Japanese education services company Benesse will offer a new service to help elementary school students with their research projects using generative artificial intelligence during the summer break. The service, which will be provided for free on its website for parents, will make suggestions and offer tips to help students search research themes and compile their findings, the company said in a recent press release. For example, if one asks "How can I study the biology of dinosaurs?" the AI would give such advice as "How about finding out what they ate?" without giving exact answers, the company said. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

Dukaan CEO and founder Suumit Shah explains why he laid of 90% of his customer support staff after saying AI outperformed them. The real estate market might feel the shifts and impacts of artificial intelligence (AI). But when it comes to making perhaps the most significant purchase of one's life, homebuyers will want that human touch, experts told Fox News Digital. "I don't think it's going to replace how we necessarily do business and automate it, but I think it's going to enhance the amount of data that we have available," Pierre Debbas, co-managing partner of Rommer Debbas LLP, said. He argued it will allow Realtors to "provide the consumer with more accurate information and maybe a broader scope of data in making their decisions when buying a home." AI has already reshaped a number of industries, including the very industry that created it, leading to rapidly decreasing work opportunities and doomsday prophecies of no more tech jobs in five years.

Ben Goertzel said the sky's'not even the limit' when it comes to the potential impact of artificial general intelligence. A panel of robots told reporters in Switzerland Friday that they could be more efficient leaders than human beings, among other statements. The nine artificial intelligence-enabled humanoid social robots also explained at a Geneva conference center that they wouldn't take anyone's jobs or stage a rebellion. Conference organizers at the United Nations-driven AI for Good Global Summit did not specify to what extent their responses were scripted or programmed. Some of the robots are capable of producing preprogrammed responses and the United Nations Development Program's first robot innovation ambassador, Sophia, sometimes relies on responses scripted by a team of writers at Hanson Robotics.

High-quality datasets can speed up breakthroughs and reveal potential developing directions in SLAM research. To support the research on corner cases of visual SLAM systems, this paper presents Ground-Challenge: a challenging dataset comprising 36 trajectories with diverse corner cases such as aggressive motion, severe occlusion, changing illumination, few textures, pure rotation, motion blur, wheel suspension, etc. The dataset was collected by a ground robot with multiple sensors including an RGB-D camera, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a wheel odometer and a 3D LiDAR. All of these sensors were well-calibrated and synchronized, and their data were recorded simultaneously. To evaluate the performance of cutting-edge SLAM systems, we tested them on our dataset and demonstrated that these systems are prone to drift and fail on specific sequences. We will release the full dataset and relevant materials upon paper publication to benefit the research community. For more information, visit our project website at https://github.com/sjtuyinjie/Ground-Challenge.

Recent advances in high-fidelity simulators have enabled closed-loop training of autonomous driving agents, potentially solving the distribution shift in training v.s. deployment and allowing training to be scaled both safely and cheaply. However, there is a lack of understanding of how to build effective training benchmarks for closed-loop training. In this work, we present the first empirical study which analyzes the effects of different training benchmark designs on the success of learning agents, such as how to design traffic scenarios and scale training environments. Furthermore, we show that many popular RL algorithms cannot achieve satisfactory performance in the context of autonomous driving, as they lack long-term planning and take an extremely long time to train. To address these issues, we propose trajectory value learning (TRAVL), an RL-based driving agent that performs planning with multistep look-ahead and exploits cheaply generated imagined data for efficient learning. Our experiments show that TRAVL can learn much faster and produce safer maneuvers compared to all the baselines. For more information, visit the project website: https://waabi.ai/research/travl

Meta boasted Friday that it has produced'the most versatile AI for speech generation' in existence. But it added that the company would not be making their AI model public, due to grave concerns over the advanced tech's'potential risks of misuse.' In recent months, scammers have become adept at employing AI-generated speech to perpetrate eerie and shocking crimes, including an April attempt at faking the kidnapping of a teenage girl in Arizona, terrorizing the young girl's distraught mother with realistic AI-generated pleas. But Meta proposed a variety of more optimistic use cases in their press release, stating that Voicebox could be used to help the visually impaired hear messages from their friends and loved ones, or to allow non-native speakers to play translations of their own words, in their own voice, but in a foreign tongue. Meta called their new Voicebox generative AI model'the most versatile AI for speech generation' in existence.

At some point last week, after watching my 100th video game trailer as part of the loosely connected series of livestreamed showcases that have replaced E3, I started to lose the will. "Wholesome" indie games featuring frogs, gritty action games, low poly PS1-era nostalgia platformers and samey mega-franchises all started to bleed into each other. Am I even capable of getting excited about video game announcements any more? Of course, the E3 press conferences of yore were ultimately adverts, too, but they were at least adverts for video games, without commercials for delivery apps or fast food shoehorned in. And if a game was shown during a Nintendo, Xbox or PlayStation presentation, it was because they thought it might encourage people to buy their console, not because the developer paid a fee to have their trailer held up in front of monetisable eyeballs.

China should play a key role in shaping the artificial intelligence guardrails needed to ensure the safety of transformative new systems, OpenAI Inc.'s Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said. "With the emergence of the increasingly powerful AI systems, the stakes for global cooperation have never been higher," Altman, whose company kick-started an AI frenzy in China with last year's launch of ChatGPT, told a Beijing conference via video link on Saturday. In both China and Silicon Valley, talent and investments are flowing into AI, a strategic area that will help define the deepening tech rivalry between the world's two largest economies. Advances in the emerging technology have also highlighted tensions in how governments are seeking to regulate the sector, one that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said requires greater state oversight to mitigate national security risks. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software.

Elon Musk's SpaceX recently launched the biggest and most powerful rocket into flight, even though it did make it into orbit. But the world's richest man isn't content on expanding his sci-fi inspired technology into just the cosmos. Neuralink, the tech startup co-founded by Musk, also wants to embark on a fantastic voyage into the brain. Two weeks ago, the company announced it had gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin trials to implant brain chips into humans. We don't know when trials will begin, but there's plenty of buzz around Neuralink's development of a brain-computer interface.

We are now entering what used to be the most exciting month for gamers (and for games journalists): June, the month of E3, where we would find out what gaming's biggest names had in store for the winter and beyond. It's all rather more diffuse now, since Covid did a number on the yearly gaming events rhythm and E3's big return was cancelled (as Keith Stuart wrote about in this very newsletter), so I've pulled together everything to look out for from the summer's gaming announcements in one place. Before we get into it, though: it is difficult to get tremendously excited about hour-long sequences of trailers, isn't it? Immediately after the live E3 press conferences of yore, games journalists would be running into side-rooms to interview executives and developers, often playing the games that had just been shown, and reporting back to readers and viewers with something more than mere marketing information. We could do a good job.