Lifeboat Foundation

Advanced tools for tracking people’s eye movements and facial expressions can be used to design better places.

AI researchers have built a Minecraft bot that can explore and expand its capabilities in the game’s open world — but unlike other bots, this one basically wrote its own code through trial and error and lots of GPT-4 queries.

Called Voyager, this experimental system is an example of an “embodied agent,” an AI that can move and act freely and purposefully in a simulated or real environment. Personal assistant type AIs and chatbots don’t have to actually do stuff, let alone navigate a complex world to get that stuff done. But that’s exactly what a household robot might be expected to do in the future, so there’s lots of research into how they might do that.

Minecraft is a good place to test such things because it’s a very (very) approximate representation of the real world, with simple and straightforward rules and physics, but it’s also complex and open enough that there’s lots to accomplish or try. Purpose-built simulators are great, too, but they have their own limitations.

Ruoming Peng/University of Washington.

This is according to a press release published by the institution on Friday.

Stepping closer to AI regulation.

As AI continues to develop at a rapid rate, concerns have been raised by experts and the so-called AI ‘godfathers’ about the imminent risks it could pose to people’s privacy, human rights, and safety.

Amid steps taken by the United Kingdom government and the European Union, in partnership with the U.S, to regulate the technology, a member of the non-statutory AI Council of the U.K. government has said that the very powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems may eventually have to be banned.

This is a “key moment in a long journey for Dream Chaser,” which could fly to orbit for the first time this year.

Sierra Space successfully carried out a key test on its Dream Chaser spaceplane, which is designed to lift passengers to the International Space Station (ISS) and Orbital Reef, the private orbital station it’s developing alongside Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin.

Colorado-based Sierra Space announced in a press statement that it has successfully powered up its spaceplane for the first time. The new milestone means Dream Chaser isn’t too far away from performing its first orbital flight test, currently scheduled for this year.

Midcap information technology (IT) services firm, Mphasis, on Thursday, announced the setting up of a business unit dedicated to generative artificial intelligence (AI). The unit will offer advisory on adoption of generative AI solutions to clients, develop the company’s own generative AI properties, offer licenses to over 250 AI models through the company’s ‘Hyperscaler’ solutions marketplace for clients, partnerships with 50 startups for helping clients build solutions, and offer conversational AI tools such as chatbots for clients to deploy in their business.

Anup Nair, who has so far served as senior vice-president and chief technology officer (CTO) of Mphasis Digital, will helm the unit, called Mphasis.ai, as its chief architect and CTO.

The launch of the dedicated business unit comes after a flurry of similar launches by pretty much every large-cap IT services firm in the country. On 6 April, Tech Mahindra became the first of the large domestic IT firms to launch a generative AI solution, called ‘Generative AI Studio’, to help clients deploy the technology for content generation use cases.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9G1iRUI8ip8

Neuralink Corp. has been cleared by the FDA to start human trials for its medical technology — and there’s no shortage of potential volunteers.

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist focusing on cognitive architectures, consciousness, models of mental representation, emotion, motivation and sociality.

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Some of the most violent cosmic collisions occur silently in the vacuum of space, but with the right instrumental ears, we can still hear it happen. Here’s how.