philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

A Smart Lamp That Watches Kids When They Study Is a Hit in China

The product, made by TikTok owner ByteDance, monitors study habits and offers aid to students—but also raises privacy issues

The lamps come equipped with two built-in cameras—one facing the child and another offering a bird’s-eye view from above—letting parents remotely monitor their children when they study. There is a smartphone-sized screen attached to each lamp, which applies artificial intelligence to offer guidance on math problems and difficult words. And parents can hire a human proctor to digitally monitor their children as they study.

In addition to the basic version of the lamp, a $170 upgraded model sends alerts and photos to parents when their children slouch. That version of the lamp sold out on China’s largest e-commerce platforms earlier this month.

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-smart-lamp-that-watches-kids-when-they-study-is-a-hit-in-china-11622466002

Facebook says U.S. is the top target of disinformation campaigns

Why it matters: While most of the campaigns targeting the U.S. have originated abroad, Facebook found that a significant number of campaigns targeting people in the U.S. have originated from inside the U.S.

One campaign the company points to was the network operated by a U.S. based marketing firm, working on behalf of its clients, including a pro-Trump organization.

See the full story here: https://www.axios.com/facebook-disinformation-campaigns-globally-8859f7a8-f846-4899-93cb-dab635461c87.html?mkt_tok=ODUwLVRBQS01MTEAAAF9ZmeiaR19ZlLgmhVHfEGPBbX_BRJl5qKPaZsa4lya9LmrDcRe85HszHH0cvdi8l2FL-dVk9VIG_u8_13hOkuJ43wZoOM9XuNARZ80UbzeC7If

AR in Product Discovery and Purchase

See the full story here; https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2021/06/augmented-reality-is-getting-evolved-to.html

Deepfake maps could really mess with your sense of the world

Satellite images showing the expansion of large detention camps in Xinjiang, China, between 2016 and 2018 provided some of the strongest evidence of a government crackdown on more than a million Muslims, triggering international condemnation and sanctions.
Other aerial images—of nuclear installations in Iran and missile sites in North Korea, for example—have had a similar impact on world events. Now, image-manipulation tools made possible by artificial intelligence may make it harder to accept such images at face value.

In a paper published online last month, University of Washington professor Bo Zhao employed AI techniques similar to those used to create so-called deepfakes to alter satellite images of several cities. Zhao and colleagues swapped features between images of Seattle and Beijing to show buildings where there are none in Seattle and to remove structures and replace them with greenery in Beijing.

“Imagine a world where a state government, or other actor, can realistically manipulate images to show either nothing there or a different layout,” McKenzie says. “I am not entirely sure what can be done to stop it at this point.”

Gabrielle Lim, a researcher at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center who focuses on media manipulation, says maps can be used to mislead without AI. She points to images circulated online suggesting that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not where she claimed to be during the Capitol insurrection on January 6, as well as Chinese passports showing a disputed region of the South China Sea as part of China. “No fancy technology, but it can achieve similar objectives,” Lim says.

Zhao at the University of Washington plans to explore ways to automatically identify deepfake satellite images. He says that studying how landscapes change over time could help flag suspect features. “Temporal-spatial patterns will be really important,” he says.

See the full story here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/deepfake-maps-could-really-mess-with-your-sense-of-the-world/

Rebel AI group raises record cash after machine learning schism

A breakaway group of artificial intelligence researchers has raised a record first round of financing for a new start-up involved in general-purpose AI, marking the latest attempt to create an organisation to guarantee the safety of the era’s most powerful technology. The group has split from OpenAI, an organisation founded with the backing of Elon Musk in 2015 to make sure that superintelligent AI systems do not one day run amok and harm their makers. The schism followed differences over the group’s direction after it took a landmark $1bn investment from Microsoft in 2019, according to two people familiar with the split. The new company, Anthropic, is led by Dario Amodei, a former head of AI safety at OpenAI. It has raised $124m in its first funding round. That is the most raised for an AI group trying to build generally applicable AI technology, rather than one formed to apply the technology to a specific industry, according to the research firm PitchBook. Based on figures revealed in a company filing, the round values Anthropic at $845m.

OpenAI has sought to insulate its research into AI safety from its newer commercial operations by limiting Microsoft’s presence on its board. However, that still led to internal tensions over the organisation’s direction and priorities, according to one person familiar with the breakaway group.

To insulate itself against commercial interference, Anthropic has registered as a public benefit corporation with special governance arrangements to protect its mission to “responsibly develop and maintain advanced AI for the benefit of humanity”. These include creating a long-term benefit committee made up of people who have no connection to the company or its backers, and who will have the final say on matters including the composition of its board.

See the full story here: https://www.ft.com/content/8de92f3a-228e-4bb8-961f-96f2dce70ebb

Bristol could have world’s first ‘augmented reality zoo’

The 'augmented reality zoo' aims to provide a fully immersive experience by allowing visitors to travel in space, time and scale to experience animals in their natural habitat. 

Visitors could enter the world of insects or go back millions of years to when dinosaurs roamed the adjacent Downs.

"We at Eden are delighted to be supporters of this adventure and truly believe it has the potential to become an international symbol of a new Green Enlightenment."

See the full story here: https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2021-05-28/bristol-could-have-worlds-first-augmented-reality-zoo

NBA announces formation of NBA Africa; 5 former players are investors

The NBA announced Monday that it has formed NBA Africa, which will oversee all league business on the continent, including the Basketball Africa League.

Silver said the current enterprise value of NBA Africa is “nearly $1 billion,” though amounts of the league and individual investments were not disclosed. The league said some of its primary areas of focus with the venture are to grow the BAL and to launch additional NBA academies in Africa.

See the full story here: https://www.nba.com/news/nba-announces-formation-of-nba-africa

DALL-E: A Stepping Stone to Artificial General Intelligence

DALL-E is already proving to be a stepping stone in AI research. Its novelty lies in the way it was trained – with both text and vision stimuli – unlocking promising new directions of research in a re-emerging field called multimodal AI.

Final thoughts

In just less than a year since GPT-3’s release, OpenAI is about to release DALL-E as its next state-of-the-art API. This, along with the GPT and CLIP models, gets OpenAI one step closer to its promise of building sustainable and safe artificial general intelligence (AGI). It also creates endless new streams of research surpassing the previous levels of AI performance. 

One thing is certain–once released, we can all expect our Twitter feed to be filled with mind-blowing applications, just this time with artificially generated images rather than artificially generated text.

See the full story here: https://www.rtinsights.com/dall-e-a-stepping-stone-to-artificial-general-intelligence/

AI is learning how to create itself

If AI starts to generate intelligence by itself, there’s no guarantee that it will be human-like. Rather than humans teaching machines to think like humans, machines might teach humans new ways of thinking.

“There’s probably a vast number of different ways to be very intelligent,” says Clune. “One of the things that excite me about AI is that we might come to understand intelligence more generally, by seeing what variation is possible.

“I think that’s fascinating. I mean, it’s almost like inventing interstellar travel and being able to go visit alien cultures. There would be no greater moment in the history of humankind than encountering an alien race and learning about its culture, its science, everything. Interstellar travel is exceedingly difficult, but we have the ability to potentially create alien intelligences digitally.”

Clune also stresses the importance of thinking about the ethics of the new technology from the start. There is a good chance that AI-designed neural networks and algorithms will be even harder to understand than today’s already opaque black-box systems. Are AIs generated by algorithms harder to audit for bias? Is it harder to guarantee that they will not behave in undesirable ways?

See the full story here; https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/27/1025453/artificial-intelligence-learning-create-itself-agi/

World-Dominating Superstar Firms Get Bigger, Techier, and More Chinese

The world’s biggest businesses were doing fine until Covid-19 arrived. Now they’re doing even better.

The top 50 companies by value added $4.5 trillion of stock market capitalization in 2020, taking their combined worth to about 28% of global gross domestic product. Three decades ago the equivalent figure was less than 5%.

See the full story here: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-biggest-global-companies-growth-trends/?mkt_tok=ODUwLVRBQS01MTEAAAF9TLFzIRiSLf1xQxhFxkUUyIGPztq6VDRE9p6idTDpJasFO1GyFw4klw047EIuLPFbuun0tjbYd7IVKDXoUe58dtt18Kv-q8-qZ95sY7vvJhyL