Fake video walk-throughs, a magically expanding loft, and stair hallucinations are just some of the new AI-generated features house hunters are coming across. As you're hunting through real estate listings for a new home in Franklin, Tennessee, you come across a vertical video showing off expansive rooms featuring a four-poster bed, a fully stocked wine cellar, and a soaking tub. It looks perfect--maybe a little too perfect. Everything in the video is AI-generated . The real property is completely empty, and the luxury furniture is a product of virtual staging.

Time series models, typically trained on numerical data, are designed to forecast future values. These models often rely on weighted averaging techniques over time intervals. However, real-world time series data is seldom isolated and is frequently influenced by non-numeric factors. For instance, stock price fluctuations are impacted by daily random events in the broader world, with each event exerting a unique influence on price signals. Previously, forecasts in financial markets have been approached in two main ways: either as time-series problems over price sequence or sentiment analysis tasks. The sentiment analysis tasks aim to determine whether news events will have a positive or negative impact on stock prices, often categorizing them into discrete labels. Recognizing the need for a more comprehensive approach to accurately model time series prediction, we propose a collaborative modeling framework that incorporates textual information about relevant events for predictions. Specifically, we leverage the intuition of large language models about future changes to update real number time series predictions. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach on financial market data.

Large multimodal models demonstrate remarkable generalist ability to perform diverse multimodal tasks in a zero-shot manner. Large-scale web-based image-text pairs contribute fundamentally to this success, but suffer from excessive noise. Recent studies use alternative captions synthesized by captioning models and have achieved notable benchmark performance. However, our experiments reveal significant Scalability Deficiency and World Knowledge Loss issues in models trained with synthetic captions, which have been largely obscured by their initial benchmark success. Upon closer examination, we identify the root cause as the overly-simplified language structure and lack of knowledge details in existing synthetic captions. To provide higher-quality and more scalable multimodal pretraining data, we propose CapsFusion, an advanced framework that leverages large language models to consolidate and refine information from both web-based image-text pairs and synthetic captions. Extensive experiments show that CapsFusion captions exhibit remarkable all-round superiority over existing captions in terms of model performance (e.g., 18.8 and 18.3 improvements in CIDEr score on COCO and NoCaps), sample efficiency (requiring 11-16 times less computation than baselines), world knowledge depth, and scalability. These effectiveness, efficiency and scalability advantages position CapsFusion as a promising candidate for future scaling of LMM training.

Amazon's Scout robot, a small machine that looks like a cooler and can navigate sidewalks, won't be delivering anybody's packages anymore. The e-commerce giant has shut down field testing for the experimental machine and is "reorienting" the program. According to Bloomberg, the Scout team has been disbanded and most of its 400 members will be offered new positions within the company. Amazon spokesperson Alisa Carroll told Reuters that the company will not be abandoning the project completely. Only a skeleton crew will remain to consider the use of autonomous robot for deliveries, though, and that could mean that it's the end for the cooler-like Scout.

Since 1999, Amazon's disruptive bravado has made "getting Amazoned" a fear for executives in any sector the tech giant sets its sights on. Here are the industries that could be under threat next. Jeff Bezos once famously said, "Your margin is my opportunity." Today, Amazon is finding opportunities in industries that would have been unthinkable for the company to attack even a few years ago. Throughout the 2000s, Amazon's e-commerce dominance paved a path of destruction through books, music, toys, sports, and a range of other retail verticals. Big box stores like Toys "R" Us, Sports Authority, and Barnes & Noble -- some of which had thrived for more than a century -- couldn't compete with Amazon's ability to combine uncommonly fast shipping with low prices. Today, Amazon's disruptive ambitions extend far beyond retail. With its expertise in complex supply chain logistics and competitive advantage in data collection, Amazon is attacking a whole host of new industries. The tech giant has ...

Dramatic employee turnover is being predicted in the post-pandemic era, at the same time that AI is being incorporated into more learning and development solutions, giving employers an opportunity to establish a competitive differentiation. An employee turnover "tsunami" is predicted by results from a survey of 2,000 adults in February conducted by The Work Institute, a research and consulting firm in Franklin, Tenn., according to an account from SHRM, the Society of Human Resource Management. The survey found that half of employees in North America plan to look for a new job in 2021. "We see absolutely pent-up turnover demand in the U.S. workforce," stated Danny Nelms, president of The Work Institute, which is focused on employee engagement and retention. Prior to the pandemic, the firm would see about 3.5 million people leaving their jobs monthly.

Welcome to the world of delivery robots: one of the fastest-growing and most competitive markets in robotics. The idea behind these bots is simple: The customer orders an item, that item is loaded into or onto the robot, and then the robot travels to the customer to drop it off. But that's not stopped multiple intrepid companies from exploring their own innovative approaches to the challenge. Here are six of the biggest names to watch out for when it comes to delivery robots. With its Star Trek-sounding name, it's no surprise that Starship went boldly where no other robotics company has gone before; helping invent the modern delivery robot in the process.

Amazon Scout, the e-commerce giant's fully-electric autonomous delivery robots, are heading south. Announced Tuesday in a blog post from Amazon Scout VP Sean Scott, Amazon says that it is set to start delivering to select customers in these markets as part of the company's continuing "field test" rollout. It has also been delivering packages in Snohomish County, Washington, and the Irvine-area of California. "We're thrilled to bring Amazon Scout to two new communities," Scott writes. "Adding Atlanta and Franklin to our existing operations gives Scout devices the opportunity to operate in varied neighborhoods with different climates than they operate in today. Amazon also has a significant presence in these areas through our corporate offices and logistics facilities. And, we know they are both great places to find world-class talent that can help us continue inventing for customers."

At the start of 2020, Amazon Scout--our fully-electric delivery system designed to safely get packages to customers using autonomous delivery devices--was busy becoming fast friends with a variety of household objects. From surfboards, to luggage, to refrigerators, and even Christmas trees waiting to be picked up for recycling--our autonomous devices have navigated around all types of objects on the sidewalk. But a lot has changed these past few months. Amazon has been providing an essential service during the COVID-19 pandemic and working hard to get customers the products they need so they can continue to stay safe. Amazon Scout is quietly playing its part in this effort, too.

Amazon has put delivery robots to work during the pandemic and is now expanding its fleet to cities in the South. The online retail giant said Tuesday that it's bringing its Amazon Scout autonomous delivery system to Atlanta, Georgia and Franklin, Tennessee this week. The news comes after a year-long test run in other locales. The cooler-sized rovers help to cut down on human-to-human contact during the nation's current coronavirus crisis. The vice president of Amazon Scout, Sean Scott, said in a blog post that the service helped the company meet increasing customer demand during the pandemic.