Items tagged with Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI has been given a big vote of confidence from Microsoft, which today announced a massive investment into the company. OpenAI is a research lab that counts Elon Musk as a co-founder and has a mission to "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." Microsoft has agreed to invest $1 billion into OpenAI in exchange for a multi-year partnership that will see a free-flowing exchange of ideas between the two companies. One takeaway from this new deal is that Microsoft will now become the exclusive cloud computing platform provider for AI, which is a big boost for Azure. Microsoft and OpenAI have also agreed to jointly develop new artificial intelligence technologies...
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The developer of the rather disturbing and depraved 'DeepNude' application, that is programmed to "undress" women using machine learning and AI technology, has shut down the operation following a backlash on social media. In a message posted to Twitter, the developer acknowledged that "the probability that people will misuse [the application] is too high." Ya think? How or why the developer may have ever thought otherwise is a mystery. In a lame attempt to justify the app's existence, the developer further stated that the software was created "for user's entertainment" and is "not that great, it only works with particular photos." Here is the full statement on why the app is no longer...
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Researchers at Adobe and UC Berkeley are collaborating on a method to detect facial manipulations made to digital photos in Photoshop. While development is in the early stages, it is part of a broader effort across Adobe to better detect image, video, audio, and document manipulations in today's landscape of fake news. Sometimes it is as easy as pie to detect a manipulated image. Take the photo at the top of this article, for instance—our knowledge of the world tell us that dogs do not normally dress up in suits and walk around like humans, and so that is obviously an altered image. But in other cases, the changes are not so blatant. That in and of itself is not a problem. It is when altered...
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We often joke about the possibility of a Skynet situation playing out, but even if that never happens, there is at least one way that machines can assert their dominance over the flesh and blood race—gaming. We have already seen this play out in numerous ways, such as on Jeopardy when IBM's Watson wiped the floor with its opponents. Google's DeepMind has been very much active in this space as well, and is now adding Quake III Arena to the list of games where it can play as good as an actual person. What's unique about Quake III Arena, as it relates to AI, is that the notion of capture the flag gameplay is a team-based sport that seemingly requires human traits to be effective at. Attacking...
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Close your eyes for a brief moment and imagine a world where it's near impossible to tell what is real from what is computer generated. The truth is, we are virtually already there to an extent, and it has enormous implications. We have already seen several examples of spoofed images and videos, known as deepfakes, but apparently artificial intelligence schemes can do a damn good job at replicating someone's voice as well. Researchers from Dessa, a startup based in Toronto that "helps the world's largest and most complex organizations build real-world value with advanced AI," demonstrated this with a believable audio clip of what sounds like Joe Rogan, former host of Fear Factor, stand up comedian,...
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Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm not a poet, which is why this line does not rhyme (oops!) or follow any sort of convention. But do you know who is a poet? Or rather, what is a poet? A new experiment by Google that taps into machine learning. It is called POEMPORTRAITS (all caps, for some reason), and it uses artificial intelligence to generate a poem based on your input. I'll just refer to it as Poem Portraits from here on out. it was created by Es Devlin, an artist and stage designer, in collaboration with the Google Arts & Culture Lab and Ross Goodwin. "Ross trained an algorithm to learn to write poems by reading over 25 million words written by 19th century poets. It works a bit like...
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Remember life before digital assistants? Even if you are not using one, it is a safe bet that you know someone who is, because they are all over the place. The market is flush with them—Alexa (Amazon), Siri (Apple), Cortana (Microsoft), Google Assistant (Google), and Bixby (Samsung), those being the main ones. There may be another on the horizon as well, from Facebook. These AI controlled assistants are in all kinds of devices these days, which mostly consists of smartphones and smart speakers. You can use them to fire up playlists, look up the news, get a weather forecast, fetch movie times, and even to order a pizza. Citing "several people familiar with the matter," CNBC reports that...
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A sneaky photographer managed to snap a shot of a slide on an apparent NVIDIA employee's laptop that points to "Project RON," which looks to be some kind play in the digital assistant space. Nothing has been announced, of course, but if Project RON is real, it may indicate that NVIDIA is making a move into the smart home device category. That would not be surprising, for a number of reasons. Smart speakers are growing in popularity, with Amazon leading the way, followed by Google, Apple, and others (in that order). According to recent data from research firm Consumer Intelligence Researcher Partners (CIRP), there are currently 66 million smart speakers in the US alone. Click to Enlarge (Source:...
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You have probably heard at some point in your life, 'Don't believe everything you read!', especially in this day and age of the Internet. That is sage advice, and of particular interest in the era of fake news stories permeating social media. However, with advances in artificial intelligence technology, don't believe everything you see, either. Just check out those mugshots above. They look real, especially the one on the left. However, those are not actually real people. They are computer generated. A software engineer at Uber created a website that generates new facial images on demand, and rather quickly, whenever the site is refreshed. "Recently a talented group of researchers at NVIDIA released...
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Sometimes the question is not 'can we?' but 'should we?', and whoever decided to make a deepfake video of Steve Buscemi's mug on Jennifer Lawrence completely ignored the latter. The result is one of the most frightening things you'll ever see. Granted, beauty is subjective and in the eye of the beholder. But let us explain. Yes, Steve Buscemi is getting up there in age, his younger days now firmly behind him. He's also a great actor, and perhaps even an underappreciated one—he has an impressive acting resume that includes Reservoir Dogs, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, and one of this editor's favorite TV series, The Sopranos. However, mashing his face onto Jennifer Lawrence is both...
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In earlier days, it was a big deal to develop a computer program that could best a player in chess, and then the roles switched—it became a big deal if a human player could beat the computer, and it remains that way today. Now, however, there is a new gold standard in testing artificial intelligence. It's the StarCraft series, which are complex real-time strategy (RTS) games, and for the first time, an AI program has beat a top professional player in a series of StarCraft II matches. Google's AlphaStar program annihilated Team Liquid's Grzegorz "MaNa" Komincz, one of the world's best StarCraft players, winning 5-0 under professional match conditions on a competitive ladder map. Unlike other...
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A popular meme that has been making the rounds is the 10-year challenge in which people on social media (and primarily Facebook) post side-by-side pictures of themselves, one from a decade ago and a recent photo, to see how they have aged. Some have hypothesized that Facebook started the meme as a sneaky way of feeding data into an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, though the social media giant has outright denied the allegation. "The 10-year challenge is a user-generated meme that started on its own, without our involvement. It's evidence of the fun people have on Facebook, and that's it," Facebook stated in a Twitter post. Let's not gloss over the fact that Facebook has a Twitter account,...
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Memes are a big part of the web, especially on social media, and they serve different purposes. Humor is the primary reason memes exist, obviously, but they can also be used to make political statements and to share satirical thoughts. Could they also be used to harvest user data, though? That is a question that has been raised in response to the 10-year profile picture challenge that has gone viral on Facebook. You have probably seen this one already—the 'challenge' is to post your first profile picture alongside your most recent one to compare how much you have changed over the years. Oftentimes, there is a fixed data applied to the challenge, usually 10 years, though some participants...
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We tend to associate NVIDIA with graphics cards, and more specifically, the graphics processing units (GPUs) that go inside them, but the company has a much broader focus. For example, NVIDIA is heavily invested in artificial intelligence technologies. As part of that, NVIDIA recently opened up a robotics lab in Seattle near the University of Washington campus to research and develop the next generation of artificially intelligent robots. NVIDIA opened the lab in November with 14 researchers and expects to triple that number by midyear, which also factors in visiting faculty and interns. Dieter Fox, senior director of robotics research at NVIDIA and professor at the University of Washington's...
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