philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

One of the biggest venues in the world for video art—Las Vegas’s Sphere delivers virtual reality (without the headset)

... It was a powerful experience—somewhere between the old-school pleasures of a planetarium and the immediacy of virtual reality (more thrilling without the headset!)—and nonetheless disorienting. ...

... it overnight became one of the biggest venues in the world for video art. (Exosphere, the name for Sphere’s exterior screen, is the perfect canvas for images of eyeballs or globes, but otherwise not as powerful.) ...

... only Brambilla and Devlin’s work were stylistically distinct enough to read as artworks. Brambilla stitched together over a thousand movie clips referencing Elvis and Vegas to create one of his characteristic scrolling video tapestries, the Bosch-like delirium of imagery being his recognisable signature at this point. And Devlin created an awe-inspiring digital tapestry featuring 26 hand-drawn examples of fantastic-looking but real species in Nevada on the verge of extinction, which grew from her Come Home Againinstallation in the gardens of the Tate Modern.
The other artworks were largely subsumed by the concert theatrics, Sphere being a great leveller of video art in much the way the internet is with photography. Who cares about authorship when a flood of stunning images is washing over you?...

The unexpected appearance of this night-time Vegas scene was probably the most powerful example of Sphere technology in action. Suddenly the band seemed to be playing in front of the real, blinking city skyline complete with its colour-shifting Ferris Wheel instead of in front a screen picturing such things. Out of some stubborn journalistic habit I asked who created that piece, and it turned out to be a team at George Lucas’s visual effects company Industrial Light and Magic. And there it was, the category that best describes Sphere’s leading video art and special effects alike, the condition that so much digital imagery today aspires to: magic.

See the full article here: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/12/26/one-of-the-biggest-venues-in-the-world-for-video-artlas-vegass-sphere-delivers-virtual-reality-without-the-headset

These are the top 10 most popular AI tools of 2023, and how to use them to make more money

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/24/the-top-10-ai-tools-of-2023-and-how-to-use-them-to-make-more-money.html

A Call For A Systemic Dismantling: These Women Refuse To Be Hidden Figures In The Development Of AI

... Case in point: According to the same study by AKAS in 2023, “mentions of Altman in articles referencing AI are twice the combined total of 42 women in the recent Top 100 list of AI influencers in Time magazine.” ...

See the full article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hessiejones/2023/12/23/a-call-for-a-systemic-dismantling-these-women-refuse-to-be-hidden-figures-in-the-development-of-ai/?ss=ai&sh=4955e0f128f4

Amazon’s new Echo Frames can’t touch the Ray-Ban Meta

...

Unlike the Ray-Bans, however, Amazon’s Echo Frames 3 don’t do video capture (you can practically hear the collective sigh of relief from privacy advocates across the globe). They do, however, offer a similar audio set up. The speakers are located in the temples, just ahead of the temple tips. ...

As their name implies, however, the real centerpiece here is Echo functionality. The Frames are yet another form factor for summoning Alexa. This makes enough sense on the face of it, a hands-free voice assistant you can take anywhere your phone gets a decent connection. You can play/pause, make calls and set reminders, for starters — all things you can do on a pair of earbuds with a connected voice assistant. ...

My feelings about the latest Echo Frames may well have been different had I not recently tested the Ray-Ban Meta. At $270, they’re $30 cheaper than the Meta glasses. If you’re attempting to decide between the two, I would say bite the bullet and spend the extra $30. Of course, it’s also worth factoring in that — as I write this — Amazon is currently offering the new Echo Frames for a deeply discounted $200.

See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/23/amazons-new-echo-frames-cant-touch-the-ray-ban-meta/

Research at Microsoft 2023: A year of groundbreaking AI advances and discoveries

This is a compilation of Microsoft’s 2023 public output for AI research with brief descriptions and links.

See the full article here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/research-at-microsoft-2023-a-year-of-groundbreaking-ai-advances-and-discoveries/

[I Am Nobody] EP01 | College Boy Got Superpower | Peng Yuchang / Hou Minghao / Wang Yinglu | YOUKU

Blended humans and virtual actors? Watch minutes 25-30 in this video. Tencent claims in press releases and news stories that the woman in the scene (and the series!) is a virtual actor.

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D6sDtaLEhIEk%26t%3D1879s%26fbclid%3DIwAR2p92au9KLrPh9_D4gqGTOI5cP850jinkJT4u8JXDJIRbhOFadxavhT_3k&h=AT0c8F5_Re_o5SQqsXxwx4k1jLe3ZtwsGznpFmKIKcmp4Wt9flFaZz_B3ejsbUYhJ4q0Y3vNn8-VtGbK7yCPajMZLu2jGF9q-2OkjtsoQxJGnV6GGnV217sk9s4MwPnqYb0jQZtQGS_p7ziH6CvV9UU&__tn__=%2CmH-R&c[0]=AT3n481kD7DkMUX_7qMej-29xbI5HmVtur_vPi4ALH3nwzxC5grT2B2kSFIi95iHGzOZfs278w4ivMnedugF8T7OCrVtox2XtAChnK7GThpkld36QFHRQeiS3QKFjiZMsDWYas2uPy9RQ18IpQc8dZH7M5w

Behind the Making of My AI Digital Double

... The scan took place at the CAA Vault, a one-story, warehouse-type facility in Los Angeles built by Creative Artists Agency, one of the entertainment industry’s top talent agencies. The Vault gathers several scanning stations—body, face, voice capture—in one place, so visitors can in a single day leave with a replica of themselves that appears on screen as authentic as the genuine article. ...

CAA clients own the digital doubles created in the Vault, giving them, the agency hopes, more license to police replicas made without their permission. ...

CAA and others want Washington’s oversight, envisioning a world in which control of one’s replica joins other inherent rights. “We didn’t have that luxury of waiting for the law to catch up,” said Alexandra Shannon, CAA’s head of strategic development and the architect behind the Vault. ...

CAA Chief Executive Bryan Lourd helped usher in one of the earliest adoptions of this throwback technology when Carrie Fisher, the actress who first portrayed Princess Leia in 1977’s “Star Wars,” died halfway through reprising the role in a new trilogy released between 2015 and 2019. Fisher was the mother of his daughter, Billie Lourd.

The filmmakers approached the Lourds for permission to recreate Fisher digitally in the last movie in the trilogy, titled “The Rise of Skywalker”—and struck a deal to make it happen. “That’s how it should go,” Bryan Lourd said. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/behind-the-making-of-my-ai-digital-double-0ff22ac8

The video is here: https://m.wsj.net/video/20231221/f0584bec-8adf-4b5c-ba0a-cef42039eb52/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8#t=0

The top 12 people in artificial-intelligence policy, ethics, and research

• Insider has compiled a list of 100 people at the forefront of artificial intelligence. 
• The list spans several industries, from hardware to ethics. 
• See who made the list for policy, research, and ethics, and learn how they're making an impact. 

Emily Bender: Bender, a linguist who teaches at the University of Washinton, has significantly contributed to our understanding of how large language models like ChatGPT process language and their limitations in processing non-English languages. Bender has urged companies and policymakers to focus on the potential dangers of AI – harms such as the possibility of human-sounding AI manipulating users – and possible solutions.

...

Jack Clark: Clark is a co-founder of AI startup Anthropic, which has raised over $5 billion, including a $4 billion check from Amazon in September. Before starting Anthropic, he was the policy director at OpenAI. Clark said he's read thousands of AI research papers and uses his knowledge to discuss the future of AI with world leaders and other policymakers. He also writes a popular newsletter called Import AI. "The greatest challenge of the 21st century is to make an increasingly fast-moving technical world 'legible' to a large number of people," he wrote in his Import AI bio. "Things will be weird. Be not afraid."

...

See the full article here: https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-100-top-12-people-policy-ethics-and-research-2023-11#ali-alkhatib-1

VERSES Identifies New Path to AGI and Extends Invitation to OpenAI for Collaboration via Open Letter

The open letter, published in The New York Times, outlines how VERSES is pursuing an alternative approach to AGI using Active Inference, a method pioneered by VERSES’ Chief Scientist, Karl Friston. Active Inference comprises a set of techniques and tools enabling the design and deployment of intelligent agents capable of automatically and efficiently seeking out and learning from relevant data, resulting in an auditable and human-explainable decision-making and action-selection process.

VERSES’ latest research results indicate that its Active Inference agents may soon be able to match and surpass the performance of leading AI state-of-the-art approaches based on deep learning while using orders of magnitude less data and fewer computations. The Company expects to share more details and validation tests with partners and the broader community in the coming months. ...

Following the Free Energy Principle — which reconciles our brains’ predictions about the world with reality to reduce the differences between the two — Active Inference codifies mathematical principles that explicitly link intelligence, cognition and rational behavior to physical processes at any scale, from macroscopic to microscopic. With this framework, VERSES aims to solve probabilistic AI’s tractability problem, allowing users to design and deploy adaptive, real-time, scalable AI. ...

See the full story here: https://aithority.com/machine-learning/verses-identifies-new-path-to-agi-and-extends-invitation-to-openai-for-collaboration-via-open-letter/

First-ever hyperrealistic AI actor appears in Chinese TV series

Lili Ziren is the first-ever AI actor in China to appear in a TV series "I Am Nobody," alongside human co-stars, according to Cryptopolitan and New Lines Magazine.

She plays the role of Er Zhuang in a series produced by Tencent Animation and Comics and distributed by Youku, a Chinese video streaming platform owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba. Lili even has her own IMDb page.

Lili's striking resemblance to a human performer has earned her a burgeoning fan base on Chinese social media. “I feel like she’s better than a real person. After this, let’s swap all [human actors] with these AI actors,” wrote a user on Douyin, China’s original version of TikTok. ...

See the full story here: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/entertainment/tv/first-ever-hyperrealistic-ai-actor-appears-in-chinese-tv-series/ar-AA1lKOmB