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Blog – Page 2969

The day is fast approaching when generative AI won’t only write and create images in a convincingly human-like style, but compose music and sounds that pass for a professional’s work, too. This morning, Meta announced AudioCraft, a framework to generate what it describes as “high-quality,” “realistic” audio and music from short text descriptions, or prompts. It’s not Meta’s first foray into audio generation — the tech giant open sourced an AI-powered music generator, MusicGen, in June — but Meta claims that it’s made advances that vastly improve the quality of AI-generated sounds, such as dogs barking, cars honking and footsteps on a wooden floor.

In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Meta… More.

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For a recovering gamer like me, one of the most exciting applications of generative AI is dynamic dialogue. I’m not suggesting AI replace writers — goodness forbid. But as anyone who’s sunk hundreds of hours into an RPG can tell you, scripted NPC interactions get old fast.

There are a few startups prototyping AI tech to dynamically generate dialogue. But one of the more promising is Inworld, launched in 2021 by the founding team of API.AI, which developed tools for speech recognition and natural language understanding until its acquisition by Google in 2016. (API.AI later became Dialogflow, Google’s flagship conversational AI design platform.)

Inworld claims to use “multiple” machine learning models to “mimic the full range of human communication.” That’s promising a lot in the context of games, but the startup makes the case that, by allowing developers to link its dialog-and voice-generating tools to animation and rigging systems within popular game engines, including 3D environments, it can help deliver more lifelike and immersive gaming experiences.

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The animals were thought to have gone extinct before the dinosaurs arrived on the scene.

Brian Kennedy, one of the lead scientists of NOAA’s deep sea expedition, said the stalked crinoid “are these big beautiful flower looking animals, but they grow on this long stalk. They’re called sea lilies, and that’s really what they look like a lot of times.”

“These were thought extinct, we thought they were a relic of pre-dinosaur times, and now we find they are one of the most common organisms in the deep sea.”

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A process of surgically joining the circulatory systems of a young and old mouse slows the aging process at the cellular level and lengthens the lifespan of the older animal by up to 10%.

Published in the journal Nature Aging, a study led by researchers at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, found that the longer the animals shared circulation, the longer the anti-aging benefits lasted once the two were no longer connected.

The findings suggest that the young benefit from a cocktail of components and chemicals in their blood that contributes to vitality, and these factors could potentially be isolated as therapies to speed healing, rejuvenate the body, and add years to an older individual’s life.

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Another day, another step closer to the normalization of build-your-own AI chatbot partners.

Per Decrypt, top-shelf Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz last week took to the developer site GitHub to lay out detailed instructions on how to build an AI companion bot from scratch. The VC outfit has a lot of money in various AI ventures, the billion-dollar AI companion startup Character. AI included; now, it seems that the folks at the firm are so enthusiastic about companion bots that they’re encouraging curious developers out there to start DIYing versions for themselves — and among several other potential use cases, it feels notable that romantic partnership was listed as use case number one.

“There are many possible use cases for these companions — romantic (AI girlfriends / boyfriends), friendship, entertainment, coaching, etc,” reads the description, noting elsewhere that the “project is purely intended to be a developer tutorial and starter stack for those curious on how chatbots are built.”

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Transforming cars that go from tearing up the tarmac to soaring through the skies at the touch of a button. It sounds like science fiction, but that might be the future we’re looking at, as America’s regulatory body for commercial flight and transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, certified to test a bona fide flying car.

The vehicle — which has a flying range of around 177km on a full charge — is the brainchild of Alef Automotive, a Californian startup backed by high-profile venture capitalist Tim Draper (whose other seed investments include Tesla and SpaceX).

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It’s not yet clear how much the property owner will be billed over the sign.

X and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment by Insider on Tuesday, nor did the reps for the landlord of the company’s headquarters, SRI Nine Market Square LLC, an affiliate of real estate investment firm Shorenstein.

Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media company now rebranded as X, had the huge “X” logo put on the roof of the company’s headquarters on Friday, prompting a slew of complaints from angry neighbors.

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If there’s one thing the Covid pandemic taught us, it’s that viruses shouldn’t be underestimated.

People are, therefore, taking note after scientists discovered a whole new range of giant virus-like particles (VLP) that have taken on “previously unimaginable shapes and forms.”

The microscopic agents, resembling everything from stars to monsters, were found in just a few handfuls of forest soil.

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