Later this year, Boston Dynamics plans to put its all-electric humanoid Atlas robot to work in a Hyundai factory. The new version of the bot, evolved from the hydraulic Atlas model that’s been performing viral video demos since 2013, made its public debut last spring. But while the company’s dog-like …
Read More »A Judge Says Meta’s AI Copyright Case Is About ‘the Next Taylor Swift’
Meta’s copyright battle with a group of authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, will turn on the question of whether the company’s AI tools produce works that can cannibalize the authors’ book sales. US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria spent several hours grilling lawyers from both sides after they …
Read More »Think Twice Before Creating That ChatGPT Action Figure
Any data, prompts, or requests you share helps teach the algorithm—and personalized information helps fine tune it further, says Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at security outfit ESET, who created his own action figure to demonstrate the privacy risks of the trend on LinkedIn. Uncanny Likeness In some markets, your …
Read More »AI Is Using Your Likes to Get Inside Your Head
What is the future of the like button in the age of artificial intelligence? Max Levchin—the PayPal cofounder and Affirm CEO—sees a new and hugely valuable role for liking data to train AI to arrive at conclusions more in line with those a human decisionmaker would make. It’s a well-known …
Read More »Poop Drones Are Keeping Sewers Running So Humans Don’t Have to
Unlike some of the latest consumer drones, which fly almost autonomously, the Asio X requires mostly manual control, and in some very unforgiving locations too, as Astorino points out: “It’s dark, air flow can quickly change within a confined space, and managing a flight path above flowing water in a …
Read More »AI Is Spreading Old Stereotypes to New Languages and Cultures
So, there’s the training data. Then, there’s the fine-tuning and evaluation. The training data might contain all kinds of really problematic stereotypes across countries, but then the bias mitigation techniques may only look at English. In particular, it tends to be North American– and US-centric. While you might reduce bias …
Read More »Stumbling and Overheating, Most Humanoid Robots Fail to Finish Half Marathon in Beijing
While capabilities like dancing can be fun and eyecatching, they don’t actually show how useful humanoid robots are in real-world situations, says Fern. Even being able to run a half marathon isn’t a very useful benchmark for their skills—it’s not like there’s market demand for robots that can compete with …
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