Artificial Intelligence News - Page 1

A bipedal robot named Cassie has achieved what no other robot has achieved -- successfully completing a 5K run on a single charge.

Oregon State University engineers have managed to teach Cassie to run using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm. The project is led by Agility Robotics who is attempting to combine robot controls with machine learning tools, and as a result of the engineers' efforts, we are presented with Cassie. The team of engineers said that Cassie taught itself to upright, which meant that it didn't require any tethering device to stabilize it as it ran.

Cassie ran around the Oregon State University campus for five kilometers or about 3.11 miles, and during the test, the running robot fell down twice, once due to a computer overheating and a second time when it when around a corner too fast. Cassie completed the five-kilometer run in 53 minutes, 3 seconds, and according to Jeremy Dao, a project team member, they were able to "reach the limits of the hardware and show what it can do."

Why use humans to build next-gen chips when AI is so much freaking faster?

That's what Google is doing, with the everything giant saying that it has created artificial intelligence (AI) software that is so powerful it can design next-gen computer chips much faster than any humans can.

In a new paper published in the journal Nature, the authors of the paper explain that it takes humans months and months to design a new chip -- meanwhile, AI takes less than 6 hours to do the same thing. Azalia Mirhoseini and Anna Goldie are two of the authors behind the new paper, who are co-heads of machine learning for systems at Google. They explained: "Our method has been used in production to design the next generation of Google TPU".

Artificial intelligence (AI) now has the capabilities to predict space weather that is caused by our Sun accurately.

Researchers from the University of Graz have created a new neural network that allows for artificial intelligence to reliably predict changes in the Sun's coronal holes from space-based observations. As you already know, the light emitted from the Sun plays a vital role in our existence here on Earth. Additionally, the light from the Sun interacting with Earth's magnetic field can influence our electronics, and in extreme cases, when the Sun blasts Earth with too many charged particles, our electricity grids can be temporarily knocked offline by geomagnetic storms.

Now, the researchers have developed a new neural network that examines some of the dark regions on the Sun called coronal holes. The location and size of coronal holes depend on how much solar activity is occurring on the Sun. Researchers are tasked with observing these coronal holes and their movements to predict space weather, which can then affect us here on Earth.

I didn't think I'd see this today, yet here we are -- Pornhub has announced its Remastured Film Library, with the porn giant using AI and deep learning to restore some of the oldest erotic films ever made.

Pornhub used the power of AI and machine learning letting it watch over 100,000 adult videos and images from Pornhub's swelling library, giving their AI a "sexual education" and "teaching it a new dirty trick". That new dirty trick is the ability to colorize vintage porn for a modern audience.

The site has even colorized the first kiss ever captured on film, with The Kiss dating back to 1886 -- 135 years ago now. The 18-second movie was "denounced as shocking and obscene to viewers" at the time, so just imagine what those same people would say at some of the videos you can find online in 2021. But now, The Kiss is in 4K 60FPS thanks to AI and deep learning.

A company has announced that it will be using deepfake technology to create a synthetic voice that celebrities and other prominent figures can license out.

Veritone has said it plans to use its Marvel.au platform to monetize deepfakes of celebrities, politicians, and any other public figure. The AI-enabled synthetic voice can be licensed out by the celebrity to companies, brands, and influencers. By having a deepfake of a celebrity's voice media companies will be able to "accelerate and amplify content creation", according to Veritone.

Essentially, Veritone would create a deepfake, or a clone of a celebrity's voice that can then be bought by companies to do brand duties that the celebrity would get paid for. Veritone mentions that creating a voice clone for a person to perform brand deals would remove the physical need for that person to on set to shoot it, which could raise the ceiling for that celebrity's total monetized content output. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Hyundai Motor Group announced its intent to purchase 80% of Boston Dynamics from SoftBank. The deal values the company at $1.1 billion. Hyundai intends to use the technology"to realize progress for humanity."

Hyundai Motor Group is doubling down on its robotics manufacturing portfolio. The company already designs and manufactures robots for automotive assembly lines. With the acquisition of Boston Dynamics, the company plans to develop robots for non-industrial use cases.

Boston Dynamics, famous for its videos of its robotic dog named Spot, builds some of the world's most advanced robotics technology. The company, which derived its technology from DARPA research, builds quadrupedal and bipedal robots that can walk like the creatures they mimic. The company also makes AI algorithms to enable these robots to adapt to their environment.

"We are delighted to have Boston Dynamics, a world leader in mobile robots, join the Hyundai team. This transaction will unite capabilities of Hyundai Motor Group and Boston Dynamics to spearhead innovation in future mobility. The synergies created by our union offer exciting new pathways for our companies to realize our goal - providing free and safe movement and higher plane of life experiences for humanity," said Euisun Chung, Chairman of Hyundai Motor Group. "We will also contribute to the society by enhancing its safety, security, public health amid global trends of ageing society and digital transformation."

You might not have heard of Parler, but it's an alterate social media platform that is similar to Facebook and Twitter but calls itself "viewpoint neutral".

Well, Parler use has exploded post-US elections on November 3, 2020 -- with Parler being the #1 app on both the Apple iOS and Google Play app stores with over 1 million downloads in the days after the election. People wanted a new home where they weren't being censored, with many popular conservatives moving from Facebook and Twitter onto Parler, driving up usage.

Parler opened in 2018 by John Matze and Jared Thomson who were sick of the "ideological suppression" by the technology companies in the US. But the number Parler are pulling in are significant, with Matze saying Parler added 4.5 million in a span of just 5 days.

A new manga has just dropped, with it being the first that was plotted and designed by artificial intelligence (AI). The AI itself looked at, and learned the artistic style of Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka.

The AI-made manga is called "PHAEDO" and was released in the weekly comic magazine "Morning" reports the Japan Times. The AI generated character designs and basic story lines from the inspiration of the Astro Boy creator, and then it was handed to professional creators to add in things like clothing and dialogue.

Kioxia Corporation has announced that it is releasing the English version of the manga, as part of TEZUKA 2020 and the first phase of the company's new #FutureMemories brand campaign. The English version of PHAEDO will be released on Kioxia's own TEZUKA 2020 website.

The coronavirus is undoubtedly a terrible thing to have happened to everyone, but out of the world's misery shines fantastic examples of humans coming together for one common cause.

One of those common causes is Folding@Home, which is a computing project run by a team at Stanford University. The whole premise of Folding@Home is that the public can donate spare computation power from either their GPU or CPU to the project, and then the project aims that computational power at calculations that give scientists more understanding about a topic, or subject. At the moment, Folding@Home is aiming its power at understanding the coronavirus, and it has recently hit a new power level - 2.4 exaFLOPS.

In the above Twitter post from the official Folding@Home Twitter account, it's stated that the collective power of the Folding@Home project is almost at 2.5exaFLOPS, which is "faster than the top 500 supercomputers combined!". The Twitter post also contains a graph, and as you can see, Folding@Home is clearly exceeding all competing supercomputers, even to the point that it's "15x faster than any current supercomputer". It's absolutely fantastic to see the technology community rally together under one great cause. If you want to check out more about Folding@Home, or would like to donate some of your own computation power, check out this link here.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has some concerns around it, and one of the most prominent names voicing those concerns if SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

If you didn't know, Musk founded a non-profit organization called OpenAI with Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman. The goal of the organization was to develop new and safe was to monitor and regulate AI development. Musk has since left the organization but is still voicing his concerns over the oversight on AI development.

Musk took to Twitter in response to a new MIT Technology Review profile of OpenAI. Here's what he said, "OpenAI should be more open imo (in my opinion). All orgs developing advanced AI should be regulated, including Tesla". Judging on Musk's responses, it can be assumed that Musk is now somewhat distant from the organization's operations. Back in 2019, OpenAI started a for-profit arm owned by the non-profit parent company, and also accepted a $1 billion investment from Microsoft.