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.

Ubisoft has announced its highly-anticipated upcoming game Assassin's Creed Shadows has been delayed until next year. Instead of releasing it on 12 November as previously planned, it has been pushed back to 14 February 2025. It follows the disappointing performance of another of the firm's major titles, Star Wars Outlaws, and concerns from some about how Ubisoft is being run. The game's executive producer Marc-Alexis Cote said the developers "need more time to polish and refine the experience". "We understand this decision will come as disappointing news," he said.

Google's Pixel Buds series has always been a worthy companion for its Pixel phones. The company only lacks a set of over-ear headphones to offer similar options to what Apple provides for iPhone users. Of course, Google got a later start than its rival, but like its Silicon Valley counterpart, the company has designed its earbuds to work best with its own devices. You'll need both a phone and earbuds from Google to get the best features. That's unlikely to change anytime soon.

Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier has the latest on the pros and cons of the bombshell developments on'Special Report.' Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, during a fireside chat at University College London (UCL) in London, UK, on Wednesday, May 24, 2023. Altman said part of the reason for his current tour of European cities is to discover a suitable location for a new office. HISTORY-MAKING DEVELOPMENT: Open AI CEO Sam Altman says the world could be just "a few thousand days" from creating an artificial "superintelligence." AI FORECAST: Artificial intelligence is sprouting up as one of the most promising revolutionary technologies in meteorology, and weather-AI experts say it's just the beginning.

As world wide as the web is, language barriers still often limit how much of a site people can explore. Well, Reddit is using AI in an attempt to lessen this issue. The company announced Redditors across more than 35 countries will soon be able to automatically translate their entire feeds. The tool first launched in France earlier this year. The machine learning-powered feature is now available in Brazil and Spain, where Redditors can click a translate icon displayed in the overflow menu.

Filmmaker James Cameron has joined the board of directors of artificial intelligence (AI) firm StabilityAI, 40 years after making a film about its risks. In 1984's The Terminator, which Cameron wrote and directed, a rogue AI called Skynet threatens the existence of mankind. But the creator of the fictional AI has not been hired to help avoid such tech being developed in real life. Instead, his role will centre around how the technology can be used in special effects, also known as computer-generated images (CGI). "I've spent my career seeking out emerging technologies that push the very boundaries of what's possible, all in the service of telling incredible stories," he said.

Amazon's latest attempt to usurp the humble bedside alarm clock is the revamped Echo Spot, equipped with a speaker and small display for a customisable Alexa clock. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. It is a full reimagining of the original Echo Spot from 2018, keeping the general half-ball shape but ditching the camera and shrinking the screen. The display is a small square in the top half of the face, immediately above a speaker grille.

We present initial results of a forthcoming benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on white-collar tasks of economic value. We evaluate agents on real-world "messy" open-web research tasks of the type that are routine in finance and consulting. In doing so, we lay the groundwork for an LLM agent evaluation suite where good performance directly corresponds to a large economic and societal impact. We built and tested several agent architectures with o1-preview, GPT-4o, Claude-3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3.1 (405b), and GPT-4o-mini. On average, LLM agents powered by Claude-3.5 Sonnet and o1-preview substantially outperformed agents using GPT-4o, with agents based on Llama 3.1 (405b) and GPT-4o-mini lagging noticeably behind. Across LLMs, a ReAct architecture with the ability to delegate subtasks to subagents performed best. In addition to quantitative evaluations, we qualitatively assessed the performance of the LLM agents by inspecting their traces and reflecting on their observations. Our evaluation represents the first in-depth assessment of agents' abilities to conduct challenging, economically valuable analyst-style research on the real open web.

While NLP research into hate speech detection has grown exponentially in the last three decades, there has been minimal uptake or engagement from policy makers and non-profit organisations. We argue the absence of ethical frameworks have contributed to this rift between current practice and best practice. By adopting appropriate ethical frameworks, NLP researchers may enable the social impact potential of hate speech research. This position paper is informed by reviewing forty-eight hate speech detection systems associated with thirty-seven publications from different venues.

Evaluation of policies in recommender systems typically involves A/B testing using live experiments on real users to assess a new policy's impact on relevant metrics. This ``gold standard'' comes at a high cost, however, in terms of cycle time, user cost, and potential user retention. In developing policies for ``onboarding'' new users, these costs can be especially problematic, since on-boarding occurs only once. In this work, we describe a simulation methodology used to augment (and reduce) the use of live experiments. We illustrate its deployment for the evaluation of ``preference elicitation'' algorithms used to onboard new users of the YouTube Music platform. By developing counterfactually robust user behavior models, and a simulation service that couples such models with production infrastructure, we are able to test new algorithms in a way that reliably predicts their performance on key metrics when deployed live. We describe our domain, our simulation models and platform, results of experiments and deployment, and suggest future steps needed to further realistic simulation as a powerful complement to live experiments.