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Oct 25, 2023

As publishers block AI web crawlers, Direqt is building AI chatbots for the media industry

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

A number of news and media publishers are already blocking AI web crawlers from accessing their sites, worried about the impact on traffic when all their work is swept up into AI chatbot experiences. However, a startup called Direqt believes publishers should embrace AI chatbots — just on their own terms. The company, which has now raised its first outside capital of $4.5 million, offers media companies like ESPN, GQ, Wired, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and others, their own customizable chatbot solutions that provide a direct connection to their audience, increased engagement with their own published content, as well as monetization via ads.

The startup was originally founded in 2017 with a focus on chatbot monetization, before turning more recently to AI. In its earlier days, the company had built out the ability to serve promotions and ads inside a chatbot experience, which it licensed to a larger customer in the U.S. In 2021, the team pivoted to start building a chatbot platform for publishers, still slightly ahead of the GPT wave and the rise of ChatGPT.

“Part of that was, candidly, us being a little bit early to the market,” remarked Direqt co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Nick Martin. “Fortunately, things over the last couple of months have really broken the direction we did anticipate all these years,” he said.

Oct 25, 2023

Midjourney Releases Huge New AI Art Feature

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Midjourney has solved one of the biggest problems with generative AI art with the option to upscale images to super-high resolutions. Until this week, Midjourney’s output was limited to a default resolution of 1,024 × 1,024 pixels. That was large enough for medium-sized web images, but not high resolution enough to print at anything greater than postcard size.

Now the company has added the option to upscale images by 2x or 4x, meaning the maximum image size is increased to 4,096 × 4,096 in the default square format. In other words, that’s a 4K resolution image.


Midjourney massively increases the resolution of its AI-generated images, with the option to upscale images to 4K.

Continue reading “Midjourney Releases Huge New AI Art Feature” »

Oct 25, 2023

NVIDIA Brings The Power Of Generative AI To The Edge

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

NVIDIA wants to turn the Jetson family of devices into powerful edge computing devices capable of running state-of-the-art foundation models. It’s also investing in frameworks that combine the power of robotics with generative AI.

Here are three significant investments from NVIDIA that transform the Jetson family of devices:

The Jetson Generative AI Lab is a collection of tutorials and walkthroughs for running popular generative AI models such as LLama2, Stable Diffusion and Segment Anything Model on Jetson devices. Developers can clone the GitHub repository to download the scripts needed to run the models and the associated applications on devices such as Jetson AGX Orin and Jetson Orini Nano.

Oct 25, 2023

Motorola Teases Flexible Phone You Wear Like A Bracelet

Posted by in category: mobile phones

Motorola unveiled a flexible phone with an adaptive display that you can wear like a bracelet or watch yesterday at Lenovo Tech World ‘23 in Austin. The full HD phone can be bent into multiple shapes, including one that props it up on a table or desk for viewing, or a full U-shaped bracelet that straps on to your wrist.

The phone offers a 6.9 display when flat and a 4.6 display when curved to sit on a flat surface like a bedside clock or a standalone viewing screen. The flexible screen appears to be paired with a fabric backing, unusual in a smartphone. The phone does not just friction-fit to your wrist, which would be likely to slip off with movement, but magnetically clings to an… More.


The full HD flexible phone can be bent into multiple shapes, including one that props it up for viewing, or a full U-shaped bracelet that straps on to your wrist.

Continue reading “Motorola Teases Flexible Phone You Wear Like A Bracelet” »

Oct 25, 2023

NIST reveals new superconducting camera technology with 400,000 pixels

Posted by in categories: innovation, space

Intricate details within the human brain, faint signals in outer space, say cheese!

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their collaborators revealed the creation of a superconducting camera in a statement.

Boasting an impressive 400,000 pixels, this innovative leap represents a four-hundred-fold increase in pixel count compared to any other device of its kind, revolutionizing the way scientists can capture faint light signals from the far reaches of space or explore intricate details within the human brain.

Oct 25, 2023

Grant and funding roundup: developing an interactive model of living cells with Minecraft

Posted by in category: futurism

In this roundup of life science grants, researchers will create an interactive model of living cells and a multi-omics consortium is announced.

Oct 25, 2023

Topological quantum computation on supersymmetric spin chains

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Only theoretical now but someday this could lead to lag free and error free quantum computers.


Quantum gates built out of braid group elements form the building blocks of topological quantum computation. They have been extensively studied in SUk quantum group theories, a rich source of examples of non-Abelian anyons such as the Ising (k = 2), Fibonacci (k = 3) and Jones-Kauffman (k = 4) anyons. We show that the fusion spaces of these anyonic systems can be precisely mapped to the product state zero modes of certain Nicolai-like supersymmetric spin chains. As a result, we can realize the braid group in terms of the product state zero modes of these supersymmetric systems. These operators kill all the other states in the Hilbert space, thus preventing the occurrence of errors while processing information, making them suitable for quantum computing.

Oct 25, 2023

Giant £2.2m Transformers-style robot could replace humans on building sites

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

A NEW generation of giant shape-shifting robots designed to work on building sites and disaster zones have been unveiled in Japan.

The Transformer-style bots, dubbed the Archax, can grow to nearly three times the height of a man on their four-wheeled legs.

Designed by Tsubame Industries in Tokyo, the machines can also change into different shapes to suit any situation.

Oct 25, 2023

Launch Roundup: SpaceX surpass 5,000 active Starlink satellites; China to send taikonauts to space station

Posted by in categories: internet, satellites

The week of Oct. 23 through Oct 30 is a big one for low-Earth orbit (LEO) with all but one flight headed to already existing constellations. This includes two Falcon 9 launches on opposite sides of the country, one Russian Soyuz 2.1b launch, and two different launches planned out of China, one involving humans.

Two Chinese launches start the week, with the first being a Chang Zheng 2D preparing for its flight from LC-3 at Xichang Satellite Launch Center. Then, a Chang Zheng 2F/G will launch out of LC-90 at the China Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, before a Soyuz 2.1b launches out of Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Then the first Falcon 9 launches more Starlink satellites on the other side of the world out of SLC-4E at Vandenberg Spaceforce Base (VSFB). Then, on the other side of America, Falcon 9 Starlink launches out of SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS).

Chang Zheng 2D – Yaogan 39 Group 04

Oct 25, 2023

Spacewalk with Astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara: Oct. 30, 2023 (Official NASA Broadcast)

Posted by in category: space

NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara are taking a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Monday, Oct. 30, to remove electronics gea…