Toggle light / dark theme

Beyond NPCs: Google’s SIMA AI plays games the way you do

DeepMind’s SIMA is groundbreaking because it doesn’t tap into a game’s internal structure or rule set. Instead, its knowledge base derives from extensive analysis of human gameplay footage paired with the explanations provided by data labelers.

What differentiates SIMA is its ‘generalist’ design. Google partnered with eight game developers to give SIMA access to a wide range of titles, ensuring the AI learns to grasp the core concepts of play within different virtual worlds. This exposure allows SIMA to follow instructions provided as simple text and interact with its environment as a human player might.

US ditches LIDAR, develops self-driving stealth tech to tackle lasers

Researchers at the US Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have developed camera-based autonomous driving tools that can work without deploying technologies like LIDAR and RADAR.

The technology can potentially deliver stealth capabilities for the military while finding applications in space and agriculture.

Modern autonomous driving solutions rely extensively on light detection and ranging (LIDAR) sensors to visualize objects around the vehicle. A software solution then identifies the objects nearby and helps the vehicle’s computer decide whether to halt or slow down.

Claude 3 Haiku: our fastest model yet

Anthropic releases Claude 3 Haiku Claude 3 Haiku is three times faster than its peers for the vast majority of workloads, processing 21K tokens (~30 pages) per second for prompts under 32K tokens.

Anthropic releases Claude 3 Haiku.

Claude 3 Haiku is three times faster than its peers for the vast majority of workloads, processing 21K tokens (~30 pages) per second for prompts under 32K tokens.


Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.

Bear Robotics, a robot waiter startup, just picked up $60M from LG

LG Electronics may no longer be a household name in smartphones, but it still sees a big future in gadgets like robots. Today, the company confirmed a $60 million investment in Bear Robotics, the California startup that makes artificial intelligence–powered server robots (autonomous tray towers on wheels that are meant to replace waiters) for restaurants and other venues. With the investment, LG Electronics becomes Bear’s largest shareholder.

Bear’s last fundraise in 2022 valued the company at just over $490 million post-money, per PitchBook data. It’s not clear what the valuation is for this latest investment, but the last year has not been a great one for startups in the space.

On the other hand, the current vogue for all things AI, and the general advances that are coming with that, are giving robotics players a fillip — see yesterday’s Covariant news, for another example. Still, it’s not clear what Bear hopes to tackle next with the basic trays-on-wheels form factor that it has adopted for its flagship Servi robots.

/* */