Toronto-based multimedia production company Shy Kids used the next-generation generative AI tool to come up with a whimsical short film about “Air Head,” a man who has a balloon instead of a head.
The short film is an impressive example of the tech’s capabilities, showing off Sora’s striking ability to generate relatively believable and photorealistic video footage in response to a text prompt.
If it walks like a particle, and talks like a particle… it may still not be a particle. A topological soliton is a special type of wave or dislocation that behaves like a particle: it can move around but cannot spread out and disappear like you would expect from, say, a ripple on the surface of a pond. In a new study published in Nature, researchers from the University of Amsterdam demonstrate the atypical behavior of topological solitons in a robotic metamaterial, something which in the future may be used to control how robots move, sense their surroundings, and communicate.
Topological solitons can be found in many places and at many different length scales. For example, they take the form of kinks in coiled telephone cords and large molecules such as proteins. At a very different scale, a black hole can be understood as a topological soliton in the fabric of spacetime. Solitons play an important role in biological systems, being relevant for protein folding and morphogenesis – the development of cells or organs.
The unique features of topological solitons – that they can move around but always retain their shape and cannot suddenly disappear – are particularly interesting when combined with so-called non-reciprocal interactions. “In such an interaction, an agent A reacts to an agent B differently to the way agent B reacts to agent A,” explains Jonas Veenstra, a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam and first author of the new publication.
Imagine performing a sweep around an object with your smartphone and getting a realistic, fully editable 3D model that you can view from any angle. This is fast becoming reality, thanks to advances in AI.
Researchers at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada have unveiled new AI technology for doing exactly this. Soon, rather than merely taking 2D photos, everyday consumers will be able to take 3D captures of real-life objects and edit their shapes and appearance as they wish, just as easily as they would with regular 2D photos today.
In a new paper appearing on the arXiv preprint server and presented at the 2023 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in New Orleans, Louisiana, researchers demonstrated a new technique called Proximity Attention Point Rendering (PAPR) that can turn a set of 2D photos of an object into a cloud of 3D points that represents the object’s shape and appearance.
In a recent study published in eBioMedicine, researchers evaluated proteomic signatures in blood plasma and cervicovaginal fluid for endometrial cancer detection.
Study: Detection of endometrial cancer in cervico-vaginal fluid and blood plasma: leveraging proteomics and machine learning for biomarker discovery. Image Credit: mi_viri/Shutterstock.com.
MIT engineers aim to give robots a bit of common sense when faced with situations that push them off their trained path, so they can self-correct after missteps and carry on with their chores. The team’s method connects robot motion data with the common sense knowledge of large language models, or LLMs.
Nvidia’s headquarters is now one of the most sought-after places to work. Spanning more than 1 million square feet combined, Nvidia’s space-ship-like buildings were designed with help from custom software powered by the AI chips that have made the company successful. WSJ gets a look inside. Photo: Nvidia.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is down for many people worldwide, with users facing multiple problems, including being unable to access their accounts, having their chat history come up empty, and the chat screens not loading properly.
When accessing ChatGPT, users may see a blank screen with “How can I help you today?” and, in some cases, a missing chat history.
AI is driving a dramatic new need for electricity, and while tech execs have long trumpeted their commitment to a green energy future, the urgency of that need presents them with a difficult path forward.
Questions about fueling the AI boom took center stage earlier this month at the CERAWeek by S&P Global, The Wall Street Journal reported. The annual energy conference draws thousands of executives to Houston to discuss topics ranging from geopolitics to the energy transition.
No one knows how much electricity will be needed to power the AI boom. AI requires massive computing power and energy loads and has triggered an explosion of data centers. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates said at the conference that the amount of power AI is bound to consume is mind-blowing.
