Lifeboat Foundation

In a major strategy shift, Sberbank, the most popular Russian lender, wants to build its own ecosystem going far beyond the world of finance and to be known not just as a bank, but also as a tech company.

During its first major online event, which was held on Thursday, Sberbank – now rebranded as Sber – presented a range of services and gadgets signaling it wants to go deeper into the tech sector. For example, the bank presented a family of “emotional” virtual assistants, called ‘Salute’, which will be incorporated into all of Sberbank’s devices and mobile apps.

There are three assistants in the Salute family, called Sber, Joy, and Athena. Unlike Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, the company is betting on the “emotional” features of the virtual assistants, as each has its own “temper,” allowing users to choose the one they find most suitable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JjJwi32a1I&feature=youtu.be

Hey! You might be interested in my latest interview with Nina Schick, author of ‘Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse’. We discuss both the advantages of the huge advances in AI generated synthetic media (personalised movies, video games etr) and the darker side with deep fakes (political misinformation, involuntary pornography etr). Thanks!

I interview Nina Schick, author of Deep Fakes and the Infocalypse, about the rise of synthetic (or AI generated) media and why she fears the deep fakes it is enabling could undermine liberal-democracy and pose major privacy questions (e.g. involuntary deep-fake pornography). We also discuss the advantages of synthetic media (personalised movies, video games etr).

Continue reading “‘Deep fakes are a threat to liberal democracy’ — Nina Schick final” »

Filmmakers in Canada have created the first-ever “dynamic film,” using A.I. to create new storylines every time you watch.

Previous Episode on Creative A.i.:

In this episode we take a look at Tesla’s “battery day” and Elon Musk’s plans for a $25,000 car.

Continue reading “Elon Musk: Affordable $25,000 Tesla and Better Batteries Are Coming” »

An artist used machine learning to create photorealistic portraits of 54 ancient Roman emperors, working from nearly 1,000 images of busts.

David Sinclair wants to slow down and ultimately reverse aging. Sinclair sees aging as a disease and he is convinced aging is caused by epigenetic changes, abnormalities that occur when the body’s cells process extra or missing pieces of DNA. This results in the loss of the information that keeps our cells healthy. This information also tells the cells which genes to read. David Sinclair’s book: “Lifespan, why we age and why we don’t have to”, he describes the results of his research, theories and scientific philosophy as well as the potential consequences of the significant progress in genetic technologies.

At present, researchers are only just beginning to understand the biological basis of aging even in relatively simple and short-lived organisms such as yeast. Sinclair however, makes a convincing argument for why the life-extension technologies will eventually offer possibilities of life prolongation using genetic engineering.

Continue reading “Harvard Professor Wants to Slow Down & Reverse Aging: David Sinclair’s Approach For a Longer Life” »

These are just some of the important applications bio-inspired robots could be used for, and that’s why roboticists at the worldwide major robotics labs are dedicated to exploring the class Insecta.

The question isn’t only how big and powerful we can make a machine, but how small and savvy. What might humans be capable of if we could command a tiny army of simple machines? How could we use robots that could fly, skim across the water, hop to the ceiling and even swarm?

The explosive successes of AI in the last decade or so are typically chalked up to lots of data and lots of computing power. But benchmarks also play a crucial role in driving progress—tests that researchers can pit their AI against to see how advanced it is. For example, ImageNet, a public data set of 14 million images, sets a target for image recognition. MNIST did the same for handwriting recognition and GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation) for natural-language processing, leading to breakthrough language models like GPT-3.

A fixed target soon gets overtaken. ImageNet is being updated and GLUE has been replaced by SuperGLUE, a set of harder linguistic tasks. Still, sooner or later researchers will report that their AI has reached superhuman levels, outperforming people in this or that challenge. And that’s a problem if we want benchmarks to keep driving progress.

So Facebook is releasing a new kind of test that pits AIs against humans who do their best to trip them up. Called Dynabench, the test will be as hard as people choose to make it.

Robot Babe.