Solid State Life

"PlayStation is collaborating with Sony's artificial intelligence department in order to create AI 'Agents' that can play games alongside human players." "Sony AI, which we established last year, has begun a collaboration with PlayStation that will make game experiences even richer and more enjoyable. By leveraging reinforcement learning, we are developing Game AI Agents that can be a player's in-game opponent or collaboration partner."

This work was inspired by the observation that animals can rapidly adapt to different soils, moving uphill or downhill, carrying loads, moving with rested or tired muscles, responding to injury, and so on, while robotics systems require immense training to adapt to any of these, which just can't be done on time scales of fractions of a second.

"Customers concentrated in London and south-east England have had food deliveries cancelled after the fire on Friday at the fulfilment centre in Erith, south-east London. Orders have been rerouted to warehouses in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, and Dordon, Warwickshire, resulting in delays."

The team that developed AlphaZero at DeepMind put fourth the hypothesis that it is, which they call the "reward is enough" hypothesis. "The generic objective of maximising reward is enough to drive behaviour that exhibits most if not all abilities that are studied in natural and artificial intelligence."

This actually came out last November and I somehow missed it.

"Neural network enabled filmmaking". Translating in the actors' voices and using deepfake technology to make lips sync. Click "Watch showreel".

"The AI model can simulate how a human user would type any sentence on any keyboard design. It makes errors, detects them -- though not always immediately -- and corrects them, very much like humans would. The simulation also predicts how people adapt to alternating circumstances, like how their writing style changes when they start using a new auto-correction system or keyboard design."

"Last week, Lyft sold its self-driving car division to a subsidiary of Toyota for $550 million. Cruise bought Voyage. Aurora merged with Uber's autonomous vehicle unit. Delivery robot startup Nuro acquired self-driving truck outfit Ike." "John Krafcik announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Waymo after helping lead the company since 2015." No mention of Tesla.

"After a large amount of experimentation, I’ve found that StyleCLIP is essentially Photoshop driven by text, with all the good, bad, and chaos that entails." He takes a photo of Mark Zuckerberg, and then gives it transformation instructions such as: "face" to "tanned face", "face with hair" to "face with Hi-top fade hair", "face with nose" to "face with flared nostrils", "face" to "Elon Musk face", "face" to "Jesus Christ face", "face" to "Dragon Ball Z Goku face", "face" to "robot face"...

LALALA.AI separates vocal tracks from instruments in music. Well, I didn't try it, I just played the sample, and it sounds like it has trouble completely removing the instruments from the vocal track, but the instrument track does sound like the voice is completely removed. So maybe this would be useful for making karaoke versions of songs. And no, they don't say how the system works, other than saying it's a 45-million-parameter neural network that was trained on 20 terabytes of audio.

Dr. Fill, a puzzle-solving automaton, came out victorious at last week's national tournament—but human solvers shouldn't throw in the towel just yet.