Lifeboat Foundation

AI has mastered some of the most complex games known to man, but models are generally tailored to solve specific kinds of challenges. A new DeepMind algorithm that can tackle a much wider variety of games could be a step towards more general AI, its creators say.

Using games as a benchmark for AI has a long pedigree. When IBM’s Deep Blue algorithm beat chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, it was hailed as a milestone for the field. Similarly, when DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated one of the world’s top Go players, Lee Sedol, in 2016, it led to a flurry of excitement about AI’s potential.

DeepMind built on this success with AlphaZero, a model that mastered a wide variety of games, including chess and shogi. But as impressive as this was, AlphaZero only worked with perfect information games where every detail of the game, other than the opponent’s intentions, is visible to both players. This includes games like Go and chess where both players can always see all the pieces on the board.

Are gamers paving the way to the future?

The future is now — or so it seems. @perrikaryal is a gamer, Twitch streamer, psychology graduate and a genius with the ability to control games…with her mind! She has mastered the art of doing this with games like Elden Ring, Halo and TrackMania all without using a controller. To do this she uses an EEG (electroencephalogram) that picks up her brain activity, which then translates into pushing buttons on a virtual controller.

Continue reading “Playing Video Games With Mind Control” »

Like “Avengers” director Joe Russo, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that fully AI-generated movies and TV shows will be possible within our lifetimes.

A host of AI unveilings over the past few months, in particular OpenAI’s ultra-realistic-sounding text-to-speech engine, have given glimpses into this brave new frontier. But Meta’s announcement today put our AI-generated content future into especially sharp relief — for me at least.

Meta his morning debuted Emu Video, an evolution of the tech giant’s image generation tool, Emu. Given a caption (e.g. “A dog running across a grassy knoll”), image or a photo paired with a description, Emu Video can generate a four-second-long animated clip.

Plans are underway to bring the life story of Elon Musk to the big screen.

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A24, a renowned New York-based film production company, has secured the rights to produce a movie about the billionaire tech entrepreneur.

Continue reading “A24 secures rights to Elon Musk biopic with Darren Aronofsky as director” »

‘It took 500 artists five years to make a world-class animated movie,’ Katzenberg said at a Bloomberg conference. ‘I don’t think it will take 10 percent of that[with AI].’

“Othello is now solved.” With that summation, a researcher at a Japanese computer company confirmed yet another milestone in supercomputing achievement.

Othello, a 140-year-old game rooted in the Shakespearean drama of the same name that depicts conflict between the Moor of Venice and Desdemona, does not seem complex at first glance. It is played on a board with black and white disks strategically positioned in squares along eight rows and eight columns.

The challenge, according to bioinformatician Hiroki Takizawa, is to conceive a game plan “with no mistake made by either player.”

Doritos introduced crunch cancellation software to “help gamers keep the crunch to themselves.”

Ever caught yourself mindlessly snacking on potato crisps while watching a movie? Sometimes, the crackling sound of chips is so loud that one has to turn on subtitles to understand what the little people on the screen are saying.

Doritos, the brand of flavorful tortilla chips, says that gamers face the same problem. According to their recent research, 85% of US gamers across the globe reach out for a bag of Doritos during their gaming session. The study also revealed that 30% of gamers in the US said that the sound of other people’s crunching impacts their performance, and they would welcome a solution that eliminates crunching sounds while gaming.

Gaming is a $193 billion industry — nearly double the size of the film and music industries combined — and there are around three billion gamers worldwide. While online gaming can improve wellbeing and foster social relations, privacy and awareness issues could potentially offset these benefits and cause real harm to gamers.

The new study, by scientists at Aalto University’s Department of Computer Science, reveals potentially questionable data collection practices in online games, along with misconceptions and concerns about privacy among players. The study also offers risk mitigation strategies for players and design recommendations for game developers to improve privacy in online games.

‘We had two supporting lines of inquiry in this study: what players think about games, and what games are really up to with respect to privacy,’ says Janne Lindqvist, associate professor of computer science at Aalto. ‘It was really surprising to us how nuanced the considerations of gamers were. For example, participants said that, to protect their privacy, they would avoid using voice chat in games unless it was absolutely necessary. Our game analysis revealed that some games try to nudge people to reveal their online identities by offering things like virtual rewards.’

The acquisition, which was first announced in January 2022, is the largest in Microsoft’s history and one of the biggest in the tech industry.

Microsoft has finally sealed the deal to buy Activision Blizzard, the gaming giant behind popular franchises such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch, for a whopping $68.7 billion. The acquisition, first announced in January 2022, is the largest in Microsoft’s history and one of the biggest in the tech industry.

Ending a long regulatory battle

Continue reading “Microsoft completes $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard” »