NVIDIA's new AI lets you recreate your pet's smile on a lion

NVIDIA, the company behind some of the most impressive graphics cards, has pulled off yet another machine learning-powered wizardry. Researchers from the Santa Clara-based chipmaker have created a new AI tool -- dubbed Ganimal -- that can take in a picture of an animal and recreate its facial expression and pose on the face of any other creature. In a paper -- titled "Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation" aka FUNIT -- the image-to-image translation method leverages generative adversarial networks (GANs), a neural network that has been widely adopted in a variety of image generation and transfer scenarios. You can give the tool a spin right here and read the technical aspects of the research here. "In this case, we train a network to jointly solve many translation tasks where each task is about translating a random source animal to a random target animal by leveraging a few example images of the target animal," Ming-Yu Liu, the lead computer vision researcher behind FUNIT, said.