Artificial Intelligence News - Page 1

Well, the moment has come... our AI "xenobot" self-replicating robots are going to rule us all and we won't be able to stop it.

But seriously, researchers have just announced they've created tiny living robots capable of self-replicating themselves inside of a dish by pushing loose cells together. They're called "xenobots" and they're made from frog cells, representing the first time a multicellular organism has found a way to reproduce in this particular way.

The cells collect together in clumps where they'll form a sphere that would have around 3000 cells, taking around 5 days to happen. Each individual clump is around half a millimeter wide and is covered in a minuscule hair-like structure, which sounds weird but the hair-like structure acts like flexible oars in water... they move the xenobots forwards in corkscrew paths, explains Joshua Bongard, senior author and computer scientist at the University of Vermont.

My name is Ganesh [Venkataramanan, Tesla director and Dojo boss] and I lead Dojo. It's an honor to present this project on behalf of the multi-disciplinary Tesla team that is working on this project.

As you saw from Milan, there's an insatiable demand for speed, actualized capacity for neural network training -- and Elon prefetched this, and a few years back he asked us to design a super-fast training computer, and that's how we started Project Dojo.

Our goal is to achieve best AI training performance and support all these larger, more complex models that Andre's team are dreaming of and be power-efficient, and cost-effective at the same time. So we thought about how to build this, and we came up with a Distributed Compute Architecture.

The Pentagon is using an experimental artificial intelligence program that allows it to see "days in advance" and look into the future.

The new experimental program is called the Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE), and it combines artificial intelligence with cloud computing and large data pools. The newest version of GIDE is GIDE 3, and according to General Glen VanHerck, the commander of the US Northern Command, the idea behind the new program is to "achieve information dominance" and "decision making superiority".

VanHerck stated to the press conference that the Pentagon is currently living in a "reactive environment" where it will respond to rival nations' actions. Now, VanHerck says, "What we've seen is the ability to get way further what I call left of being reactive to actually being proactive. And I'm talking not minutes and hours, I'm talking days."

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.