Roughly a year ago, VentureBeat wrote about progress in the AI and machine learning field toward developing multimodal models, or models that can understand the meaning of text, videos, audio, and images together in context. Back then, the work was in its infancy and faced formidable challenges, not least of which concerned biases amplified in training datasets. But breakthroughs have been made. This year, OpenAI released DALL-E and CLIP, two multimodal models that the research labs claims are a "a step toward systems with [a] deeper understanding of the world." DALL-E, inspired by the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, was trained to generate images from simple text descriptions.

The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by "research and deployment company" OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. Along with Sinatra, they've done what are known as "deepfakes" of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Céline Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you'll get an approximation out the other end.

It's hot tub time!" sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him. With an easy swing, cheery bonhomie, and understated brass and string flourishes, this could just about pass as some long lost Sinatra demo. Even the voice – that rich tone once described as "all legato and regrets" – is eerily familiar, even if it does lurch between keys and, at times, sounds as if it was recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool. The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by "research and deployment company" OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. Along with Sinatra, they've done what are known as "deepfakes" of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Céline Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you'll get an approximation out the other end. "As a piece of engineering, it's really impressive," says Dr Matthew Yee-King, an electronic musician, researcher and academic at Goldsmiths. "They break down an audio signal into a set of lexemes of music – a dictionary if you like – at three different layers of time, giving you a set of core fragments that is sufficient to reconstruct the music that was fed in.

Welcome to Small Humans, an ongoing series at Mashable that looks at how to take care of – and deal with – the kids in your life. Because Dr. Spock is nice and all, but it's 2018 and we have the entire internet to contend with. During my first pregnancy, I craved a mamaRoo rocker, believing it would alleviate by stress as a new mom. Instead, I did things the old-fashioned way, rocking my baby in my arms and using baby wraps for multitasking. Nearly three years later, I'm thinking about it again as we wait on our second child.

There are too many new video games right now. Q4 of 2016 has been so oversaturated with big new releases that some games--like Titanfall 2--that should have been huge hits were barely even noticed by consumers. As a professional game critic who loves to play lots of different genres, I can barely stay above water. I'm behind on almost all the games I hoped to play. If I was a regular consumer who also had to pay for all of these? I'd be skipping games left and right.

Google is starting a research unit in Europe focused solely on machine learning, a major branch of artificial intelligence. The Zurich-based project, announced today (June 16), will be key to the company's ambitions, as it bets big on machine learning to power its next generation of products. These include the digital assistant inside its Allo chat app, its driverless car efforts, and enhancements to its ubiquitous search engine. The new unit, called Google Research, Europe, comes at a time when the search giant is facing serious scrutiny from European authorities. The European commission has the company in its crosshairs, as it faces two antitrust charges, over a search product and Android, which could rack up billions in fines.

'How to be good?' is the pre-eminent question for ethics, although one that philosophers and ethicists seldom address head on. It was the question Plato posed in a slightly different form in The Republic when he said, "We are discussing no trivial subject, but how a man should live." Marcus Aurelius thought he knew the answer. When he unequivocally stated in his Meditations "A King's lot: to do good and be damned." He was himself a king and ruled almost all of the world that was known to him.