philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Beeple’s ‘Human One’ Sculpture and NFT Sells for Nearly $29 Million

PhilNote: this is a true Andy Warhol / John Cage moment - it is great art because it uses the established art infrastructure and the market says it is thru the valuation.

HUMAN ONE, a 3-D video sculpture and the latest creation bythe artist known as Beeple, sold for US$28.9 million to an online bidder in Switzerland at a live Christie’s auction in New York on Tuesday evening. 

The more than 7-foot-high sculpture featuring dystopian imagery that is accessed through the Ethereum blockchain drew bids from collectors on the phone with specialists in New York and Hong Kong, before ultimately selling for a hammer price of US$25 million in just over 3 minutes. 

The imagery that makes up the world of this ever-exploring human in Beeple’s work is drawn randomly from a data pool of one-minute video clips set up by Winkelmann and accessed via Ethereum, Christie’s says. 

The artist intends to change the imagery blanketing the four walls of the sculpture  throughout his lifetime, creating a lifelong connection with the winning bidder as well as any future owners of the sculpture. 

See the full story here: https://www.barrons.com/articles/beeples-human-one-video-sculpture-and-nft-sells-for-nearly-29-million-01636506472

Theater chain AMC explores NFTs after big screen return boosts sales

AMC Entertainment’s chief said on Monday the theater chain was in talks with Hollywood studios to launch non-fungible tokens (NFTs), after the company handily beat estimates for quarterly revenue as moviegoers returned to the big screen.

The company, which is looking to accept bitcoin as a payment method, said it was also exploring launching its own cryptocurrency and selling its own brand of popcorn in grocery stores.

See the full story here: https://toysmatrix.com/amc-entertainment-theater-chain-amc-explores-nfts-after-big-screen-return-boosts-sales/

Alibaba-backed institute achieves “another Sputnik moment” in China’s battle for AI supremacy

Chinese science and technology research institute, Damo Academy – a subsidiary of ecommerce giant Alibaba – has announced that its “Multi-Modality to Multi-Modality Multitask Mega-transformer” (M6) artificial intelligence (AI) system has increased its number of parameters from 1 trillion to 10 trillion, far exceeding the trillion-level models previously released by Google and Microsoft. According to the announcement, this makes M6 the world’s largest AI pre-training model.

According to the academy, M6 has achieved ultimate low carbon, high efficiency in AI models using 512 graphic processing units (GPU) to train a 10 trillion parameter neural network within ten days. Compared to the GPT-3, a large model released by the OpenAI research laboratory last year, M6 achieved the same parameter scale with only 1% of its energy consumption.

...The Alibaba Damo Academy (Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook) is an academically-oriented hybrid research and development facility. It was established in 2017 in Hangzhou – where Alibaba is headquartered – and operates independently from its parent company.

...It aims to create a research ecosystem in China combining cutting-edge technologies (such as quantum technology), breakthroughs in core technologies (such as AI and chips) and the application of key technologies (such as databases).

See the full story here: https://www.railway-technology.com/features/alibaba-backed-institute-achieves-another-sputnik-moment-in-chinas-battle-for-ai-supremacy/

What investors look for when deciding to back an A.I. startup

For Dhaliwal, the “best companies” have founders who have the technical, academic background and also a deep curiosity about the world and the problem they’re trying to solve.

Sturtevant said he looks to academic research to help identify opportunities. Often times, he said researchers can be so “underwater” that they might not necessarily be at the place where they’ve decided whether to turn their academic work into a company. 

While Dhaliwal said he doesn’t want to be in the position to help guide founders toward the problem they should be solving, Sturtevant said he has helped companies in this area.

“We do spend a lot of time helping these technical founders who are CEOs think about what’s the pull, why do people care,” he said.

See the full story here: https://fortune.com/2021/11/09/ai-investing-in-artificial-intelligence/

The Metaverse is a Dystopian Nightmare. Let’s Build a Better Reality.

As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one — or we can work to make sure that doesn’t happen. At Niantic, we choose the latter. We believe we can use technology to lean into the ‘reality’ of augmented reality — encouraging everyone, ourselves included, to stand up, walk outside, and connect with people and the world around us. This is what we humans are born to do, the result of two million years of human evolution, and as a result those are the things that make us the happiest. Technology should be used to make these core human experiences better — not to replace them.

See the full story here: https://nianticlabs.com/blog/real-world-metaverse/

‘AR Is Where the Real Metaverse Is Going to Happen’

Facebook might aim to build an all-immersive digital matrix, but Niantic CEO John Hanke tells us that what he plans to do is take reality—and make it better.

“Our overarching goal … is to help bring the metaverse to life,” Mark Zuckerberg told his workforce in June.

Hanke hates this idea. He’s read all the science fiction books and seen all the films that first imagined the metaverse—all great fun, and all wrong. He believes that his vision, unlike virtual reality, will make the real world better without encouraging people to totally check out of it. This past summer, he felt compelled to explain why in a self-­described manifesto whose title says it all: “The Metaverse Is a Dystopian Nightmare. Let’s Build a Better Reality.” (Facebook’s response: Change its name to Meta so it could focus on constructing Hanke’s nightmare.)

See the full story here: https://www.wired.com/story/john-hanke-niantic-augmented-reality-real-metaverse/

Niantic opens Lightship augmented reality platform to all developers

Niantic today announced it’s opening its Lightship AR platform to all developers. More specifically, it’s offering the Lightship Augmented Reality Developer Kit (ARDK) to developers who wish to create real-world metaverse concepts.

The Lightship ARDK will feature several of the tools used in Niantic’s games, such as Pokémon GO and Pikmin Bloom. These tools will allow developers to create games using three features made popular by Niantic games: Real-time mapping, understanding (which helps AR objects interact with real world places), and multiplayer sharing features. The company recently acquired Hoss to improve the Lightship developer experience, specifically in preparation for this event.

John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, said in a statement, “Transforming humanity’s relationship with technology by merging the physical and virtual worlds will require the ideas and perspectives of as many people as possible. That’s why we’re so excited to open the vault of technology that powers our own games, so developers, creators, and brands globally can build inclusive experiences that push the boundaries of what’s possible in AR.”

In addition to the global launch, Niantic has also created Niantic Ventures in order to invest in AR projects. 

See the full story here; https://venturebeat.com/2021/11/08/niantic-opens-lightship-augmented-reality-platform-to-all-developers/

Peter Jackson Selling Weta Digital’s VFX Tech Division to Unity for $1.625 Billion

Unity Software, a 3D game-development platform, is expanding its VFX footprint in a big way with the $1.625 billion acquisition of the technology division of Peter Jackson’s New Zealand-based Weta Digital.

The deal promises to make the tools used to create Gollum for Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings,” Caesar from “The Planet of the Apes” and characters and settings from a slew of other movies available to creators all over the world.

See the full story here: https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/unity-acquires-weta-digital-1235107544/

H2O.ai raises $100M at a $1.6B pre-money valuation for tools to make AI usable by any kind of enterprise

H2O.ai — a startup that has developed an open-source framework as well as proprietary apps that make it easier for any kind of enterprise to build and operate artificial intelligence-based services — has seen a surge of interest as AI applications have become more ubiquitous, and enterprises beyond tech companies want to get in on the action. Now, it has raised $100 million to fuel its growth, a round of funding that values H2O.ai at $1.7 billion post-money ($1.6 billion pre-money).

The company has offered an open source component to its services, which it calls simply H2O, from its earliest days, and that is now used by over 20,000 enterprises. Part of the reason for that is its flexibility: H2O.ai says that its open source framework works both on top of existing big data infrastructure, on bare metal or on top of existing Hadoop, Spark or Kubernetes clusters and is able to ingest data directly from HDFS, Spark, S3, Azure Data Lake or any other data source into it’s in-memory distributed key-value store.

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/07/h2o-ai-raises-100m-at-a-1-7b-valuation-for-tools-to-make-ai-usable-by-any-kind-of-enterprise/

Metaverse is….a fake Rolex

I am the co-founder and founding CTO of the company Red 6 Aerospace (founded 2018)— www.red6ar.com — while Epic/Facebook/Google/Microsoft/Snap might jockey for position in the quest to establish/define the boundaries of the future Metaverse we just went ahead and built it.

We created a unique new form of military training — allowing real soldiers/airmen/sailors to train against and alongside any number of virtual adversaries.

I called the overall system CARBON (Common Augmented Reality Battlespace Operational Network) –the core idea was to allow physical entities (for the sake of argument F22s and F35s) to simultaneously see a number of synthetic entities — in the same place, at the same time, with the same physics.

In other words — it’s a multi-player video game in the sky.

The building blocks are broadly the same as the Internet (clients, servers, APIs, cloud, wireless mesh networks, always on mobile computing units etc). The differentiator is NOT the output format (screen vs. VR vs AR headset)

It’s real-world impact — either Physical Impact or real-time datasets that influence decisions.

Neither VR nor AR are a requirement of this metaverse layer — they’re just an advanced version of it.

...

Psychological issues of Ender’s game scenarios notwithstanding — the fusion of an outdoor AR environment with a massive multi-player online gaming environment involving real-time datasets and real-world impact is a vital stepping stone to a useful Metaverse.

See the full story here: https://medium.com/@nickybee/metaverse-is-a-fake-rolex-9cef8e7c01ca