In some ways, Gigi is like any other young social media influencer. With perfect hair and makeup, she logs on and talks to her fans. She shares clips: eating, doing skin care, putting on lipstick. She even has a cute baby who appears in some videos. But after a few seconds, something may seem a little off.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which starts today in Las Vegas, is an odd beast. It is the biggest technology event of the year, a sprawling conference that spills over multiple casinos and convention centres to dominate a city that is hard to overshadow. But for the better part of a decade it has been an afterthought for some of the world's biggest businesses, led by Apple realising that if you can get the press to come to you, you don't need to risk burying your product launches under hundreds of competing newslines. The result is that CES is no longer where you see the future, but where you learn how that future will get copied into a thousand cheap plastic knockoffs. There are, of course, exceptions.

Systems of competing agents can often be modeled as games. Assuming rationality, the most likely outcomes are given by an equilibrium (e.g. a Nash equilibrium). In many practical settings, games are influenced by context, i.e. additional data beyond the control of any agent (e.g. weather for traffic and fiscal policy for market economies). Often the exact game mechanics are unknown, yet vast amounts of historical data consisting of (context, equilibrium) pairs are available, raising the possibility of learning a solver which predicts the equilibria given only the context. We introduce Nash Fixed Point Networks (N-FPNs), a class of neural networks that naturally output equilibria. Crucially, N- FPNs employ a constraint decoupling scheme to handle complicated agent action sets while avoiding expensive projections. Empirically, we find N-FPNs are compatible with the recently developed Jacobian-Free Backpropagation technique for training implicit networks, making them significantly faster and easier to train than prior models. Our experiments show N-FPNs are capable of scaling to problems orders of magnitude larger than existing learned game solvers.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a key approach for distributed machine learning, enhancing online personalization while ensuring user data privacy. Instead of sending private data to a central server as in traditional approaches, FL decentralizes computations: devices train locally and share updates with a global server. A primary challenge in this setting is achieving fast and accurate model training--vital for recommendation systems where delays can compromise user engagement. This paper introduces FedFNN, an algorithm that accelerates decentralized model training. In FL, only a subset of users are involved in each training epoch. FedFNN employs supervised learning to predict weight updates from unsampled users, using updates from the sampled set. Our evaluations, using real and synthetic data, show: (i) FedFNN achieves training speeds 5x faster than leading methods, maintaining or improving accuracy; (ii) the algorithm's performance is consistent regardless of client cluster variations; (iii) FedFNN outperforms other methods in scenarios with limited client availability, converging more quickly.

This morning, the New York Times' Kevin Roose called what has been a big week for generative AI tools a "coming out" party [subscription required]. He detailed an actual party, on Monday night, which celebrated a massive funding round for Stability AI, the startup behind Stable Diffusion, the uber-popular image-generating algorithm that was only launched publicly two months ago. But this week was chock-full of other significant news around generative AI (which refers to using unsupervised learning algorithms to learn from existing text, audio or images and create new content -- and now includes popular tools including GPT-3, DALL-E 2 and Imagen as well as nascent text-to-video options from OpenAI and Google). There was the news that Microsoft would add DALL-E to its Office suite and to Azure AI, while Adobe was planning to add generative AI tools to Photoshop and also committed to transparency in its use of generative AI. Then, besides Stable Diffusion's news, content generator Jasper also announced a massive funding round of $125 million, solidifying VC interest in the generative AI space.

It's been just a few weeks since OpenAI began allowing customers to commercially use images created by DALL-E 2, its remarkably powerful AI text-to-image system. But in spite of the current technical limitations and lack of volume licensing, not to mention API, some pioneers say they're already testing the system for various business use cases -- awaiting the day when DALL-E 2 becomes stable enough to deploy into production. Stitch Fix, the online service that uses recommendation algorithms to personalize apparel, says it has experimented with DALL-2 to visualize its products based on specific characteristics like color, fabric and style. For example, if a Stitch Fix customer asked for a "high-rise, red, stretchy, skinny jean" during the pilot, DALL-E 2 was tapped to generate images of that item, which a stylist could use to match with a similar product in Stitch Fix's inventory. "DALL-E 2 helps us surface the most informative characteristics of a product in a visual way, ultimately helping stylists find the perfect item that matches what a client has requested in their written feedback," a spokesperson told TechCrunch via email.

Christmas Spirit Foundation executive director Rick Dungey on bringing cheer to military families and how viewers can help. The top U.S. commander for the Middle East said Thursday that the United States will keep the current 2,500 troops in Iraq for the foreseeable future, and he warned that he expects increasing attacks on U.S. and Iraqi personnel by Iranian-backed militias determined to get American forces out. Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie said in an interview with The Associated Press at the Pentagon that despite the shift by U.S. forces to a non-combat role in Iraq, they will still provide air support and other military aid for Iraq's fight against the Islamic State. Noting that Iranian-backed militias want all Western forces out of Iraq, he said an ongoing uptick in violence may continue through December. Gen. McKenzie, commander of the United States Central Command, testifies before the House Armed Services Committee on the conclusion of military operations in Afghanistan and plans for future counterterrorism operations on Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

The Air Force on Tuesday said Lt. Gen. Sami Said will lead a review of the investigation into the Kabul Aug. 29 drone strike that was intended for ISIS-K militants but actually killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. "The secretary of the Air Force has directed Lt. Gen. Sam Said, the Department of the Air Force inspector general, to investigate the facts and circumstances relating to the civilian casualty event on Aug. 29, 2021, in Kabul, Afghanistan," the Air Force said in a statement. The announcement comes one day after Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a senior-level review of the investigation that detailed the day's events. The investigation conducted by the U.S. Central Command found that the military mistakenly identified a white Toyota Corolla, believed to be carrying at least one Islamic State fighter, and instead was carrying a longtime Afghan employee at a U.S. humanitarian organization. The vehicle in question had been tracked for eight hours after initially being spotted in an Islamic State compound in Kabul.

Fox News anchor Bret Baier offers analysis on that and other breaking news stories, on'Your World'. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is calling the U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan that mistakenly killed seven children "unacceptable." The comments by Sanders, the progressive champion and runner up to now-President Biden in the race for the 2020 Democratic nomination, comes in the wake of an acknowledgment by the Pentagon that the attack was a "tragic mistake." At the time of the August 29 attack, the Pentagon said the strike had targeted an Islamic State suicide bomber amid the U.S. led evacuation of Americans and Afghan allies at Kabul's international airport, during the final days of the U.S. withdrawal from the warn torn Central Asian nation. The head of U.S. Central Command, Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie, the head of the U.S. Central Command, said that at the time he was confident the drone strike took out averted an imminent threat to U.S. forces at the airport. But reports of civilian causalities quickly emerged and U.S. military leaders later concluded that the strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. President Biden took major hits this week, from the Pentagon confirming that a "tragic mistake" led to 10 civilians in Afghanistan dying in a drone strike, to the Food and Drug Administration rejecting his vaccine booster proposal, with much of the news breaking as the president headed to the beach for vacation. "So the U.S. drone strike did NOT kill any ISIS-K but did kill 10 innocent civilians, including 7 children. The Biden administration is a sad, tragic mess and an utter embarrassment on the world stage!,"