philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Nvidia CEO Huang says countries must build sovereign AI infrastructure

Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday that every country needs to have its own artificial intelligence infrastructure in order to take advantage of the economic potential while protecting its own culture.

"You cannot allow that to be done by other people," Huang said at the World Government Summit in Dubai. ...

See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-ceo-huang-says-countries-must-build-sovereign-ai-infrastructure-2024-02-12/

Disney to Partner With Artificial Intelligence, ‘Emotional Control’ Coming Soon to Streaming Service

... The Walt Disney Company uses artificial intelligence to create a new advertising tool called “Disney’s Magic Words.” This tool lets brands customize their commercials to match the mood of specific scenes in movies or TV shows on Disney+ and Hulu. Disney can identify content, brands, images, and moods by analyzing scenes using AI and machine learning creating metadata tags. Brands can use these tags to personalize their messages to fit the scene or mood.

Geoffrey Calabrese, Omnicom Media Group’s chief investment officer, explained that this approach moves away from targeting broad demographics and instead focuses on specific audience emotions. Omnicom is one of six global advertising companies participating in an early test of this tool. ...

See the full story here; https://insidethemagic.net/2024/02/disney-streaming-service-artificial-intelligence-emotional-ads-emd1/

Philip Lelyveld using Apple vision pro at Todd Terrazas’s house

Hainan Airlines is handing out Rokid AR glasses for in-flight entertainment

• Hainan Airlines this week started handing out Rokid’s augmented reality glasses on a few routes for in-flight entertainment, the tech startup announced Thursday.
• Rokid claimed it’s the first time AR glasses — whose tech allows digital images to be imposed over the real world — have been used at scale on flights. 
• Apple’s Vision Pro virtual reality headset, which isn’t available in China yet, comes with a motion-stabilizing “travel mode” for use on airplanes.

See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/08/hainan-airlines-hands-out-rokid-ar-glasses-for-in-flight-entertainment.html

Huawei researchers say giving AI a Body is the next step

... But the Huawei team’s paper essentially argues that large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, can’t understand the real world because they don’t live in it.

Embodied artificial intelligence 

In order for AI agents to truly interact with the real world, claim the researchers, models will need to be housed in some form of embodiment capable of perception, action, memory, and learning. ...

See the full story here: https://cointelegraph.com/news/huawei-researchers-artificial-intelligence-ai-body-next-fundamental-step-human-level

YouTube unveils 2024 strategy with focus on AI, creators, and home entertainment

Neal Mohan, YouTube’s CEO, today unveiled the platform’s strategic direction for 2024, focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), elevating the role of content creators, enhancing user safety, and expanding into living room entertainment and subscription models. This vision aims to harness AI to foster creative expression and simplify content creation, while also acknowledging the evolving role of creators in reshaping the entertainment landscape. ...

Financially, the YouTube Partner Program stands out as the most lucrative creator monetization platform, having distributed over $70 billion to creators, artists, and media companies in the past three years. The platform has witnessed a substantial increase in the use of memberships, underscoring the growing importance of fan funding. ...

See the full story here: https://readwrite.com/youtube-unveils-2024-strategy-with-focus-on-ai-creators-and-home-entertainment/

AR glasses with multimodal AI nets funding from Pokémon Go creator

... Today, Singapore-based Brilliant Labs announced its new product, Frame, a pair of lightweight AR glasses powered by a multimodal AI assistant called Noa. The glasses have captured the attention and investment of John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, theaugmented reality platform behind games like Pokemon Go. ...

In a video demo seen by TechCrunch, one of Brilliant Labs’ founders asked Noa through voice for a self-introduction. After about three seconds, the agent generated and projected an answer in text onto the lenses.

In addition to voice commands, Noa is capable of visual processing, image generation and translation, thanks to the handful of AI models it has integrated: conversational search engine Perplexity AI; Stability AI’s text-to-image model Stable Diffusion; OpenAI’s latest text generation model GPT4; and the speech recognition system Whisper. Frame’s lenses have a resolution of 640 x 400 for displaying videos and photos. ...

Brilliant Labs’ Bluetooth-enabled devices rely on a smartphone to access the various AI models today. Eventually, though, the founders want to do away with the phone host and embed lightweight machine-learning models directly into the glasses. ...

Frame will be available for pre-order starting today and will retail at $349, the same as Monocle’s price tag. The devices will begin shipping in April. ...

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/08/ar-glasses-with-multimodal-ai-attracts-funding-from-pokemon-go-founder

NFTS launches Sean Connery Talent Lab for cinematographers, editors

The National Film and Television School (NFTS) is launching the inaugural Sean Connery Talent Lab as part of the expansion of NFTS Scotland.

The 12-month programme is aimed at developing emerging filmmakers across Scotland and the UK and is open to writers/directors, producers, cinematographers, editors and production designers. ...

See the full story here: https://www.tvbeurope.com/production-post/nfts-launches-sean-connery-talent-lab-for-cinematographers-editors?utm_source=MESA+Newsletters&utm_campaign=cf6e7159ae-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_02_02_11_39&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5534b41342-cf6e7159ae-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

Eggscape Entertainment Secures $4.25M Investment to Build the Future of Social Gaming for Mixed Reality and Beyond

Eggscape Entertainment is a new venture founded by the creative minds behind 3DAR, an animation powerhouse out of Buenos Aires, Argentina. They are best known for Little Dicky's viral music video EARTH with over a decade of creating immersive VR experiences like Gloomy Eyes featuring Colin Farrell, and Paper Birds featuring Edward Norton. ...

"Eggscape isn't just a single game; we believe that the Eggscape team is helping define the future of social gameplay for mixed reality," said Andrew Sheppard, a partner at Transcend Fund. "The fusion of mixed reality, Pixar quality animation, and social interactions that Eggscape brings to the table create a new gaming experience we have not seen before. We are beyond excited to support Eggscape Entertainment in this venture." ...

"Entertainment in mixed reality requires a fresh and novel approach to combine spatial awareness with fun and engaging gameplay. The Eggscape team has already demonstrated a compelling vision to build such a platform" said Tipatat Chennavasin, co-founder and General Partner at The Venture Reality Fund. ...

See the full story here: https://www.gamespress.com/en-US/Eggscape-Entertainment-Secures-425M-Investment-to-Build-the-Future-of-

Should we make our most powerful AI models open source to all?

“If you’re a private company building nuclear weapons or bioweapons, it’s definitely more dangerous if you’re making them available to everyone — but a lot of the danger is building them in the first place,” Cotra said. “Most systems that are too dangerous to open source are probably too dangerous to be trained at all given the kind of practices that are common in labs today, where it’s very plausible they’ll leak, or very plausible they’ll be stolen, or very plausible if they’re [available] over an API they could cause harm.”

But there’s one thing everyone agreed on: As we address today’s challenges in the form of Taylor Swift deepfakes and bot spam, we should expect much larger challenges to come. ...

See the full story here: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/2/2/24058484/open-source-artificial-intelligence-ai-risk-meta-llama-2-chatgpt-openai-deepfake