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 .

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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."

Google executives may be fearing the worst once again as Microsoft-backed rival OpenAI launches a new AI-powered search tool. 'SearchGPT', which is being trialed as a prototype before a wider rollout, scours the web for live news and information just like Google Search. OpenAI says the new product is particularly useful for queries about current events, recent developments, or specific information that ChatGPT might not know. Social media users have noted the parallels with the world's biggest search engine, with one saying'Google Search is definitely in trouble'. Another said: 'Anyone who has been paying attention knows there will be a new king of search within 10 years.

OpenAI is testing a new search engine that uses generative artificial intelligence to produce results, raising the prospect of a significant challenge to Google's dominance of the online search market. SearchGPT will launch with a small group of users and publishers before a potential wider rollout, the company announced on Thursday. OpenAI ultimately intends to incorporate the search features into ChatGPT, rather offer a standalone product. OpenAI said SearchGPT is a temporary prototype that will combine the company's AI models, such as ChatGPT, with the ability to search the internet. It will respond conversationally to searches, while providing up-to-date information with "clear links to relevant sources".

The Neuralink CEO, Elon Musk, said on Wednesday that the company would soon test its pound-coin-sized implant and brain-computer interface on a second patient. The unnamed patient's surgery is slated for "the next week or so", Musk said. Surgery on a different patient intended to be the second participant in Neuralink's human trial had been scheduled for late June but was delayed when they experienced unspecified health issues contraindicating the procedure. The same day, the company announced that the wires attaching the first Neuralink patient's brain to the implant in his skull had become "more or less very stable" after detaching months ago. "Once you do the brain surgery it takes some time for the tissues to come in and anchor the threads in place, and once that happens, everything has been stable," said the Neuralink executive Dongjin "DJ" Seo during a live stream late on Wednesday on Twitter/X.