Lifeboat Foundation

U.K.-based startup Yepic AI claims to use “deepfakes for good” and promises to “never reenact someone without their consent.” But the company did exactly what it claimed it never would.

In an unsolicited email pitch to a TechCrunch reporter, a representative for Yepic AI shared two “deepfaked” videos of the reporter, who had not given consent to having their likeness reproduced. Yepic AI said in the pitch email that it “used a publicly available photo” of the reporter to produce two deepfaked videos of them speaking in different languages.

The reporter requested that Yepic AI delete the deepfaked videos it created without permission.

Anysphere, a startup building what it describes as an “AI-native” software development environment, called Cursor, today announced that it raised $8 million in seed funding led by OpenAI’s Startup Fund with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and other angel investors.

The new cash, which brings Anysphere’s total raised to $11 million, will be put toward hiring and supporting Anysphere’s AI and machine learning research, co-founder and CEO Michael Truell said.

“In the next several years, our mission is to make programming an order of magnitude faster, more fun and creative,” Truell told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our platform enables all developers to build software faster.”

Inside Character. AI’s disheveled Palo Alto, California headquarters, employees at first appear to be hard at work, glued to their computer monitors. But rather than coding, many of them are engrossed in lively group chats with their colleagues and the AI chatbot characters that Character has become known for. Now, thanks to a new group chat function the startup launched Wednesday, they were chatting with work friends along with bots that anyone can build to create the illusion that you’re actually talking to the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Tony Stark or Lucifer.

“The feature was good enough that people stopped working sometimes to use it,” cofounder Daniel De Freitas told Forbes. De Freitas,… More.

The unicorn AI startup is bringing bots that make it sound like you’re talking to well known people like Taylor Swift into interactions with friends.

Continue reading “Character.AI’s $200 Million Bet That Chatbots Are The Future Of Entertainment” »

We’ve been talking about this a lot in the places where we gather to discuss the potential for AI. There’s an extent to which we’ve already seen the big disruption around chat tech – but then there are all of those question marks about how far it’s going to go from here! You get this when you’re listening to dozens of entrepreneurs, researchers, and people connected to top institutions giving out their pearls of wisdom to expectant crowds. And I’ve done a lot of that lately.

Anyway, what we’re finding in terms of chat evolution is that many of these future chatbot systems are likely to be connected to things that aren’t like large language models at all. Hmmm.

Let’s start with the basic premise of what these large language models do – they source a large amount of training data out on the net, they aggregate it altogether, and they use language as a tool to sort of imitate human cognition in digital environments.

Researchers developed ‘HistoAge,’ an algorithm that unravels brain aging and neurodegenerative disorders.

As we age, our brains undergo structural and cellular changes influenced by intrinsic and external factors. Accelerated aging in the brain can result in an increased risk of neurodegenerative conditions, bipolar disorder, and mortality. In a bid to deeply understand how an aging brain works, researchers say they have built a powerful AI tool that can identify regions in the brain vulnerable to age-related changes.

The team used AI to develop an algorithm called ‘HistoAge,’ which predicts age at death based on the cellular composition of human brain tissue specimens with an average accuracy… More.

Continue reading “New AI model uncovers how and why the human brain ages” »

As we accelerate towards creating one of humanity’s greatest technological achievements, we need to ask ourselves – what is the offset of this development?

Artificial intelligence-powered systems not only consume huge amounts of data for training but also require tremendous amounts of electricity to run on. A recent study calculated the energy use and carbon footprint of several recent large language models. One of them, ChatGPT, running on 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs, was found to be consuming 1,287 megawatt hours of electricity – the equivalent of energy used by 121 homes for a year in the United States.

As we accelerate towards building one of the greatest technological developments man has ever… More.

Continue reading “Google’s AI alone may consume as much energy as Ireland” »

Microsoft’s annual event will take place from November 14 to 17.

Microsoft has been developing a computer chip under a project codenamed ‘Athena’ for some time. Now, as per a recent report, it is believed that the company is ready to unveil the AI chip at its annual event ‘Ignite’ next month.

This is a significant development because it would mean that Microsoft would be able to reduce its reliance on GPUs produced by NVIDIA, the uncrowned king of the semiconductor industry, reported Interesting Engineering in April. Athena has been designed to power Microsoft’s data center servers that are used to train and run large language models.

Disney’s latest robot combines art and technology to convey emotions through dynamic movements, showcased at IROS 2023.

In a captivating evening keynote address at the 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

A legacy of emotion-driven robotics

Continue reading “Emotion-infused robots: Disney’s breakthrough” »

It is now apparent that the mass-produced artifacts of technology in our increasingly densely populated world—whether electronic devices, cars, batteries, phones, household appliances, or industrial robots—are increasingly at odds with the sustainable bounded ecosystems achieved by living organisms based on cells over millions of years.

Cells provide organisms with soft and sustainable environmental interactions with complete recycling of material components, except in a few notable cases like the creation of oxygen in the atmosphere, and of the fossil fuel reserves of oil and coal (as a result of missing biocatalysts).

However, the fantastic information content of biological cells (gigabits of information in DNA alone) and the complexities of protein biochemistry for metabolism seem to place a cellular approach well beyond the current capabilities of technology, and prevent the development of intrinsically sustainable technology.