77% of our electronic devices already use artificial intelligence (AI). By 2025, the global market of AI is estimated to grow to 60 billion US dollars. By 2030, AI may even boost global GDP by 15.7 trillion US dollars. And, at some point thereafter, AI may come to be the last human invention, provided it optimises itself and takes over research and innovation, leading to what some have termed an ‘intelligence explosion’. In the grand scheme of things, as Google CEO Sundar Pichai thinks, AI will then have a greater impact on humanity than electricity and fire did.
... we may face a ‘responsibility gap’, a situation in which no one is responsible for the harm caused by AI. Responsibility gaps may arise because current AI systems themselves cannot be morally responsible for what they do, and the humans involved may no longer satisfy key conditions of moral responsibility, ...
... “The fact is that we are not a theater exhibitor, but a technology licensing company,” IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond said in an interview with Deadline. The executive has for some time been referencing IMAX 3.0 in investor presentations, including one this month for SSIMWAVE.
“SSIMWAVE boasts a brilliant team of engineers, technologists, and academics obsessed with image quality and on the leading edge; the similarities between this company and IMAX when we acquired it nearly 30 years ago are uncanny,” Gelfond expounded in the company announcement.
In addition to nearly 1,700 IMAX theater systems in 80 countries, the company markets a content library of more than 200 IMAX Enhanced titles across global streaming platforms, including Disney+. There are more than 10 million IMAX Enhanced certified devices in the market worldwide, according to the firm.
“In the near-term, SSIMWAVE brings to IMAX new, SaaS-based revenue and a world-class client roster that tightly aligns with some of our strongest, most successful content partnerships,” said Gelfond. ...
... Noting that Web3 is just a “new iteration of the worldwide web,” she explained: “Basically at the heart, it’s the next version of everything and what it’s really about is decentralization.”
Along with blockchain-based technologies,” it’s also about “artificial intelligence (AI) helping to empower more intelligence and more adaptive applications; it’s all these things that are happening in our world right now, 5g as well – all these behaviors.”
She added: “Everything that’s being driven is all coming under this umbrella of Web3. And I want to just say right now that the metaverse, NFTs and all these other buzzwords are tactics inside of this larger Web3 environment.” ...
James Earl Jones, the original voice of Darth Vader who has delivered some of the most iconic lines in cinematic history, has officially stepped back from the villainous role.
According to a Friday report by Vanity Fair, the 91-year-old screen legend has permitted Disney and Lucasfilm to use artificial intelligence and archival recordings to re-create his menacing tone in future “Star Wars” projects. Jones was most recently billed as Darth Vader on the Disney+ series “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” which premiered earlier this year.
While working on “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Skywalker Sound editor Matthew Wood and the Ukrainian company Respeecher consulted with Jones to create a sound for Vader that captured his chilling vocal performance from the flagship “Star Wars” trilogy. ...
... To match the resolution limits of the human eye, VR displays need to squeeze between 7,000 and 10,000 pixels into each inch of display, say the authors. For context, the latest smartphone screens manage only around 460 pixels per inch.
Despite the size of that gap, though, there are already clear paths towards closing it. At present, most VR headsets use separate red, green, and blue organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), which are hard to make more compact due to their manufacturing process. But an alternative approach that adds colored filters to white OLEDs could make it possible to achieve 60 PPD.
Relying on filtering has its own challenges, as it reduces the efficiency of the light source, resulting in lower brightness or higher power consumption. But an experimental OLED design known as a “meta-OLED” could get around this trade-off by combing the light source with nanopatterned mirrors that exploit the phenomenon of resonance to emit light only from a particular frequency.
Meta-OLEDS could potentially achieve pixel densities of more than 10,000 PPD, approaching the physical limits set by the wavelength of light. They could also be more efficient and have improved color definition compared to previous generations. However, despite keen interest from display technology companies, the technology is still nascent and likely further away from commercialization. ...
Niantic has released its Lightship Visual Positioning System (VPS) for the Web, providing developers access to its augmented reality (AR) tools designed by 8th Wall, it announced on Thursday.
The new platform anchors webAR and virtual content across physical locations by adding depth and realism to immersive experiences anywhere in the world using its AR map, allowing precise, centimetre-level accuracy across global locations, with just a mobile browser and no app required.
It also provides access to 3D meshes of over 100,000 locations for developers to implement in AR scenes, enabling them to build webAR experiences with occlusion and physics for enhanced interactions between the virtual and physical world, the company explained. ...
... Generative AI is powered by a computer program called a diffusion model. In simple terms, a diffusion model destroys and recreates images to find statistical patterns in them. The way it operates is not like natural intelligence.
We cannot predict how well, or even why, an AI like this works. We can only judge whether its outputs look good. ...
Diffusion models perform two sequential processes. They ruin images, then they try to rebuild them. Programmers give the model real images with meanings ascribed by humans: dog, oil painting, banana, sky, 1960s sofa, etc. The model diffuses — that is, moves — them through a long chain of sequential steps. In the ruining sequence, each step slightly alters the image handed to it by the previous step, adding random noise in the form of scattershot meaningless pixels, then handing it off to the next step. Repeated, over and over, this causes the original image to gradually fade into static and its meaning to disappear.
When this process is finished, the model runs it in reverse. Starting with the nearly meaningless noise, it pushes the image back through the series of sequential steps, this time attempting to reduce noise and bring back meaning. At each step, the model’s performance is judged by the probability that the less noisy image created at that step has the same meaning as the original, real image. ...
To produce images that have associated text meanings, words that describe the training images are taken through the noising and de-noising chains along at the same time. In this way, the model is trained not only to produce an image with a high likelihood of meaning, but with a high likelihood of the same descriptive words being associated with it. ...
A set of parameters that produces good images is indistinguishable from a set that creates bad images — or nearly perfect images with some unknown but fatal flaw. Thus, we cannot predict how well, or even why, an AI like this works. We can only judge whether its outputs look good. ...
Towering linguist Noam Chomsky pointed out that a generative model like GPT-3 does not produce words in a meaningful language any differently from how it would produce words in a meaningless or impossible language. ...
... Mehrish, who oversees Mars’ global digital, data and analytics teams, including in AI and machine learning, says efforts with DALL-E are just a tiny part of the massive AI-focused digital transformation journey Mars has been on over the past five years.
“We are about midway through, so we are still on that journey,” said Mehrish, who joined Mars in 2018 after a two-decade career in banking, technology, consulting, strategy and data science. The effort behind both AI and digital transformation at Mars, he explained, came from from outgoing CEO Grant Reid with a focus on agile development, speed and scale.
“It’s a passion project that our new CEO, Poul Weihrauch, is going to continue and build on, so it’s really a top-down mandate and it’s always been a very high priority for the company,” Mehrish said. ...
In 2016, Mars spent $117 million to acquire Whistle, a smart collar startup known as a “Fitbit for dogs.” This past May, Whistle launched Whistle Health, an AI-enabled, data-driven smart device for dogs aimed at preventive care, which a press release said can “translate every dog’s movements into a personalized, holistic wellness index,” including health behaviors like eating, drinking, scratching, licking, sleeping and fitness.
“These are built on huge training sets with machine learning and AI built in that gives you a score that allows you to track your dog’s health and also ties in with a vet,” said Mehrish. ...
In 2021, it announced a digital twin initiative with Microsoft to develop virtual clones of its physical supply chain operations to help simulate scenarios that would be too difficult to test with physical assets. ...
Over the last two years, the company has moved to what it calls a ‘federated center of growth,’ with business segments adding their own data scientists and engineers.
“That’s the second wave, as we go down more and more into the organization and upskill our associates from a bottom-up perspective,” Mehrish said. ...
