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The next “Spider-Verse” film may have a new animation style: AI.

Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) CEO Tony Vinciquerra does not mince words when it comes to artificial intelligence. He likes the tech — or at the very least, he likes the economics.

“We are very focused on AI. The biggest problem with making films today is the expense,” Vinciquerra said at Sony’s Thursday (Friday in Japan) investor event. “We will be looking at ways to…produce both films for theaters and television in a more efficient way, using AI primarily.”

Researchers from the Institute of Metal Research (IMR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and collaborators from the Institute of Physics of CAS have directly observed polar Bloch points in strained ferroelectric films.

Their work is published in Nature Communications.

Based on their previous work on the polar meron lattice, the researchers considered the model of a tensile-strained ultrathin ferroelectric PbTiO3 film sandwiched by symmetric electrodes in phase-field simulations and found that the merons transform into Bloch points with the increase of the electrode thickness.

Lowtek Games combined the multifunctionality of a screen with the beauty of a pop-up book in a unique project that will take your imagination to another level. Codenamed Lowtek Lightbook, this interactive experience allows you to not only read stories but also play various games.

For example, you can color pictures with digital paints, find hidden objects, run away from aliens, or deliver food to them – all thanks to projection mapping and Lowtek Games’ clever thinking. Moreover, the story of Bib Goes Home can be even more engaging if you manually make Bib go home and explore his surroundings using a controller and a projector.

If you’ve ever wanted to explore the corners of your favorite PlayStation 2 title, check out PS2 Cam Acolyte which already supports a handful of horror games.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has said the 2013 Spike Jonze film is his favorite movie, invited comparisons by posting the word “Her” on X after the company announced the new ChatGPT version. But later, OpenAI executives denied any connection between Johansson and the new voice assistant.

Then the company suddenly dropped the voice.

In a post on X just before midnight Pacific time Sunday, OpenAI said the voice would be halted as it addresses “questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT.” A company spokeswoman would not provide further detail.

The lab’s latest AI news is something different, though. Instead of designing a model to master a single game, DeepMind has teamed up with researchers from the University of British Columbia to develop an AI agent capable of playing a whole bunch of totally different games.

Called SIMA (scalable i nstructable m ulti-world a gent), the project also marks a shift from competitive to cooperative play as the AI operates by following human instructions.

But SIMA wasn’t created simply to help sleepy players grind out levels or farm up resources. The researchers instead hope that by better understanding how SIMA learns in these virtual playgrounds, we can make AI agents more cooperative and helpful in the real world.

Summary: A new study highlights the concerning trend of AI systems learning to deceive humans. Researchers found that AI systems like Meta’s CICERO, developed for games like Diplomacy, often adopt deception as a strategy to excel, despite training intentions.

This capability extends beyond gaming into serious applications, potentially enabling fraud or influencing elections. The authors urge immediate regulatory action to manage the risks of AI deception, advocating for these systems to be classified as high risk if outright bans are unfeasible.

Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents.

The company announced Wednesday that it raised $9 million in an oversubscribed seed round, co-led by First Spark Ventures (Eric Schmidt’s deep-tech fund) and Patron (the seed stage fund co-founded by Riot Games alums).

The funding follows Altera’s previous raising a pre-seed $2 million from a16z SPEEDRUN and others in January of this year. Now, Altera wants to use the new capital to hire more scientists, engineers, and team members to help with product development and growth.