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CB Insights has unveiled the winners of the seventh annual AI 100 — a list of the 100 most promising private AI companies across the globe.

Around one-third of this year’s winners are focused on AI applications across specific industries — such as visual dubbing for the media & entertainment sector or textile recycling for fashion & retail. A total of 40 vendors are focused on cross-industry solutions, like AI assistants & human-machine interfaces (HMIs), digital twins, climate tech, and smell tech.

Additionally, 27 companies in this cohort are developing tools like vector database tech and synthetic datasets to support AI development.

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Have you ever wondered how can North Korea afford its nuclear program and the luxury goods for its leadership when its economy is effectively cut off from the world? Well… let me tell you a little secret.

If you want to support the channel, check out my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ExplainedWithDom.

Selected sources and further reading:
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/north-koreas-criminal-act…-challenge.
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article…monographs.
https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/328526…ase-study/
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/RL33885.pdf.
https://www.rusi.org/events/open-to-all/organised-crime-north-korea.
https://moneyweek.com/19827/north-koreas-criminal-economy

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Near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy sits an immense object that astronomers call Sagittarius A*. This “supermassive” black hole may have grown in tandem with our galaxy, and it’s not alone. Scientists suspect that similar behemoths lurk at the heart of almost all large galaxies in the cosmos.

Some can get really big, said Joseph Simon, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“The black hole at the center of our galaxy is millions of times the mass of the sun, but we also see others that we think are billions of times the ,” he said.

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This quickly turned out to be a record-setter. It was dubbed the Brightest Of All Time, or the “Boat,” as convenient shorthand among astronomers studying and observing the event. Not only did the Boat start out bright, it refused to fade away like other bursts.

We still do not fully know why the burst was so exceptionally bright, but our new study, published in Science Advances, provides an answer for its stubborn persistence.

The burst originated from a distance of 2.4 billion light years—relatively nearby for a GRB. But even when accounting for relative distance, the energy of the event and the radiation produced by its aftermath were off the charts. It is decidedly not normal for a cosmically distant event to deposit about a gigawatt of power into the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

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“There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time,” the company said in a research post. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.”

Representatives for Meta did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, made outside normal working hours.

Meta said in the news release that the model could allow visually impaired people to hear messages from friends in their voices or allow users to speak in foreign languages in their own voice. The company also said the tech opened up the possibility for creators to edit audio tracks for video or create more natural-sounding voices for virtual assistants.

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Matching the sight and sound of speech—a face to a voice—in early infancy is an important foundation for later language development.

This ability, known as intersensory processing, is an essential pathway to learning new words. According to a recent study published in the journal Infancy, the degree of success at intersensory processing at only 6 months old can predict vocabulary and language outcomes at 18 months, 2 years and 3 years old.

“Adults are highly skilled at this, but infants must learn to relate what they see with what they hear. It’s a tremendous job and they do it very early in their development,” said lead author Elizabeth V. Edgar, who conducted the study as an FIU psychology doctoral student and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Child Study Center. “Our findings show that intersensory processing has its own independent contribution to language, over and above other established predictors, including parent language input and socioeconomic status.”

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