ones. “The big distinction between us and Disney,” he says, “is we actually want complexity and confusion and existential crisis and struggle. We don’t want to just be the happiest place on earth.”
... But porn or not, this is still AI-generated imagery, and given the protests currently going on at ArtStation, and with the wider controversy surrounding the field in general, Unstable Diffusion landed at the right time to be the campaign to get Kickstarter looking at their own policies on the matter. ...
UPDATE 11:15pm ET: Unstable Diffusion have issued a statement, which reads:
While Kickstarter’s capitulation to a loud subset of artists disappoints us, we and our supporters will not back down from defending the freedom to create. We have updated our new website, to allow our supporters to directly contribute to the creation and release of new artistic AI systems more powerful than ever. We are rising to the call to defend against the artists lobbying to make all AI art illegal, and backers support will allow us to challenge this increasingly well-funded and organized lobby.
And this technology could open the door to films being changed long after they come out, said Denver D’Rozario, a Howard University marketing professor who has studied the software resurrection of dead actors.
“Let’s say … in a movie a guy’s drinking a can of Pepsi, and 20 years from now you get a sponsorship from Coke,” said D’Rozario. “Do you change the can of Pepsi to Coke?” “At what point can things be changed? At what point can things be bought?”
Mann said the advantages of his technology are many, from breaking down language barriers and fomenting cross-border empathy to sparing actors the headache of reshoots. In his view, scenarios like D’Rozario’s hypothetical Coke sponsorship represent new revenue streams. ...
ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence program captivating Silicon Valley with its sophisticated prose, had its origin three years ago, when technology investor Sam Altman became chief executive of the chatbot’s developer, OpenAI.
Mr. Altman decided at that time to move the OpenAI research lab away from its nonprofit roots and turn to a new strategy, as it raced to build software that could fully mirror the intelligence and capabilities of humans—what AI researchers call “artificial general intelligence.” Mr. Altman, who had built a name as president of famed startup accelerator Y Combinator, would oversee the creation of a new for-profit arm, believing OpenAI needed to become an aggressive fundraiser to meet its founding mission. ...
... The chart shows the answers of 352 experts. This is from the most recent study by Katja Grace and her colleagues, conducted in the summer of 2022.
Experts were asked when they believe there is a 50% chance that human-level AI exists.3Human-level AI was defined as unaided machines being able to accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers. More information about the study can be found in the fold-out box at the end of the text on this page.4 ...
As highlighted in the annotations, half of the experts gave a date before 2061, and 90% gave a date within the next 100 years. ...
Expert surveys are one piece of information to consider when we think about the future of AI, but we should not overstate the results of these surveys. Experts in a particular technology are not necessarily experts in making predictions about the future of that technology. ...
10. For the first time, a human wears augmented reality contacts
In July, the startup Mojo Visionannounced that their CEO wore the company’s prototype augmented reality (AR) contact lenses for the first time. Each device is equipped with a display that is 30 times sharper than an iPhone’s and is outfitted with all the technology needed to track a user’s eye movements. Though extremely preliminary, the technology makes real the sci-fi dream of implanted vision that allows the wearer to seamlessly interact with digital images overlaid on perceptual reality. ...
