Google's AI is now even smarter, and more versatile. Gemini Live is the more conversational, natural language way of interacting with the Google Gemini AI bot using your voice. The idea is you chat with it like you would chat with a friend, interruptions and all, even if the actual answers are the same as you'd get from typing your queries into Gemini as normal. Now, about a year and a half after its debut, Gemini Live has been given what Google is describing as its "biggest update ever." The update makes the Gemini Live mode even more natural and even more conversational than before, with a better understanding of tone, nuance, pronunciation, and rhythm.

Marc Raibert, the founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics, gave the world a menagerie of two- and four-legged machines capable of jaw-dropping parkour, infectious dance routines, and industrious shelf stacking. Raibert is now looking to lead a revolution in robot intelligence as well as acrobatics. And he says that recent advances in machine learning have accelerated his robots' ability to learn how to perform difficult moves without human help. "The hope is that we'll be able to produce lots of behavior without having to handcraft everything that robots do," Raibert told me recently. Boston Dynamics might have pioneered legged robots, but it's now part of a crowded pack of companies offering robot dogs and humanoids.

Black Friday is upon us once again, and that means great deals on all the gear you've been eyeing that seemed just a bit too pricey. Below we've rounded up our favorite Black Friday Best Buy deals, bringing the best of the store into your living room. Now is the time to strike, so whether you're after a sweet new screen, a smarter security camera, or any number of cool gadgets with a temptingly slashed price tag, you'll find the perfect holiday shopping fare below. Get best-in-class reporting that's too important to ignore for just 2.50 1 per month for 1 year. Includes unlimited digital access and exclusive subscriber-only content.

Nintendo, after nearly four decades, is taking The Legend of Zelda somewhere new. With Echoes of Wisdom, the video game company not only builds on the experimentation of its last Switch release, Tears of the Kingdom--it also does something no other Zelda title has done before: Give the princess power that was previously afforded to only Link. "They gave Zelda a sword" has been the refrain for Echoes of Wisdom since it was announced back in June. But that isn't the entirety of what makes the game unique. Rather, it's part of a top-down 2D series for the franchise, one with a different look and feel than Tears of the Kingdom that still utilizes the freedoms that players got with previous games--like the ability to create everything from Korok prisons to giant mechs.

Artificial intelligence has changed the way science is done by allowing researchers to analyze the massive amounts of data modern scientific instruments generate. It can find a needle in a million haystacks of information and, using deep learning, it can learn from the data itself. AI is accelerating advances in gene hunting, medicine, drug design and the creation of organic compounds. Deep learning uses algorithms, often neural networks that are trained on large amounts of data, to extract information from new data. It is very different from traditional computing with its step-by-step instructions.

David Ferrucci, the man who built IBM's Jeopardy-playing machine, Watson, is explaining a children's story to his new creation. In the tale, Fernando and Zoey buy some plants. Fernando places his plant on a windowsill while Zoey tucks hers away in a darkened room. After a few days, Fernando's plant is green and healthy but the leaves of Zoey's have browned. She moves her plant to the windowsill, and it flourishes.

Some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, including two godfathers of the machine learning boom, are betting that clever algorithms are about to transform the abilities of industrial robots. Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, who shared this year's Turing Prize with Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning, are among the AI luminaries who have invested in Covariant.ai, The company, emerging from stealth Wednesday, announced the first commercial installations of its AI-equipped robots: picking boxes and bags of products for a German electronics retailer called Obeta. Picking up everyday boxes and plastic packages might sound trivial, and it is for most humans. Workers in factories and warehouses are frequently given new objects to handle, or a batch of different items mixed together, but it's deceptively difficult for a machine to quickly work out how to grab the next doodad.

Some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, including two godfathers of the machine learning boom, are betting that clever algorithms are about to transform the abilities of industrial robots. Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, who shared this year's Turing Prize with Yoshua Bengio for their work on deep learning, are among the AI luminaries who have invested in Covariant.ai, The company, emerging from stealth Wednesday, announced the first commercial installations of its AI-equipped robots: picking boxes and bags of products for a German electronics retailer called Obeta. Picking up everyday boxes and plastic packages might sound trivial, and it is for most humans. Workers in factories and warehouses are frequently given new objects to handle, or a batch of different items mixed together, but it's deceptively difficult for a machine to quickly work out how to grab the next doodad.

The original GAN paper by Goodfellow et al did not work for discrete data because of the inability to the backproagate gradient to the generator. Have there been any recent developments in this directions since, allowing the adversarial idea to be implemented for discrete data? And still take advantage of the automatic differentiation (backpropagation) facilities of libraries like PyTorch / Tensorflow?

BERT, by contrast, considers the context before and after a word all at once, making it bidirectional. It does this using a technique known as "masking." In a given passage of text, BERT randomly hides 15% of the words and then tries to predict them from the remaining ones. This allows it to make more accurate predictions because it has twice as many cues to work from. In the sentence "The man went to the ___ to buy milk," for example, both the beginning and the end of the sentence give hints at the missing word. The ___ is a place you can go and a place you can buy milk.