The TV adaptation of the video game Twisted Metal is coming back for a second season on July 31. Just like the first season, this won't be a weekly release. All of the episodes will be available on Peacock on that date. The first season was surprisingly decent, and occasionally hilarious. One thing we didn't see in that batch of episodes, however, was the titular tournament.

Men who have virtual "wives" and neurodiverse people using chatbots to help them navigate relationships are among a growing range of ways in which artificial intelligence is transforming human connection and intimacy. Dozens of readers shared their experiences of using personified AI chatbot apps, engineered to simulate human-like interactions by adaptive learning and personalised responses, in response to a Guardian callout. Many respondents said they used chatbots to help them manage different aspects of their lives, from improving their mental and physical health to advice about existing romantic relationships and experimenting with erotic role play. They can spend between several hours a week to a couple of hours a day interacting with the apps. Worldwide, more than 100 million people use personified chatbots, which include Replika, marketed as "the AI companion who cares" and Nomi, which claims users can "build a meaningful friendship, develop a passionate relationship, or learn from an insightful mentor".

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Your favorite streaming app may soon no longer be just a "streaming app" per se but an overall entertainment app that functions as a cross-medium platform of its own--and a necessity on both your smartphone and smart TV. On Monday, Peacock, the NBCUniversal service that catapulted off a successful 2024 to become one of the most popular streamers in the world, rolled out a bunch of new goodies in its latest mobile update, part of the testing phase for a gradual expansion of platform features. Subscribers will now have access to a significant array of pilot programs: new engines for discovery and for personalized recommendations, bonus clips for beloved shows, and even NBC-themed "mini-games" that will be updated daily to adapt to the latest broadcasts in the sports and reality-TV schedules. "After presenting the Paris Olympics on Peacock and testing interactive features like'Choose Your Reality' for shows like Real Housewives, we've learned that fans want to have options in their viewing experience and dive deeper into their favorite content," John Jelley, senior vice president of product and user experience at Peacock, told me. He added that the platform is "piloting new features" to allow users to interact with sports and TV shows "so they can indulge their obsessions in a way that's fun, super simple, and all in one place."

Comcast is spinning out Rotten Tomatoes, Fandango and a bunch of NBCUniversal (NBCU) cable networks into a separate company. That means USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and Golf Channel will soon have a new home. Comcast is hanging onto other NBCU operations, namely NBC, Peacock, film and TV studios, Telemundo and theme parks. Bravo is also sticking around to help keep feeding Peacock's ever-hungry reality TV maw. Comcast says the new entity will be a "tax-free spin-off" and the step is "expected to be accretive to revenue growth at Comcast and approximately neutral to Comcast's leverage position."

Cloud computing has high applicability as an Internet based service that relies on sharing computing resources. Cloud computing provides services that are Infrastructure based, Platform based and Software based. The popularity of this technology is due to its superb performance, high level of computing ability, low cost of services, scalability, availability and flexibility. The obtainability and openness of data in cloud environment make it vulnerable to the world of cyber-attacks. To detect the attacks Intrusion Detection System is used, that can identify the attacks and ensure information security. Such a coherent and proficient Intrusion Detection System is proposed in this paper to achieve higher certainty levels regarding safety in cloud environment. In this paper, the mating behavior of peafowl is incorporated into an optimization algorithm which in turn is used as a feature selection algorithm. The algorithm is used to reduce the huge size of cloud data so that the IDS can work efficiently on the cloud to detect intrusions. The proposed model has been experimented with NSL-KDD dataset as well as Kyoto dataset and have proved to be a better as well as an efficient IDS.

This study explores the capabilities of multimodal large language models (LLMs) in handling challenging multistep tasks that integrate language and vision, focusing on model steerability, composability, and the application of long-term memory and context understanding. The problem addressed is the LLM's ability (Nov 2023 GPT-4 Vision Preview) to manage tasks that require synthesizing visual and textual information, especially where stepwise instructions and sequential logic are paramount. The research presents a series of 14 creatively and constructively diverse tasks, ranging from AI Lego Designing to AI Satellite Image Analysis, designed to test the limits of current LLMs in contexts that previously proved difficult without extensive memory and contextual understanding. Key findings from evaluating 800 guided dialogs include notable disparities in task completion difficulty. For instance, 'Image to Ingredient AI Bartender' (Low difficulty) contrasted sharply with 'AI Game Self-Player' (High difficulty), highlighting the LLM's varying proficiency in processing complex visual data and generating coherent instructions. Tasks such as 'AI Genetic Programmer' and 'AI Negotiator' showed high completion difficulty, emphasizing challenges in maintaining context over multiple steps. The results underscore the importance of developing LLMs that combine long-term memory and contextual awareness to mimic human-like thought processes in complex problem-solving scenarios.

Smartphone apps that identify plants from photographs can be as little as 4 per cent accurate, which could put people foraging for food at risk and also lead to endangered plants being mislabelled as weeds and eradicated. Julie Peacock at the University of Leeds, UK, and her colleagues evaluated six of the most popular apps: Google Lens, iNaturalist, Leaf Snap, Pl@ntNet, Plant Snap and Seek. They attempted to identify 38 species of plant in their natural habitat, at four locations in Ireland, with each app. The team found that some apps scored extremely poorly, while even the best fell short of 90 per cent accuracy. "There are lots of reasons why it's important that either the apps are accurate, or people are aware that these apps are a guide but definitely not perfect," says Peacock.

NBCUniversal owns and operates over 20 different businesses across 30 countries including a valuable portfolio of news and entertainment television networks, a premier motion picture company, significant television production operations, a leading television stations group, world-renowned theme parks and a premium ad-supported streaming service. Here you can be your authentic self. As a company uniquely positioned to educate, entertain and empower through our platforms, Comcast NBCUniversal stands for including everyone. We strive to foster a diverse and inclusive culture where our employees feel supported, embraced and heard. We believe that our workforce should represent the communities we live in, so that together, we can continue to create and deliver content that reflects the current and ever-changing face of the world.

David Arquette and Elizabeth Marvel are gearing up to face-off against Artificial Intelligence in Peacock's sci-fi series, Mrs. Davis. The duo are the newest names added to the call sheet alongside series stars Betty Gilpin and Jake McDorman, as well as a featured cast including Andy McQueen, Ben Chaplin, and Margo Martindale. The project hails from Tara Hernandez (The Big Bang Theory) and Damon Lindelof (HBO's Watchmen, The Leftovers) and has been packing on the creative power by tapping Alethea Jones (Rise of the Pink Ladies, Evil) to serve as a director for several episodes. Jones will be joined in her directorial talents by the previously announced Emmy-award winner, Owen Harris, who is best known for his eye behind the critically acclaimed Black Mirror episode "San Junipero." Both will also executive produce.

Digital health experts from the UK will join the debate on how healthcare can evolve beyond Covid-19. As the world struggles to recover from the outfall of Covid-19, the role of digital health has come under the spotlight. Healthcare experts from the UK will be among the European leaders to discuss this new paradigm at the virtual HIMSS21 & Health 2.0 European Health Conference, on June 7-9 2021. The UK is known for its world-leading expertise in genomics. Professor Sharon Peacock, executive director and chair of the Covid-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium will contribute her vast knowledge and experience to the opening keynote session on creating a roadmap out of the coronavirus crisis.