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Ready Player Me has launched a new experimental arm called Ready Player Me Labs kicking off with an AI powered avatar creator for unlimited outfit customization. The first Labs release is a new and experimental version of the company’s avatar creator that utilizes AI to customize and stylize the textures and prints of avatars outfits that can be shared across social media platforms. Leveraging Dall-E, the platform generates textures and prints based on a user’s prompts.

The move comes in response to frequent requests by Ready Player Me users.

“It’s unrealistic for any brand or creator to cater to the diverse needs and preferences of billions of people in the virtual world,” says Ready Player Me CEO and co-founder Timmu Tõke.

“Opening up customization options empowers users to play a role in creating their own assets and shaping their digital identities. We want those using our avatars to feel like they are digitally represented in however style and fashion they desire,” he adds.

Continue reading “Why Customization Is The Next Big Thing In Digital Fashion: Ready Player Me Launches Labs Feature” | >

In the world of self-driving, the strong leaders are now Google/Alphabet’s Waymo, and GM’s Cruise. Both are headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, and both have thus been keen to deploy in the city of San Francisco itself. No wonder, it’s their hometown. Driving it is a challenge but an important one to handle. On the other hand, it doesn’t snow, though it faces fog. It’s a city that already has many people who don’t own cars, and it was the birthplace of ride-hail, first with the now-defunct Sidecar, then Lyft and Uber. It makes a lot of sense that they both want to be there.

Even so, the city of San Francisco and it’s agencies have not been too happy with the pilot deployments of these companies and recently wrote letters hoping to slow them down. This article examines the conflict between the companies and their city, considering not just the particular points of contention, but also what sort of relationship makes sense here and how to resolve conflicts going forward.

San Francisco doesn’t have the authority to regulate driving. That’s the California DMV. Ride services are under the authority of the California Public Utilities Commission. The federal government regulates the making, importing and selling of vehicles and keeping them safe.

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As CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman captains the buzziest — and most scrutinized — startup in the fast-growing generative AI category, the subject of a recent feature story in the February issue of Forbes.

In a rare interview, OpenAI’s CEO talks about AI model ChatGPT, artificial general intelligence and Google Search.

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Mentions of the “metaverse” were relatively few and far between in Meta’s quarterly earnings call this week — we counted a mere seven mentions compared to 23 for “AI” — but the company’s investment into its vision of a VR-connected social future remains colossal.

Starting in 2021, Meta began breaking out its Reality Labs VR and AR division into its own segment for financial reporting purposes. That makes it possible to see just how much Meta is pouring into those areas, and the numbers are staggering.

Meta reported $13.7 billion in operating losses for Reality Labs for 2022, more than the already jaw-dropping $10.2 billion it sunk into the division in 2021. Reality Labs brought in $2.16 billion last year in revenue, a drop from $2.27 billion in 2021.

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Google worked to reassure investors and analysts on Thursday during its quarterly earnings call that it’s still a leader in developing AI. The company’s Q4 2022 results were highly anticipated as investors and the tech industry awaited Google’s response to the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has the potential to threaten its core business.

During the call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai talked about the company’s plans to make AI-based large language models (LLMs) like LaMDA available in the coming weeks and months. Pichai said users will soon be able to use large language models as a companion to search. An LLM, like ChatGPT, is a deep learning algorithm that can recognize, summarize and generate text and other content based on knowledge from enormous amounts of text data. Pichai said the models that users will soon be able to use are particularly good for composing, constructing and summarizing.

“Now that we can integrate more direct LLM-type experiences in Search, I think it will help us expand and serve new types of use cases, generative use cases,” Pichai said. “And so, I think I see this as a chance to rethink and reimagine and drive Search to solve more use cases for our users as well. It’s early days, but you will see us be bold, put things out, get feedback and iterate and make things better.”

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Bing users said a ‘new Bing’ interface just appeared — and disappeared — this morning. Microsoft is reportedly integrating OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT into its search engine, with plans to announce the update soon.

Microsoft is reported to be capitalizing on the success of ChatGPT by integrating the AI chatbot into its search engine Bing. But what might that look like? We may now have some idea, thanks to Bing users who said a new, AI-assisted version of the search engine mysteriously appeared (and disappeared) earlier today.

Student and designer Owen Yin reported seeing the “new Bing” on Twitter this morning.

An apparition of Bing’s AI-powered future.

Continue reading “Is this Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing?” | >

Colossal Biosciences, a genetic engineering company focused on de-extincting past species, has announced $150 million in Series B funding, which it plans to use for bringing back the iconic dodo.

The resurrection of several extinct species is predicted to occur within the next five years. One company aiming to make that a reality is Texas-based startup Colossal Biosciences, founded in 2021 by some of the world’s leading experts in genomics. In May 2022, it appeared in the World Economic Forum’s list of Technology Pioneers and it won Genomics Innovation of the Year at the BioTech Breakthrough Awards.

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