Movie enthusiasts and Will Smith fans probably already know that he turned down the role of Neo in The Matrix in favor of Wild Wild West in 1999. In an alternate universe, this is how he might have looked in the film. Despite Wild Wild West not being a wild box office success, Smith says he has no regrets about his decision, saying that Keanu Reeves’s performance as Neo was superior to what he would have achieved. Read more to see what deepfake algorithms can do.
A new iOS app called Zao, developed by Chinese developer MoMo, was the most-downloaded China over the weekend, as it takes deepfakes to the next level by letting users superimpose their faces onto celebrities in just seconds rather than hours or even days. So far, the only issue users have had is with their privacy policy, which states that the developers could keep and reuse their images forever. Read more for a video of the software in-action.
Facebook has teamed up with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for the world’s most popular video game, Minecraft. This isn’t an AI that will help you automatically build worlds, but rather one capable of multitasking and helping users with everyday tasks outside a gaming environment. Read more for a video and additional information.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is an epic science fiction film released in 1968, inspired by Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”. It basically follows a voyage to Jupiter with the sentient computer HAL after the discovery of a mysterious black Monolith affecting human evolution, and deals with themes of existentialism, human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, as well as the possibility of extraterrestrial life. If this film were to be remade today and starred Elon Musk, this is what one of the scenes might look like. Read more for the video and additional information.
A.I. Bar has opened in London, and it’s powered by DataSparQ’s new software which uses facial recognition to place people in a digital queue to make ordering a breeze. How is this useful? For starters, it gets rid of those who cut in line, thanks to the AI-powered facial recognition system that automatically determines which customer should be served next. This software-as-a-service would only cost bar owners about $240 a month and connects to a simple webcam, touchscreen display and an internet connection. Read more for a video and additional information.
YouTuber “Ctrl Shift Face” is known for their many deepfake videos, like replacing Jack Nicholson with Jim Carrey in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Now, we get to see what Bruce Lee might have looked like in The Matrix if he were alive and replaced Keanu Reeves. Interested in trying this yourself, check out FakeApp. This piece of software lets users to easily create and share videos with faces swapped using an artificial neural network and the power of the graphics processor. Read more for a video and additional information.
Always wanted to turn your own selfies into classical 15th century Renaissance paintings? If so, then artificial intelligence is here to save the day, or to be more specific, a website called AI Portraits. Researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab created this website, which allows users to upload a selfie and wait while the algorithm, which by the way, was trained on 45,000 portrait images, to create a fake watercolor, oil or ink painting. Read more for a video of it in-action and additional information.
Microsoft announced today that it will partner with Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence research company OpenAI to build AI technology for their Azure cloud. It will be used to address issues in climate change, healthcare, education, and other big issues facing the world. However, their ultimate goal is to create Artificial General Intelligence, a human-like AI that you’ve probably seen in science fiction movies and TV shows. Since being founded in 2015, OpenAI has created technology that helps computers understand language, train robots for simple tasks, and of course, defeat humans in the computer games, like Dota 2. Read more to see the Dota 2 match and for additional information.
The Squad X experimentation program was started to give infantry Marines the same resources that mounted forces have by using autonomous robots engineered by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In a test at Twentynine Palms earlier this year, a group of these autonomous ground and aerial systems provided intelligence as well as recon support for Marines equipped with sensor-laden vests as they moved between natural desert and mock city blocks, all the while ground-based units provided armed security for the primary force. Read more for a video of this test.
University of California, Irvine researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system, called DeepCubeA, that can solve a Rubik’s Cube in about 20 moves, or an average of 1.2 seconds. For comparison, the current human world record clocks in at 3.47 seconds, but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s min2phase algorithm solved one in a mere 0.38-seconds, roughly three times faster than DeepCubeA. Read more for a video of MIT’s record-setting robot and additional information.