This photo posted by DOGE on Feb. 11, 2025, shows shelving and cardboard boxes which DODGE says workers at the underground mine facility use to store federal worker retirement papers. The White House announces that it will implement AI technology to improve efficiency in federal records keeping. HISTORIC EFFICIENCY: Fox News Digital has learned that the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will post an updated Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) at the close of business Wednesday that paves the way for artificial intelligence to improve government efficiency and enhance the federal record-keeping process. NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE: The use of artifical intelligence to reimagine the classic film "The Wizard of Oz" will likely see mixed reactions from fans, experts told Fox News Digital. BAD-FAITH TACTICS: OpenAI escalated its legal battle with Elon Musk by countersuing the Tesla and xAI CEO, claiming in a lawsuit he "has tried every tool available to harm" the company.

FlashBot Arm is designed to interact more like a human. As you navigate through your daily routine, whether it's grabbing a meal at a restaurant, visiting a healthcare center or checking into a hotel, you might soon encounter a new kind of robot at these places. It's called the FlashBot Arm, and Pudu Robotics is behind it. This semi-humanoid robot combines advanced manipulation capabilities with intelligent delivery features, making it a significant innovation in the service robotics sector. Unlike traditional robots, the FlashBot Arm is designed to interact with its environment in a more human-like way.

By pretty much every objective measure, HBO's adaptation of the hit postapocalyptic video game The Last of Us has been a roaring success. Never before has a video game narrative been molded into Emmy nominations and such warm reception among respectable critics, industry darlings, and people who have no idea what the term "one-shotting" means. You'd think that the devotees who first fell in love with the game back when it was originally released in 2013 would be toasting the cultural ascendance of their favorite medium--and especially how the story's complicated morality has impacted those who've never picked up a controller. And yet, for as long as the show has been on television, its most dogmatic fans have been caught up in a controversy of much inferior consequence: Specifically, they're furious that Bella Ramsey doesn't look much like Ellie. On the most basic level, this observation is correct.

With the second season of The Last of Us returning to our screens, it might be comforting to think that the show is purely fictional. But believe it or not, the show's haunting zombies aren't that far from reality. Real-life'zombie-making' fungi burrow into their host's flesh and manipulate their minds to turn them into hyperactive super spreaders. As it stands, these mind-warping parasites only affect certain insects. However, the stages of infection are eerily similar to those seen in the hit HBO show.

Every day, the world seems to be slipping further and further into dystopia, with President Donald Trump placing tariffs on islands inhabited by penguins and the country's head of Medicare and Medicaid touting AI-first healthcare. In case you needed an even higher dose of Orwellian anxiety in your life, though, Black Mirror has finally returned for season 7 with six brand new episodes. In its new season, the anthology series about our, shall we say, complicated relationship with technology takes on AI sentience, subscription pricing models, lost loves, high school grudges, and the privatization of health care. It's also got plenty of action, romance, and a heaping helping of tech-era terror. As with any anthology series, Black Mirror has plenty of hits, and also its share of misses, and season 7 is no exception, which only makes it more perfect for ranking.

Based on one of the world's best-selling video games, the film tells the story of four misfits pulled through a mysterious portal into the Overworld - the place where all players start in Minecraft. Despite underwhelming critics' reviews, the film, which boasts a star-studded cast including Jason Momoa, Jack Black and Jennifer Coolidge, exceeded expectations by making 300m ( 233m) globally at the box office on its opening weekend. In the film, Momoa's character Garrett Garrison has to battle a baby zombie riding a chicken on the way to finding the orb that can take him back to the real world. Hess and Black thought it would be funny if Black's character Steve announced everything that happens to him intensely, hence the "Chicken jockey!" meme taking off. "Jack says it with such passion," said Hess. "Everything that comes out of his mouth in the film is spoken with such authority and seriousness, like this is the most important thing anybody has ever heard in their life.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I was 21 when I first watched Spike Jonze's 2013 sci-fi romance Her in theaters in New York City--a then–fresh college graduate teeming with the potent and deluded optimism that came with being a very broke and online millennial hoping to change the world. Her sparked some of my first reflections about whether tech innovation is inherently good or bad for society, and helped validate my early moral quandaries and panic at the time. I was graduating at the first turn of a recovering recession (mainly due to big tech investments in digital and social media) and securing my first full-time role as an online reporter. Though I was eager and rosy, a quiet, worried voice also began growing inside of me. Me, my job, my realities, were entirely dependent on tech--mainly Facebook content dissemination and programmatic turnkey digital ads--and I was not sure these huge tech investments by our broligarchical founding fathers would lead us anywhere good.

Fox News correspondent William La Jeunesse joins'Fox News Sunday' to discuss the evolution of AI and the push lawmakers are making to regulate it. The use of artifical intelligence to reimagine the classic film "The Wizard of Oz" will likely see mixed reactions from fans, experts told Fox News Digital. While "film purists" may resist the idea of using generative AI to give classic films an entire makeover, the technology could "breathe new life" into hit movies -- including "The Wizard of Oz." Warner Bros. Discovery, Google Cloud and Magnopus have set out to do just that by creating an immersive experience for fans of the 1939 classic. The new "Wizard of Oz" experience is set to premiere at the Las Vegas Sphere on Aug. 28. "The fan reaction will likely split into two distinct camps," Michael Walker, CEO of AI-First at Trilogy, told Fox News Digital.

The advancement of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, a rigorous evaluation framework for video CoT reasoning remains absent. Current video benchmarks fail to adequately assess the reasoning process and expose whether failures stem from deficiencies in perception or reasoning capabilities. Therefore, we introduce VCR-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to comprehensively evaluate LVLMs' Video Chain-of-Thought Reasoning capabilities. VCR-Bench comprises 859 videos spanning a variety of video content and durations, along with 1,034 high-quality question-answer pairs. Each pair is manually annotated with a stepwise CoT rationale, where every step is tagged to indicate its association with the perception or reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we design seven distinct task dimensions and propose the CoT score to assess the entire CoT process based on the stepwise tagged CoT rationals. Extensive experiments on VCR-Bench highlight substantial limitations in current LVLMs. Even the top-performing model, o1, only achieves a 62.8% CoT score and an 56.7% accuracy, while most models score below 40%. Experiments show most models score lower on perception than reasoning steps, revealing LVLMs' key bottleneck in temporal-spatial information processing for complex video reasoning. A robust positive correlation between the CoT score and accuracy confirms the validity of our evaluation framework and underscores the critical role of CoT reasoning in solving complex video reasoning tasks. We hope VCR-Bench to serve as a standardized evaluation framework and expose the actual drawbacks in complex video reasoning task.

-- Cartoon avatars have been widely used in various applications, including social media, online tutoring, and gaming. However, existing cartoon avatar datasets and generation methods struggle to present highly expressive avatars with fine-grained facial expressions and are often inspired from real-world identities, raising privacy concerns. T o address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, GenEA va, for generating high-quality cartoon avatars with fine-grained facial expressions. Our approach fine-tunes a state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion model to synthesize highly detailed and expressive facial expressions. We then incorporate a stylization model that transforms these realistic faces into cartoon avatars while preserving both identity and expression. Leveraging this framework, we introduce the first expressive cartoon avatar dataset, GenEA va 1.0, specifically designed to capture 135 fine-grained facial expressions, featuring 13,230 expressive cartoon avatars with a balanced distribution across genders, racial groups, and age ranges. We demonstrate that our fine-tuned model generates more expressive faces than the state-of-the-art text-to-image diffusion model SDXL. We also verify that the cartoon avatars generated by our framework do not include memorized identities from fine-tuning data. The proposed framework and dataset provide a diverse and expressive benchmark for future research in cartoon avatar generation. I. INTRODUCTION Cartoon avatars have become increasingly important in various digital domains, serving as personalized digital representations in applications such as social media [41], chatbots [22], online tutoring [18], [57], video conferencing [45], virtual reality [5], and video games [40]. As digital communication evolves, cartoon avatars offer a compelling alternative to realistic human representations, providing users with enhanced personalization and privacy, and enriching user engagement and interaction across various platforms.