Zuckerberg has stated that he expects it to take up to a decade for the metaverse to go mainstream.
Virtual reality (VR) technology, once hailed as the next big thing in the tech industry, has yet to live up to its hype. According to data acquired by CNBC.
Wildpixel/iStock.
What does the future hold for VR?
Chinese tech companies rush to match Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, but roadblocks lie ahead.
The gigantic technological.
The gigantic technological leap that machine learning models have shown in the last few months is getting everyone excited about the future of AI — but also nervous about its uncomfortable consequences. After text-to-image tools from Stability AI and OpenAI became the talk of the town, ChatGPT’s ability to hold intelligent conversations is the new obsession in sectors across the board.
In China, where the tech community has always watched progress in the West closely, entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors are looking for ways to make their dent in the generative AI space. Tech firms are devising tools built on open source models to attract consumer and enterprise customers. Individuals are cashing in on AI-generated content. Regulators have responded quickly to define how text, image, and video synthesis should be used. Meanwhile, U.S. tech sanctions are raising concerns about China’s ability to keep up with AI advancement.
As generative AI takes the world by storm towards the end of 2022, let’s take a look at how this explosive technology is shaking out in China.
It’s a demonstration of what’s possible with today’s AI — and the outstanding challenges.
Generative AI is coming.
Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid, combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat videos.
Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images generated by DALL-E 2 and adds a synthetic voiceover and background music from YouTube’s royalty-free music library. QuickVid’s creator, Daniel Habib, says that he’s building the service to help creators meet the “ever-growing” demand from their fans.
“By providing creators with tools to quickly and easily produce quality content, QuickVid helps creators increase their content output, reducing the risk of burnout,” Habib told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Our goal is to empower your favorite creator to keep up with the demands of their audience by leveraging advancements in AI.”
The first open source equivalent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has arrived, but good luck running it on your laptop — or at all.
This week, Philip Wang, the developer responsible for reverse-engineering closed-sourced AI systems including Meta’s Make-A-Video, released PaLM + RLHF, a text-generating model that behaves similarly to ChatGPT. The system combines PaLM, a large language model from Google, and a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback — RLHF, for short — to create a system that can accomplish pretty much any task that ChatGPT can, including drafting emails and suggesting computer code.
But PaLM + RLHF isn’t pre-trained. That is to say, the system hasn’t been trained on the example data from the web necessary for it to actually work. Downloading PaLM + RLHF won’t magically install a ChatGPT-like experience — that would require compiling gigabytes of text from which the model can learn and finding hardware beefy enough to handle the training workload.
As Meta faces antitrust scrutiny over its acquisition of VR fitness developers Within, the tech giant is making another acquisition. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is purchasing Luxexcel, a smart eyewear company headquartered in the Netherlands. The terms of the deal, which was first reported in the Belgian paper De Tijd, have not been disclosed.
Founded in 2009, Luxexcel uses 3D printing to make prescription lenses for glasses. More recently, the company has focused its efforts on smart lenses, which can be printed with integrated technology like LCD displays and holographic film.
After years of walled gardens, cross-pollination could be in sight.
Interoperability and decentralization.
Interoperability and decentralization have been major themes in tech this year, driven in large part by mounting regulation, societal and industrial pressure and the hype trains that are crypto and web3. That rising tide is lifting other boats, such as an open standards-based communication protocol called Matrix — which is playing a part in bringing interoperability to another proprietary part of our digital lives: messaging.
The number of people on the Matrix network doubled in size this year, according to Matthew Hodgson, one of Matrix’s co-creators — a notable, if modest, boost to 80.3 million users (that number may be higher; not all Matrix deployments “phone home” stats to Matrix.org).
While the bulk of all this activity has been in enterprise communications, it looks like mainstream consumer platforms might now also be taking notice.
Neil deGrasse Tyson explains in great detail how our universe came to be. And whether it has a center.
Neil deGrasse Tyson also explains what it would mean to be on the “edge” of the universe.
Brian Greene also chimes in on important concepts about the universe such as the ultimate speed limit which is the speed of light in a vacuum.
Michio Kaku then explains that a type 3 civilization using warp drives could travel to the “edge” of the universe.
Brian Cox also encapsulates our advancement in science for the last 500 years and what it means for humanity.
#science #universe #space
The year 2023 is set to be revolutionary for technology, with many disruptive trends expected to reshape how businesses function and how people interact with each other. From metaverse-based virtual workspaces, advancements in quantum computing and green energy sources to innovations in robots and satellite connectivity – here’s a look at the technological trends that could define the coming year.
According to BCG’s “Mind the Tech Gap” survey, a majority of businesses across 13 countries plan to increase their spending on digital transformation in 2023 vs. 2022. The top two areas for future investments are business model transformation and sustainability, with respondents expressing concern over the uncertain return on investment from digital transformation initiatives. Furthermore, Sylvain Duranton, a Senior Partner & Managing Director at Boston Consulting Group, Global Leader of BCG X states that “Despite economic headwinds, 60% of BCG’s recently surveyed companies plan to increase their investments in digital and AI in 2023. But many of those surveyed simultaneously expressed concern over the uncertainty of the ROI from digital transformation. During covid, we saw companies that used advanced digital technologies and AI outperform their counterparts.
Nobel winner Jennifer Doudna explains CRISPR, the gene-editing technology she pioneered.
Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize for her work on the revolutionary gene-editing technology known as CRISPR. It has the potential to cure genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia and hereditary blindness and may even be used to treat cancer and HIV. But when it comes to editing humanity, where do we draw the line? How do we avoid falling into the same kind of dystopian nightmare outlined in Blade Runner? Doudna discussed the risks and benefits of CRISPR in an interview with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. Also in this episode: a look at cloning our pets (speaking of going too far…).
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