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‘Upset’ with Game of Thrones? ChatGPT could help, says OpenAI co-founder

ChatGPT is “going to be a tool, just like the cell phone in your pocket,” says OpenAI’s co-founder.

Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, has suggested that ChatGPT could help enhance the “interactive” entertainment experience.

“Imagine if you could ask your AI to make a new ending that goes a different way and maybe even put yourself in there as a main character or something,” he said during a panel discussion at the 2023 South by Southwest (SXSW) event on Friday.


Joel Carillet/iStock.

Brockman compared the technology to a team of “assistants” who aren’t flawless but are “eager and never sleep,” according to a report by The Hollywood Reporter (THR) on Friday.

Oregon man stranded in remote snow-covered road uses drone to signal for help

Stranded with no obvious way out, the man came up with a plan on how to alert rescuers to his situation. He attached his cellphone to a drone he had in his vehicle. He typed out a text on his phone to a friend describing what had happened and his exact location. Then he hit send on the text and launched the drone several hundred feet into the air. That high up, the phone was able to connect to service and send the text.

The man’s friend received the text, reached out to authorities and rescue crews were able to locate the man and rescue him. During the rescue trip, crews also found and rescued another driver who’d been stranded nearby in the snow for multiple days.

How Star Trek inspired modern tech—smart phones, touch panels, VR

The most famous one is the cell phone itself: Captain Kirk’s communicator inspired the folks at Motorola to make the first handheld mobile device in 1973. Star Trek: The Original Series (popularly called TOS) from the 1960s also inspired video conferencing. But things started to amp up when, in 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation (aka TNG) hit the floors, with Sir Patrick Stewart in the lead. It became one of the most syndicated shows on television—which is how I discovered it in mid-90s India on the Star network. It fundamentally impacted my life, inspiring me to become the technology writer I am today.

But more than me, this show heralded more technological concepts that are becoming increasingly real. The LCARS computer on the Galaxy-Class USS Enterprise D is basically the foundation of what Google is today. Google’s former head of search, Amit Singhal, often said that the company is “trying to build the Star Trek computer”.

They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam

As impersonation scams in the United States rise, Card’s ordeal is indicative of a troubling trend. Technology is making it easier and cheaper for bad actors to mimic voices, convincing people, often the elderly, that their loved ones are in distress. In 2022, impostor scams were the second most popular racket in America, with over 36,000 reports of people being swindled by those pretending to be friends and family, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission. Over 5,100 of those incidents happened over the phone, accounting for over $11 million in losses, FTC officials said.

Advancements in artificial intelligence have added a terrifying new layer, allowing bad actors to replicate a voice with just an audio sample of a few sentences. Powered by AI, a slew of cheap online tools can translate an audio file into a replica of a voice, allowing a swindler to make it “speak” whatever they type.

Experts say federal regulators, law enforcement and the courts are ill-equipped to rein in the burgeoning scam. Most victims have few leads to identify the perpetrator and it’s difficult for the police to trace calls and funds from scammers operating across the world. And there’s little legal precedent for courts to hold the companies that make the tools accountable for their use.

NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images

ALGORITHMS TURN PHOTO SHAPSHOTS INTO 3D VIDEO AND OR IMMERSIVE SPACE. This has been termed “Neural Radiance Fields.” Now Google Maps wants to turn Google Maps into a gigantic 3D space. Three videos below demonstrate the method. 1) A simple demonstration, 2) Google’s immersive maps, and 3) Using this principle to make dark, grainy photographs clear and immersive.

This technique is different from “time of flight” cameras which make a 3D snapshot based on the time light takes to travel to and from objects, but combined with this technology, and with a constellation of microsatellites as large as cell phones, a new version of “Google Earth” with live, continual imaging of the whole planet could eventually be envisioned.

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUP5Fry24ao.

3)


We present RawNeRF, a method for optimizing neural radiance fields directly on linear raw image data. More details at https://bmild.github.io/rawnerf.

Billions of Android and iPhone users told to search texts over ‘bank blitzkrieg’

WHETHER you’re an Android fan or an iPhone lover, you should be wary of a common text message scam.

It’s called “smishing” and has been flagged by the experts at Security Intelligence as a growing problem.

Smishing is essentially the same as phishing, the common email scam technique that tries to get you to give away personal data.

Your body, ‘perfect charger’ for smartphones, says father of cellphone

On April 3, 1973, Marty Cooper made the world’s first call from a handheld portable brick phone —weighing 2.5 pounds and 11 inches long.

The first cellphone inventor aka the father of cellphones, Marty Cooper, has projected that phones would be implanted under the skin of consumers’ ears.

“The next generation will have the phone embedded under the skin of their ears,” said cooper.


Ted Soqui/Getty.

The body is the ideal charger for such devices because they won’t require conventional charging, Cooper told CNBC at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Wednesday.

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