Back from the Dead

In a culture-jacking stunt worthy of the "Year of AI," a company called play.ht has produced a fictional podcast starring AI-generated versions of Joe Rogan and the late Steve Jobs. You may not enjoy the content, but you will enjoy this tour de force in technique. Continue Reading →

TikTok’s Amazing Text-to-Image AI Backgrounds

Cosmo AI Cover
Want to know how fast virtual worlds are going to appear? TikTok recently added a new effect called "AI greenscreen." Users type a description, then the AI does its best to interpret the prose and output an image that can be used as a background for a TikTok video. Continue Reading →

Is Meta Smarter Than Google?

Mark Zuckerberg wants to build an AI universal translator for Meta: "This is going to be especially important when people begin teleporting across virtual worlds and experiencing things with people from different backgrounds.” He's right, of course. Continue Reading →

AI to tap your egocentric perception

Facebook AI has announced Ego4D, a project that is trying to give AI the ability to understand and interact with the world from a first-person perspective (the way that humans do). AI typically learns from photos and videos captured in third-person, but next-generation AI will need to learn from videos that show the world from the center of action. Continue Reading →

Amazon Astro: Cool or Creepy?

Cool or creepy? These are the opposite ends of the Shelly Palmer scale for evaluating AI-powered surveillance systems built into robots, IoT, and other tech. With my cool or creepy scale in mind, behold Amazon's Astro. Continue Reading →

What You Need To Know About AI

What You Need To Know About AI
Google Translate is one of the world's largest AI models — it supports 109 languages and translates over 100 billion words per day — but anyone who has used Google Translate knows that as amazing as it is, it has a long way to go. Continue Reading →

Uber is selling off its self-driving car group

Uber is selling off its self-driving car group
  Uber is selling its self-driving car division to autonomous vehicle startup Aurora. People familiar with the deal say Uber will invest $400 million in Aurora and end up with a 26% stake in the company. Like every transportation company, Uber has been struggling during the pandemic (it cut 25% of its staff). Uber says Continue Reading →