Lifeboat Foundation

It’s time to toss AI onto the big pile of problems that Americans worry about constantly but do nothing to fix.

While OpenAI launched an official ChatGPT app for iOS, most of the AI-powered chatbots are still best accessible through the web. And that’s why browsers are stepping up to integrate AI-aided features within their apps. LocalGlobe-and Y Combinator-backed web browser startup SigmaOS launched its own AI assistant on Thursday to a limited set of people.

The company says that the unique thing about Airis, its AI assistant, is that understands a page’s context and gives you answers based on that. Here’s a good example: if you are reading about Manchester United, ask Airis to explain “United” or ask questions about it, the bot understands that you are asking about the football team and not just the word.

Dumme, a startup putting AI to practical use in video editing, is already generating demand before opening up to the public. The Y Combinator-backed company has hundreds of video creators testing its product, which leverages AI to create short-form videos from YouTube content, and a waitlist of over 20,000 pre-launch, it says. Using a combination of both proprietary and existing AI models, Dumme’s promise is that it can not only save on editing time but also — and here’s its big claim — do a better job than the contracted (human) workforce who is often tasked with more menial video editing jobs, like cutting down long-form content for publication on short-form platforms like YouTube Shorts, TikTok or Instagram Reels.

Founded in January 2022 and a participant in startup accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 program, Dumme co-founder and CEO Merwane Drai said he was originally focused on building a search engine for video. But around six months ago, the team realized that a better product might be to repurpose the same AI models they were developing to edit video clips instead.

Joined by co-founders Will Dahlstrom (CPO) and Jordan Brannan (CTO), all with AI backgrounds, Drai realized Dumme may have landed on the right product-market fit after their app went viral, crashing their servers.

“This tool will eventually enable developers to import detailed objects — whether small statues or massive buildings — into virtual environments for video games or industrial digital twins.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) company and chip manufacturer Nvidia announced the latest AI tool in its army of models.

Continue reading “Neuralangelo: Nvidia’s new AI model turns 2D videos into 3D structures” »

Published 2 hours ago.

Over Take Us, AI Friends!

WASHINGTON − President Joe Biden on Thursday amplified fears of scientists who say artificial intelligence could “overtake human thinking” in his most direct warning to date on growing concerns about the rise of AI.

Biden brought up AI during a commencement address to graduates of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. while discussing the rapid transformation of technology that he said could “change the character” of future conflicts.

Continue reading “President Biden warns artificial intelligence could ‘overtake human thinking’” »

This article is part of our exclusive IEEE Journal Watch series in partnership with IEEE Xplore.

Does your robot know where it is right now? Does it? Are you sure? And what about all of its robot friends—do they know where they are too? This is important. So important, in fact, that some would say that multirobot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a crucial capability to obtain timely situational awareness over large areas. Those some would be a group of MIT roboticists who just won the IEEE Transactions on Robotics Best Paper Award for 2022, presented at this year’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023), in London. Congratulations!

Out of more than 200 papers published in Transactions on Robotics last year, reviewers and editors voted to present the 2022 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award to Yulun Tian, Yun Chang, Fernando Herrera Arias, Carlos Nieto-Granda, Jonathan P. How, and Luca Carlone from MIT for their paper Kimera-Multi: Robust, Distributed, Dense Metric-Semantic SLAM for Multi-Robot Systems.

Overcoming AI Technophobia

Currently, there is a public surge of interest in AI topics, especially in Large Language Models, like ChatGPT. This is not a random development.

AI is here to stay and will have huge social and economic implications, seen as both a blessing and a curse. In view of its potential dangers, many AI scientists have expressed concern over AI developments that border on technophobia. But there is a means of defending ourselves from the dark side of AI as expressed in dystopian science fiction.

Discussion on AI, GPT-4 and the Open Letter”. We discuss and debate 4 areas of concern: Spectrum of Cultural Concepts of AI and GPT-4; Logic of Assertion that Large language models resulting in AGI; Plausibility of AI-Foom vs. Soft take-off; and Practicality of the “AI-pause”.