Artificial Intelligence News - Page 1

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.

Researchers at the King's College London, Massachusetts General Hospital, and health science company ZOE have managed to create artificial intelligence capable of predicting if a person has COVID-19 without conducting a test.

The AI was created using data from the COVID Symptom Study app that is being used by more than 3.3 million people. These people who have downloaded the app are reporting their daily health status, which includes a long list of symptoms such as coughing, fatigue, fever, loss of taste and smell, and more. The researchers looked at the data and found which symptoms were most likely associated with a positive test if the person was to have one.

The researchers then created a mathematical model that can predict with nearly 80% accuracy whether a person is likely to have a COVID-19 infection based on these four symptoms: loss of smell or taste, severe or persistent cough, fatigue, and skipping meals. The mathematical model also takes into account the person's age and sex. The researchers applied this model to a group of 800,000 users and predicted that 17.42% of the users were likely to already have a COVID-19 infection. If you are interested in reading more about this study, check out this link here.

AI has predicted that if social distancing restrictions are lifted prematurely all the coronavirus prevention work we have done so far will be for nothing.

MIT researchers have trained an AI to gobble up publicly available data about the spread of the coronavirus, and provide insightful predictions about how social distancing has influenced the spread's outcome and when new infection cases will plateau. The AI was able to predict that the US and Italy will begin to see new case counts start to level off sometime next week. The AI was able to do this by using the statistical data gathered by researchers from January through to early March.

The researchers recently released a paper, which stated "Leveraging our neural network augmented model, we focus our analysis on four locales: Wuhan, Italy, South Korea and the United States of America, and compare the role played by the quarantine and isolation measures in each of these countries in controlling the effective reproduction number of the virus."

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.

For some time now, we have known that Facebook is taking an aggressive stance towards misinformation about the coronavirus outbreak, but what if that stance has been letting misinformation run wild and free this whole time?

A new report has come out on Consumer Reports, where a journalist decided to test Facebook's misinformation AI that regulates the content posted to the platform. Facebook has said that any content that evokes fear into the public, or "create a sense of urgency, like implying a limited supply, or guaranteeing a cure or prevention" will be removed. Facebook's AI also is designed to remove any misinformation surrounding the coronavirus; this includes advertisements.

The journalist from Consumer Reports decided to test this AI to see what they could get past it. Unfortunately, all of the ads that were specifically designed to trigger the AI's misinformation barrier managed to slip through its cracks. The AI isn't picking up on every piece of misinformation, as ads that were promoting the coronavirus was a hoax, social distancing is fake, and drinking bleach kills coronavirus all were approved by Facebook's algorithm.

A new artificial intelligence has been developed to combat the coronavirus outbreak, and the company behind it has claimed that it can detect the virus with 96% accuracy.

If you don't know what Alibaba is, it's basically the Chinese version of Amazon. Now, Alibaba, much like Amazon, doesn't just participate in e-retail, it has other ventures as well, and some of those ventures fall into the artificial intelligence realm. Reports are now coming out from Nikkei Asian Review about a new algorithm developed by Alibaba's research institute Damo Academy.

In these reports, this AI has been trained on 5,000 confirmed coronavirus cases and can now detect the difference between ordinary viral pneumonia and COVID-19 infections in humans with 96% accuracy. This newly developed AI could be the savior the world needs to accurately detect the infected, which is the main problem with the coronavirus. According to the report, the AI can detect an infected human in just 20 seconds, which is pretty damn fast compared to a human doctor that takes anywhere between five and twenty minutes.

Alibaba has said that this new AI system is being rolled out to more than 100 hospitals in the provinces of Hubei, Guangdong, and Anhui.

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.

Deepfake technology is getting uncomfortably good, and while most of what you have probably seen from deepfakes is movie-related, check out this video game one.

Above we have a video from BabyZone who used Deepfake technology to include various celebrities in Mortal Kombat 11. Using the deepfake tech, BabyZone was able to successfully replace Sub-Zero with Keanu Reeves from John Wick, Terminator with Bruce Campbell, Kabal as Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Johnny Cage as Jean-Claude Van Damme, Kung Lao with Jackie Chan, Liu Kang with Bruce Lee and finally The Joker with Joaquin Phoenix.

I think Keanu Reeves as Sub-Zero and Jackie Chan as Kung Lao are the two that are particularly good out of the set. Unfortunately, you cannot download these to play as BabyZone used his own facesets, and the footage that you are seeing was edited in post. Regardless of not being able to download them, these deepfakes are extremely impressive.