An artificial intelligence called InfiniCity can build virtual cities that extend in all directions seemingly without end. It could lead to virtual reality worlds that millions of people can interact in or be used for training driverless cars how to cope with new surroundings. Creating detailed three-dimensional environments can be an intensive process. Making ones that represent the real world requires collecting a huge amount of real-world data, for example by Google's Street View cars.

The experiment demonstrates that natural language processing, though developed to read and write language text, can learn at least some of the underlying principles of biology. Salesforce Research developed the Al program, called ProGen, which uses next-token prediction to assemble amino acid sequences into artificial proteins. Scientists said the new technology could become more powerful than directed evolution, a Nobel-prize-winning protein design technology, and will energize the 50-year-old field of protein engineering by speeding the development of new proteins that can be used for almost anything from therapeutics to degrading plastic. A user enters a control tag, which can be a protein type such as lysozome, into the ProGen Al model. The ProGen Al model uses the tag to assemble amino acid sequences into artificial proteins.

Artificial intelligence models could soon be used to instantly create or edit near-photorealistic three-dimensional scenes on a laptop. The tools could help artists working on games and CGI in films or be used to create hyperrealistic avatars. AIs have been able to produce realistic 2D images for some time, but 3D scenes have proved to be trickier due to the sheer computing power required.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology can generate plausible, entertaining, and scientifically interesting titles for potential research articles, finds a study in the Christmas issue of The BMJ. A study of The BMJ's most popular Christmas research articles--which combine evidence based science with light hearted or quirky themes--finds that AI generated titles were as attractive to readers but that, as in other areas of medicine, performance was enhanced by human input. As such, the researchers say AI could have a role in generating hypotheses or directions for future research. AI is already used to help doctors diagnose conditions, based on the idea that computer systems can learn from data and identify patterns. But can AI be used to generate worthwhile hypotheses for medical research?

A growing body of research suggests that the facial movements of almost anyone can be synced to audio clips of speech, given a sufficiently large corpus. In June, applied scientists at Samsung detailed an end-to-end model capable of animating the eyebrows, mouth, and eyelashes, and cheeks in a person's headshot. Only a few weeks later, Udacity revealed a system that automatically generates standup lecture videos from audio narration. And two years ago, Carnegie Mellon researchers published a paper describing an approach for transferring the facial movements from one person to another. Building on this and other work, a Microsoft Research team this week laid out a technique they claim improves the fidelity of audio-driven talking heads animations.

And to demonstrate exactly how absurd the problem is, a new AI called Grover, developed by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Washington (and spotted by AI Weirdness), allows you to enter a headline, and it will generate hundreds of words of convincing, fake text that looks like it belongs in the New York Times or on CNN. Luckily for you, the researchers put Grover's fake news generator online for anyone to try. And let me say, from personal experience, that it can create some doozies. For a test, I wrote the headline: "Why Donald Trump Eats 100 Cheeseburgers a Day." This is an article that even I, a journalist, don't know how I'd go about writing.

Impressive AI demonstration could be a useful tool for animators and video game designers, as well as making machines smarter. Remember when Apple had its disastrous launch of Apple Maps in 2012 and real-world geography suddenly received a dose of accidental "creativity" which replaced hospitals with supermarkets and turned bridges into death slides? Well, researchers at Stanford University and Intel have just debuted a new project which creates imaginary street scenes -- except these folks have done it on purpose. What the researchers have developed is an imaginative artificial intelligence that can create photorealistic Google Street View-style images of fake street scenes. These scenes are rendered in highly detailed 1,024 x 2,048 HD resolution.