Lifeboat Foundation

Event Timing: Thursday, October 26, 2023 | Doors open at 6 PM | Service commence at 7 PM. Event Address: Perpetual Life 950 South Cypress Road, Pompano Beach, FL 33,060 Contact us: [email protected] Zoom Registration: Register Now.

Over the next few years, artificial intelligence is going to have a bigger and bigger effect on the way we live.

I hate going to the gym. Last year I hired a personal trainer for six months in the hope she would brainwash me into adopting healthy exercise habits longer-term. It was great, but personal trainers are prohibitively expensive, and I haven’t set foot in a gym once since those six months came to an end.

That’s why I was intrigued when I read my colleague Rhiannon Williams’s latest piece about AI gym trainers.

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.

It might sound scary, but it has given the first recipient a new lease on life, with more independence and lesser dependence on pain medication.

A collaborative effort of researchers from Italy, Australia, Sweden, and the US has led to the development of a bionic arm that can fuse with the bones and work with the neurons in the body to deliver high functionality, a press release said.

In a farming accident twenty years ago in Sweden, Karin lost her right arm. She was given a conventional prosthesis that she found not only uncomfortable but also unreliable. Karin did not find the prosthesis was helping her carry on with her routine life in a meaningful way.

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” »

Mercedes-Maybach has joined forces with Space Perspective, the world’s first carbon-neutral spaceflight experience company, to offer customers an emissions-free luxurious ride into 100,000 feet into space for those wishing for a space experience like no other. Rides to the spaceship are provided by Mercedes-Maybach electric vehicles.

Sustainable, accessible and safe

The firms describe the craft used for these travels called Spaceship Neptune as “the most accessible, most sustainable, and safest spacecraft on or above Planet Earth. It comprises of the SpaceBalloon, Reserve Descent System and Neptune Capsule.”