Lifeboat Foundation

Whipping Up Worlds

Because the AI can learn from unlabeled online videos and is still a modest size—just 11 billion parameters—there’s ample opportunity to scale up. Bigger models trained on more information tend to improve dramatically. And with a growing industry focused on inference —the process of by which a trained AI performs tasks, like generating images or text—it’s likely to get faster.

DeepMind says Genie could help people, like professional developers, make video games. But like OpenAI—which believes Sora is about more than videos—the team is thinking bigger. The approach could go well beyond video games.

Apple Vision Pro may gain the ability to play SteamVR games, thanks to developers who have begun porting the open-source ALVR software.

ALVR is software that enables streaming VR games to virtual reality headsets. The adaptation of ALVR allows users to enjoy SteamVR games on Apple Vision Pro’s Micro-OLED displays.

However, interacting with these games requires a specific type of controller that tracks itself instead of one tracked by a headset.

Blog post with show notes and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/11/05/epis…nd-theory–…

Researchers have come up with an optical storage device that has the same shape and size as a DVD, but can store 1.6 petabits of data.

Silas Adekunle was born in Nigeria and moved to the UK at about 11 years old. He spent much of his childhood obsessed with science and technology, playing with Lego robot kits and watching YouTube videos to get ideas for simple robots he could build himself at home.

Now 27, Adekunle is the CEO and founder of a robotics company that he says has raised $10 million in funding. He also built what he calls the world’s first gaming robot, which impressed Apple executives enough that, in 2017, the tech giant signed an exclusive distribution deal with Adekunle’s UK-based company, Reach Robotics. Apple now sells the robots at $250 a pop.

Adekunle still remembers the first time he built his own robot, “if you could even call it a robot,” he tells CNBC Make It. He was only about 9 years old, still living in his hometown of Lagos, Nigeria.

While Artificial Intelligence (AI) focuses on simulating and surpassing human intelligence, Artificial Life (A-Life) takes a different approach. Instead of replicating cognitive abilities, A-Life seeks to understand and model fundamental biological processes through software, hardware, and even… wetware.

Forget Turing tests and chess games. A-Life scientists don’t care if their creations are “smart” in the traditional sense. Instead, they’re fascinated by the underlying rules that govern life itself. Think of it as rewinding the movie of evolution, watching it unfold again in a digital petri dish.

Turn an image into a playable game with AI.

The surprisingly subtle geometry of a familiar game shows how quickly math gets complicated.

Have you ever imagined listening to the brain’s activity as it unfolds in real-time? Researchers from Columbia University have pioneered a technique that transforms complex neuroimaging data into a captivating audiovisual experience, akin to watching a movie with a musical soundtrack. This novel approach allows scientists to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ the brain’s intricate workings, offering fresh insights into its behavior during various tasks.

The details of their work have been published in the journal PLOS One.

The motivation behind this study stems from a growing challenge in neuroscience: the vast amount of data generated by advanced brain imaging techniques. Technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and wide-field optical mapping (WFOM) capture the dynamic, multi-dimensional activities of the brain, revealing patterns of neurons firing and blood flow changes.