Press Release
Slain suburban jogger heard screaming on dashcam moments before murder
A Nashville woman was heard screaming for help by witnesses before she was found dead – police were able to track her alleged killer down using dashcam footage from a helpful civilian and a detective who had worked a case involving his twin. Last week, the Metro Nashville Police Department announced the arrest of 29-year-old Paul Park in connection with the death of 34-year-old Alyssa Lokits. The woman was exercising on the Mill Creek Greenway trail in Nashville on Monday, Oct. 14. Security cameras show Park allegedly emerging from between two parked vehicles and "following her at a brisk pace," the department wrote in a press release. After the two left the view of the camera, witnesses heard a woman scream "Help! Then, police said, the witnesses heard gunfire. Paul Park, 39, was arrested by the Metro Nashville Police Department on Oct. 15 in the death of Alyssa Lokits. Park was seen a short while later with scratches on his arms and blood on his clothing as he returned to his gray BMW sedan. Detectives didn't get a break in the case until a local resident provided them with dashcam footage, which showed part of Park's license plate and a clearer image of his face. A homicide detective who reviewed the footage recognized Park as the identical twin brother from a suicide case that she had worked in December 2021, CBS News reported. "I pray that we don't have an incident where we don't have a dashcam, or we don't have someone helping us like we had in this case," MNPD Chief John Drake said at a press conference. "I'm so thankful that our people got on this – we need technology." Even without the helpful civilian's footage, new technology pioneered by artificial intelligence software can help police investigate cases like the Nashville killing. Veritone is one of the companies spearheading that movement. The license plate of Paul Park's gray BMW sedan wasn't captured on surveillance footage – but thanks to a partial license plate number captured by a hiker's dashcam, police were able to arrest the accused killer. Veritone Track, one of several functions in a suite of services for law enforcement, uses artificial intelligence to run one photo or video of a vehicle – like the video captured on the park's surveillance footage – against stoplight cameras, body-worn cameras and other municipal surveillance footage available to police to find a match. "Both federal and local law enforcement have a major data problem," Veritone CEO Ryan Steelberg told Fox News Digital. "They are now capturing body camera [footage] and dashcams.
Anthropic Wants Its AI Agent to Control Your Computer
It took a while for people to adjust to the idea of chatbots that seem to have minds of their own. The next leap into the unknown may involve trusting artificial intelligence to take over our computers, too. Anthropic, a high-flying competitor to OpenAI, announced today that it has taught its AI model Claude to do a range of things on a computer, including search the web, open applications, and input text using the mouse and keyboard. "I think we're going to enter into a new era where a model can use all of the tools that you use as a person to get tasks done," says Jared Kaplan, chief science officer at Anthropic and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. Kaplan showed WIRED a prerecorded demo in which an "agentic"--or tool-using--version of Claude had been asked to help plan an outing to see the sunrise at the Golden Gate Bridge with a friend.
Google goes NUCLEAR: Tech giant will use nuclear reactors to generate the vast amounts of energy needed to power its AI data centres
With its Gemini chatbot and Pixel AI phone software, it's fair to say Google has an obsessive focus on artificial intelligence. But all that advanced computational power requires millions of computers, known as'servers', housed inside data centres across the world that operate 24/7. Now, in an attempt to cater to its vast AI needs, Google is going nuclear. The tech giant has signed a deal with California-based nuclear firm Kairos Power to build new nuclear reactors to supply its US data centres with energy. Although the location of these reactors is yet to be revealed, Google said the first will be operational in 2030, with more to follow by 2035.
Learning to Drive via Asymmetric Self-Play
Zhang, Chris, Biswas, Sourav, Wong, Kelvin, Fallah, Kion, Zhang, Lunjun, Chen, Dian, Casas, Sergio, Urtasun, Raquel
Large-scale data is crucial for learning realistic and capable driving policies. However, it can be impractical to rely on scaling datasets with real data alone. The majority of driving data is uninteresting, and deliberately collecting new long-tail scenarios is expensive and unsafe. We propose asymmetric self-play to scale beyond real data with additional challenging, solvable, and realistic synthetic scenarios. Our approach pairs a teacher that learns to generate scenarios it can solve but the student cannot, with a student that learns to solve them. When applied to traffic simulation, we learn realistic policies with significantly fewer collisions in both nominal and long-tail scenarios. Our policies further zero-shot transfer to generate training data for end-to-end autonomy, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art adversarial approaches, or using real data alone. For more information, visit https://waabi.ai/selfplay .
Everything Announced at Meta Connect 2024: Quest 3S, Orion AR glasses and Meta AI updates
Although Meta Connect 2024 lacked a marquee high-end product for the holiday season, it still included a new budget VR headset and a tease of the "magic glasses" Meta's XR gurus have been talking about for the better part of a decade. In addition, the company keeps plowing forward with new AI tools for its Ray-Ban glasses and social platforms. Here's everything the company announced at Meta Connect 2024. Today's best mixed reality gear -- like Apple's Vision Pro and the Meta Quest 3 -- are headsets with passthrough video capabilities. But the tech industry eventually wants to squeeze that tech into something resembling a pair of prescription glasses.
How to renew your US passport online (finally)
The State Department also plans to expand access soon. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The State Department has announced that its online passport renewal website is live and taking submissions. The modernization move, highlighted in the department's statement and press conference, marks a major shift in what has long been a notoriously tedious process for citizens traveling in and out of the country. While not available to all US citizens, officials promised expansions are coming in the near future.
Amazon's Audiobook Narrators Can Now Make Their Own AI Voice Clones
Synthetic voices have been proliferating for years, and the generative AI boom of the new '20s has sped that process right along. AI voices are everywhere--in podcasts, in political campaigns, and in chatbots where they maybe-not-so-subtly replicate celebrity voices. Soon, they'll be all up in your audiobooks too. Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook company, announced a trial program for generating AI voice clones to read works in its audiobook marketplace. The announcement came via a post in ACX--Audiobook Creation Exchange--Audible's service that lets authors and publishers turn written books into audiobooks.
Apple brings sleep apnea detection to the Watch Series 10
Apple is bringing sleep apnea detection to the most recent generations of its Watch, the company announced today. At the iPhones 16 launch event, Apple revealed the feature would come to the new Series 10, as well as the Series 9 and Ultra 2. If you wear your watch while you sleep, you'll get an alert in the morning if symptoms are detected through the night, urging you to visit your clinician. The data for this will be collated in the Health app on the iPhone. Rather than using oxygen saturation, which would be the logical approach, Apple says it's using motion tracking. This is likely related to the messy patent battle surrounding the blood oxygen sensor in the Watch that has stymied the company's work in this area.
UK regulator looks at Google's partnership with Anthropic
The Competition and Markets Authority has begun a preliminary investigation into a partnership between Google and the AI startup Anthropic, marking the latest in a string of investigations into deals between big tech companies and smallerAI ones. Google invested 2bn (about 1.56bn) into Anthropic in 2023, shortly after signing a cloud computing agreement with the startup, which develops the Claude LLM and chatbot. The CMA is now considering whether the partnership has "resulted in the creation of a relevant merger situation" which would allow the agency to begin a formal investigation. It is inviting comments over the next two weeks. The move comes amid broader concerns about competition in the generative AI sector. A deal between Amazon and Anthropic is also being investigated by the CMA as a potential merger after Amazon took a 4bn stake in the company and signed a deal to become one of the startup's cloud computing providers.
Canadian Olympic Committee says spying scandal 'could tarnish' women's Tokyo gold medal
The drone scandal surrounding the Canadian women's soccer team could have bigger implications than just this year's Games in Paris. Head coach Bev Priestman was removed from her position on Thursday night after two staff members were sent home from Paris after an investigation found that analyst Joseph Lombardi had used a drone to spy on New Zealand's practice sessions. Head coach Beverly Priestman reacts during the Women's Gold Medal match between Canada and Sweden on day 14 of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at International Stadium Yokohama on Aug. 6, 2021 in Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan. "Over the past 24 hours, additional information has come to our attention regarding previous drone use against opponents, predating the Paris 2024 Olympic Games," Canada Soccer CEO Kevin Blue said in a statement. "In light of these new revelations, Canada Soccer has made the decision to suspend Women's National Soccer Team Head Coach, Bev Priestman for the remainder of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, and until the completion of our recently announced independent external review."