When he got his first glimpse of a movie studio, Orson Welles excitedly proclaimed it "the biggest electric train set any boy ever had." But with a reported budget of more than 300 million, Joe and Anthony Russo's The Electric State makes Welles' train set look like a busted caboose. The most expensive movie in Netflix's history, it's also among the costliest of all time, joining a list that includes the brothers' own Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. If the Russos are the most profligate creators in history--their Amazon series Citadel is also one of the most expensive TV shows ever made--they're among the most successful too. And yet for all the money they're making, and all that they're allowed to spend, they don't seem to be enjoying themselves very much.

Harrison Ford isn't impressed by or afraid of artificial intelligence. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, the "Captain America: Brave New World" star was asked if he was planning on securing control of his likeness from studios, and he brushed off the concern. "You don't need artificial intelligence to steal my soul. You can already do it for nickels and dimes with good ideas and talent," he told the outlet. Ford was referring to the 2024 video game "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle," with actor Troy Baker, who provided the voice and motion-capture performance for the character.

The future of search is the rise of intelligent data and documents. Way back in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, then a young English software developer working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, came up with an intriguing way of combining a communication protocol for retrieving content (HTTP) with a descriptive language for embedding such links into documents (HTML). Shortly thereafter, as more and more people began to create content on these new HTTP servers, it became necessary to be able to provide some kind of mechanism to find this content. Simple lists of content links worked fine when you were dealing with a few hundred documents over a few dozen nodes, but the need to create a specialized index as the web grew led to the first automation of catalogs, and by extension led to the switch from statically retrieved content to dynamically generated content. In many respects, search was the first true application built on top of the nascent World Wide Web, and it is still one of the most fundamental.

Since the superhero genre is rooted in science fiction, the Marvel Cinematic Universe features a lot of futuristic technology. One type of tech that has appeared in almost every MCU project and has had a large impact on the franchise is Artificial Intelligence. There are a bunch of different AI systems featured in the MCU that serve various purposes, each with its own distinct personality. Much like the main characters, no two AIs are exactly the same, even if they were created by the same person which usually happens to be Tony Stark. Wizey is a smart home system created by Tina Minoru and her tech company, Wizard, on Marvel's Runaways. The system is installed in the Minoru household and runs security as well as gives them updates on things like news and weather.

A deepfake video featuring Chris Evans as Homelander from Amazon's The Boys recently appeared on Reddit. The 13-second clip from Redditor d4danger includes multiple shots from The Boys, but with Chris Evans, who played Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as Antony Starr's Homelander. The irony of the MCU's Nazi-fighting Captain America's face on the body of Homelander -- who was in a relationship with an actual Nazi in Season 2 of The Boys -- was not lost on viewers. A deepfake video is a popular trend in which the likeness of one person replaces another with exacting detail. There have been several recent deepfakes involving cinematic superheroes, including one with Jon Krasinski taking Evans' place as Captain America, while another swaps Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman with Lynda Carter's version from the 1970s.

MIT researchers successfully create chip with tens of thousand of synthetic brain synapses that could help revolutionize handheld computing. In a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, MIT engineers describe what they're calling a'brain-on-a-chip' which is smaller than a piece of confetti and uses what are known as'memristors' - a portmanteau of'memory'v and'transistors' - which mimic information-transmitting synapses found in the brain. Researchers say the chip, which is made out of alloys of silver and copper, and silicon and is only one square millimeter in size was able to'remember' images and recreate them. Pictures is a close-up view of the neuromorphic'brain-on-a-chip' that uses tens of thousands of memristors, or'memory transistors' The chip was able to recreate pictures of Captain America's shield from'memory' and using far fewer resources than traditional silicon-based chips with normal transistors In one example, the chip was able to reproduce an image of Captain America's shield while in another demonstration it replicated an image of MIT's Killian Court. Both of the reproductions worked more reliably than existing designs for memristors, they say.

You don't need to wait until the summer premiere of Crazy Rich Asians to see Fresh Off the Boat's Constance Wu headline a big-budget movie. Here she is starring in the live-action Ghost in the Shell, and here she is in Luc Besson's Lucy, and here she is as Black Widow in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Yes, those are all films that starred Scarlett Johansson, but not in the corner of the web containing the new social media campaign #SeeAsAmStar, where Wu enjoys a retconned blockbuster career. Deepfakes are mostly associated with scarily realistic pornography featuring the faces of famous actresses superimposed onto the bodies of adult performers. The campaign, which appeared last week, employs the deepfake toolkit for a nobler purpose: the fight for better representation of minorities in pop culture.

Task-oriented dialog systems have been applied in various tasks, such as automated personal assistants, customer service providers and tutors. These systems work well when users have clear and explicit intentions that are well-aligned to the systems' capabilities. However, they fail if users intentions are not explicit. To address this shortcoming, we propose a framework to interleave non-task content (i.e. everyday social conversation) into task conversations. When the task content fails, the system can still keep the user engaged with the non-task content. We trained a policy using reinforcement learning algorithms to promote long-turn conversation coherence and consistency, so that the system can have smooth transitions between task and non-task content. To test the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we developed a movie promotion dialog system. Experiments with human users indicate that a system that interleaves social and task content achieves a better task success rate and is also rated as more engaging compared to a pure task-oriented system.

In 1948 a young man by the name of Alan Turing penned a report entitled "Intelligent Machinery." The opening sentence "I propose to investigate the question as to whether it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behavior" (1) had instantly set the stage for what we today would call AI, or Artificial Intelligence. And ever since that time the world has looked towards the future with glossy stares and dreams of such a day. Turing, in 1935, was the pioneering mind behind the modern computer, though most people recognize the name based on the human computer test called the Turing Test. The test was introduced by Alan in a 1950 paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and his goal was to "test if a machine's ability could exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human."

Avengers: Age of Ultron is soft science fiction and happy to be so. Between the god of thunder flying around in a cape, Scarlet Witch's magical mind control and telekinesis powers, and the giant green rage monster who can only be soothed by the touch of a beautiful woman, this is a fun summer action blockbuster from beginning to end. With that said, Marvel has not shied away from using fun summer action blockbusters as a means to explore ethical questions that society is already dealing with – or those that it might have to face in the future. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo have said that during the development of Captain America: The Winter Soldier they heard about President Barack Obama's "kill list" of known terrorists, and it highlighted for them just how morally grey issues of security and freedom had become. "Cap is a representative of the Greatest Generation. The war, the conflict they were involved in, was very black and white,'" Joe Russo explained.