Items tagged with AI
John Carmack is a legend in the gaming world best know by gamers for his work at id Software. Carmack left id to pursue a position with Oculus and work on the Oculus Rift VR headset. Carmack has announced via Facebook that starting this week he is moving into a "consulting CTO" position with Oculus. He says that he will still "have a voice in the development work" but notes that the endeavor will consume "a modest slice of my time." As for what Carmack plans to do with the remainder of his time, he intends to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI). Carmack notes that in all the things he has done in games, aerospace, and VR, he has always felt that he had "at least a vague line of sight"...
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Deepfake photos and videos have fooled many people, but can text-generated articles be just as convincing? OpenAI recently published the full version of “GPT-2: 1.5B”, a text-generating artificial intelligence system. The research lab warns that the tool could potentially be dangerous if it is misused. OpenAI released a paired down version of its GPT-2 model this past winter. This model included 124 million parameters, while the latest release features more than 1.5 billion parameters. OpenAI originally believed that its GPT-2 model was too dangerous, but there has since been “no strong evidence of misuse.” The full version was released earlier this week. Researchers used...
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NVIDIA is flexing its muscle once again when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI) inference workloads, and this time around, the company is claiming benchmark supremacy in MLPerf Inference 0.5. AI performance is becoming increasingly more important for usage scenarios like image recognition, voice recognition and autonomous vehicles (among other fields). To that end, NVIDIA says that the one-two punch of its Turing-based AI accelerators and the Xavier SoC allowed it to take top honors in all five of MLPerf's inference benchmarks. For its Turing offerings (with a focus on data centers), the Turing GPUs were able to top the charts in both server and offline scenarios on a "performance per processor"...
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Will artificial intelligence be humanity’s savior or downfall? Many people have begun to evaluate the potential consequences of AI as it becomes more integrated into our everyday lives. Microsoft president Brad Smith recently warned that AI could be a “formidable weapon” with “unintended consequences” if human beings do not use caution. Smith spoke at the 2019 Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. He gave a very Jurassic Park-esque warning and stated, “We shouldn’t just ask what computers can do, we need to ask what they should do.” He noted that we are the first generation to allow machines to make decisions that are typically made by human beings. He...
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NVIDIA isn't just a company that is known for its gaming products like the GeForce RTX Series; it has quickly made a name for itself with enterprise hardware and solutions to accelerate artificial intelligence operations. Today, NVIDIA announced a new partnership with the United States Postal Service (USPS) that will see the government agency adopting advanced AI technology to provide a 10x speed uplift in data processing at its mail centers. For starters, USPS datacenters will be upgraded to feature NVIDIA's potent V100 Tensor Core GPUs that are trained for multiple AI algorithms. From there, the USPS will deploy those algorithms with NVIDIA EGX edge computing systems at nearly 200 postal facilities...
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Alphabet's DeepMind has been working on its AlphaStar AI for years to get the AI to be able to beat human players at the popular and challenging video game Starcraft II. The game is one of the most popular esports titles in the world. The game is particularly challenging to humans and specifically to the AI. DeepMind says that Starcraft II has posed a tougher challenge to AlphaStar than games like chess, and other board games, in part because the Starcraft opponent's pieces are often hidden from view. Some professional gamers have conflicting emotions about AlphaStar claiming Grandmaster status in the game. Despite any mixed feelings people have about the AI's new status, DeepMind says that AlphaStar's...
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Artificial intelligence has frequently been used to better identify people and objects. But can AI also be used to mask someone’s identity? Facebook recently announced that it has created video de-identification technology that can hide people from facial recognition. Facebook has combined an “adversarial autoencoder” and a “trained-face classifier”. An autoencoder is an artificial neural network that learns a representation for a set of data unsupervised. Adversarial autoencoders were introduced in 2016 and are able to “match the aggregated posterior of the hidden code vector of the autoencoder with an arbitrary prior.” Classifiers typically use an algorithm...
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Many tech companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI). These kinds of programs and products can be rather expensive, but there are a few that are more accessible to the public and small companies. Google’s Coral AI board has just come out of beta and has been released on a wider scale. Coral is a complete AI toolkit that helps researchers to “bring new models out of the data center and onto devices, running TensorFlow models efficiently at the edge.” The toolkit has allowed a variety of institutions to incorporate AI into new solutions. For example, Virgo Surgical Video Solutions has used Coral to improve the accuracy of endoscopies. This type of technology...
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We've entered an age with technology and software where you can't always believe what you hear, and with deepfakes, we can't always believe what we see. The video below shows what happens when you combine a voice actor who can do exceptional celebrity impersonations with AI-powered deepfake tech, to map the celebrity's face on the head of the impressionist. The result is a video that looks extremely convincing and just plain awesome. The impressionist in this video is Jim Meskimen, and the video is titled "Pity the Poor Impressionist." In the video, he voices 20 different celebrities, some more convincingly than others. He does an excellent Tommy Lee Jones and Robert De Niro as well. The visuals...
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Console gaming fans are looking forward to the next year or so as the PS5 game console is set to land in the holiday season of 2020. The Google Stadia game streaming platform is set to launch next month, and in a recent interview, the head engineer for the Google streaming platform talked about performance. VP of engineering Madj Bakar believes that Stadia will be faster and more responsive than local gaming hardware. The catch to that statement made by Bakar is that he says Stadia will be faster than local gaming systems in "a year or two." Bakar says that Google is on the verge of being better than local hardware due to advancements in modeling and machine learning. He says that the Stadia...
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Intel and Brown University announced today that they are working on a DARPA-funded project that is called Intelligent Spine Interface. The project is aiming to use AI tech to restore movement and bladder control in patients who have severe spinal cord injuries. During the two year-program, researchers will record motor and sensory signals for the spinal cord. The team will use AI networks to learn how to stimulate the post-injury site to send motor commands. During the study, surgeons at Rhode Island hospital near Brown University will implant electrode arrays on both ends of a patient's injury site. The electrodes will create an intelligent bypass to allow the severed nerves to communicate in...
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Many companies are working hard to improve their artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. AI could impact everything from medicine to silly Instagram overlays and everything in between. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are all toiling to gain an edge in the AI field by leveraging their massive treasure troves of data, but what are their existing privacy policies and user data security track records? Which of these companies cares the most about protecting your privacy? Should you even trust Amazon, Apple, Facebook, or Google with your data? We examined the kind of data that is collected by the above companies and how it is shared, their virtual assistants, and privacy controls. We also reviewed...
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Today at TwitchCon, NVIDIA announced some interesting new tech that can be quite beneficial to the livestreaming community. The company has been leveraging the RT and Tensor cores in its current generation of Turing-based GeForce RTX graphics cards to enable features like real-time ray tracing, but that same hardware will be used to power the company’s new RTX Broadcast Engine. The RTX Broadcast Engine will leverage the onboard Tensor cores to enable a wide variety of effects in real-time including style filters, augmented reality, and greenscreens. In the case of RTX Greenscreen, NVIDIA is using artificial intelligence to scrub the background in the livestream, leaving just your face and...
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How do you defeat “deepfakes”? According to Google, you develop more of them. Google just released a large, free database of deepfake videos to help research develop detection tools. Google collaborated with “Jigsaw”, a tech “incubator” founded by Google, and the FaceForesenics Benchmark Program at the Technical University of Munich and the University Federico II of Naples. They worked with several paid actors to create hundreds of real videos and then used popular deepfake technologies to generate thousands of fake videos. Researchers will be able to freely access both the fake and real videos to develop “synthetic video detection methods”....
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