Lifeboat Foundation

In today’s digital age, computational tasks have become increasingly complex. This, in turn, has led to an exponential growth in the power consumed by digital computers. Thus, it is necessary to develop hardware resources that can perform large-scale computing in a fast and energy-efficient way.

In this regard, optical computers, which use light instead of electricity to perform computations, are promising. They can potentially provide lower latency and reduced power consumption, benefiting from the parallelism that optical systems have. As a result, researchers have explored various optical computing designs.

For instance, a diffractive optical network is designed through the combination of optics and deep learning to optically perform complex computational tasks such as image classification and reconstruction. It comprises a stack of structured diffractive layers, each having thousands of diffractive features/neurons. These passive layers are used to control light-matter interactions to modulate the input light and produce the desired output. Researchers train the diffractive network by optimizing the profile of these layers using deep learning tools. After the fabrication of the resulting design, this framework acts as a standalone optical processing module that only requires an input illumination source to be powered.

Needs work.

AN ultrarealistic AI robot has opinions about the afterlife and can even sense anxiety with her advanced technology, The U.S. Sun has learned.

Through a camera in her eyes, the amazing bot called “Xoxe” (pronounced Zo-zie) can detect if anybody in her presence has committed any illegal activities.

Continue reading “Creepy ultrarealistic AI Xoxe sensed my anxiety as we discussed end of the world” »

But for some industry leaders, chatbots and image-generators are far from the final robotic frontier. Next up? Consciousness.

“This topic was taboo,” Hod Lipson, the mechanical engineer in charge of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, told The New York Times. “We were almost forbidden from talking about it — ‘Don’t talk about the c-word; you won’t get tenure’ — so in the beginning I had to disguise it, like it was something else.”

Consciousness is one of the longest standing, and most divisive, questions in the field of artificial intelligence. And while to some it’s science fiction — and indeed has been the plot of countless sci-fi books, comics, and films — to others, like Lipson, it’s a goal, one that would undoubtedly change human life as we know it for good.

Dan recently shared an article about Vall-E, and it reminded me of this free software anyone can use. You can even make yourself sound like Morgan Freeman with it:

Express yourself with our real-time AI Voice Changer and soundboard to be who you want, when you want in the metaverse. Build your sonic identity for platforms like Roblox, OBS, VRChat, Discord, and more.

Download now for FREE Voicemod a funny & scary voice changer app. A voice transformer and modifier with effects that makes you sound like a girl or a robot.

Engineering student Priyanjali Gupta does not have tall tales of the inspiration behind her AI model that translates American Sign language (ASL) into English immediately.

Instead, the driving factor was her mum, who asked her “to do something now that she’s studying engineering”, a statement echoed by most Indian mums. Gupta is a third-year computer science student specializing in data science from the Vellore Institute of Technology, Tamil Nadu.

Humanity has taken yet another step toward the inevitable war against the machines (which we will lose) with the creation of Vall-E, an AI developed by a team of researchers at Microsoft that can produce high quality human voice replications with only a few seconds of audio training.

Vall-E isn’t the first AI-powered voice tool— xVASynth (opens in new tab), for instance, has been kicking around for a couple years now—but it promises to exceed them all in terms of pure capability. In a paper available at Cornell University (opens in new tab) (via Windows Central (opens in new tab) ), the Vall-E researchers say that most current text-to-speech systems are limited by their reliance on “high-quality clean data” in order to accurately synthesize high-quality speech.

Interesting Engineering met up with Ploonet at CES 2023 to develop a language-agnostic digital clone.

The virtual world is one of the most high-anticipated emerging technologies on the planet. In particular, virtual humans are predicted to have a $527.58 billion market by 2030 as their use grows in several industries, including entertainment, business, and retail.

One company that caught our eye at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2023 was Ploonet-a subsidiary of artificial intelligence (AI) Korean-based firm Saltlux. Agard/Interesting Engineering/Ploonet.

As we enter 2023, these were the big stories in self-driving cars for 2022. You an also check out my summary of early 2022 for more details on that quarter, but these are the game-changers for this year. There’s no doubt this was a year of huge ups and downs. A year where some gave up and others doubled down. A year where the stock market and VC funding took a massive nosedive and companies mostly shrunk, but also a year of great technical progress.

Usually I do this as a countdown to the biggest story, but I’ll spoil it right now and say the big story was the incredible contrast of the good and bad news. So I’m instead going to tell you the good, the bad and the not particularly ugly.

We wrap up the year with the biggest stories in robocars, from the very bad to the very good, of which 2022 had lots of both. Includes video of the stories.

Continue reading “Top Self-Driving Car Stories Of 2022 In Review” »

Meta, Canva, and Shopify among other companies are already using the technology that undergirds ChatGPT in their customer service chatbots, but experts warn that companies should be wary of generative AI’s creativity and unpredictability.

From processing an order return at Shopify to resetting a password for a Canva account, chances are that the chatbot you’ve interacted with uses the same type of large language models that power ChatGPT, OpenAI’s viral generative AI chatbot.

Now Ada, the Toronto-based company that automates 4.5 billion customer service interactions, has partnered with OpenAI to use GPT-3.