A collateral beneficiary of the feverish pace of generative artificial intelligence development appears to be the humanoid robot. A Norwegian company called 1X Technologies, formerly Halodi Robotics, which describes itself as a manufacturer and inventor of androids, recently attracted $23.5 million in a round of funding led by the OpenAI Startup Fund -- the same OpenAI that got the AI snowball rolling with its ChatGPT generative AI bot. "1X is at the forefront of augmenting labor through the use of safe, advanced technologies in robotics," Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's COO and manager of the OpenAI Startup Fund, said in a statement. "The OpenAI Startup Fund believes in the approach and impact that 1X can have on the future of work." With the funds, 1X said it intends to accelerate the development of its bipedal android model NEO and expand manufacturing of its first commercially available wheel-based android, EVE, in Norway and North America.

As if defenders of software supply chains didn't have enough attack vectors to worry about, they now have a new one: machine learning models. ML models are at the heart of technologies such as facial recognition and chatbots. Like open-source software repositories, the models are often downloaded and shared by developers and data scientists, so a compromised model could have a crushing impact on many organizations simultaneously. Researchers at HiddenLayer, a machine language security company, revealed in a blog on Tuesday how an attacker could use a popular ML model to deploy ransomware. The method described by the researchers is similar to how hackers use steganography to hide malicious payloads in images.

Nostalgia website MyHeritage has launched a new service that allows you to create lifelike animations of faces in still photos. The AI-powered service called Deep Nostalgia, launched last week, is free to try and is remarkably accurate in depicting how a person would look if captured on video. Their eyes blink, their head moves and their mouth forms a smile. "You'll have a'wow moment' when you see a treasured family photo come to life with Deep Nostalgia," Gilad Japhet, founder and CEO of MyHeritage, said in a statement. "Seeing our beloved ancestors' faces come to life in a video simulation lets us imagine how they might have been in reality, and provides a profound new way of connecting to our family history," he added.

Artificial intelligence has made noticeable changes to technologies around the world. Perhaps AI's most notable potential, however, is its role in the supply chain industry. AI has changed the supply chain process from reactive to proactive, which creates a larger change in how data-driven processes will operate in the future. The true role of AI in the supply chain is to enhance and augment human intelligence and decision making. That is much different than what some people view as making human intelligence obsolete, according to experts at Supplyframe.

Google this week debuted a slew of new capabilities for its artificial intelligence software, Google Assistant, at CES in Las Vegas. One of the headliners was a preview of Google Assistant Connect. The new platform lets device manufacturers incorporate Google Assistant into their products easily and cost-effectively. Connect uses Google's existing smart home platform to expand to new device types, while making device setup and discovery easy for consumers. A manufacturer could create a continuous e-ink display projecting weather or calendar information, for example, while using Connect to drive content from a linked smart speaker.

Artificial intelligence dominated CES 2018 in a big way on Monday with major announcements on connected car advances and home system technologies. Google all but declared war on Amazon with its Google Assistant voice technology making its presence known at nearly every turn on the showroom floor. LG rolled out a new lineup of high-end AI OLED and Super UHD televisions infused with its ThinQ AI technology and Alpha 9 technology, combining cinema-quality home entertainment with the ability to voice control the entire home. The ThinQ technology, which integrates LG's WebOS smart TV platform with Google Assistant, will allow customers to use hundreds of voice commands to search for specific content, control various functions on the television, and control home appliances. LG introduced a total of nine new 4K AI OLED televisions, ranging from 55 to 77 inches, and seven new AI UHD televisions ranging from 55 to 75 inches.

Microsoft on Wednesday announced new artificial intelligence features and functionality for several of its flagship products and services, including Office 365, Cortana and Bing, at an event in San Francisco. Building on the progress the company has made in integrating AI over the past year, the new enhancements are designed to help users perform increasingly complex and complicated tasks. "AI has come a long way in the ability to find information, but making sense of that information is the real challenge," said Kristina Behr, a partner design and planning program manager with Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research group. One of the advances, machine reading comprehension, will improve an AI-based system's understanding of context -- for example, recognizing that one's cousin is a family member. Bing users will get more personalized answers, Microsoft said, such as restaurant recommendations based on travel destinations, or a greater variety of answers to offer different perspectives on a topic.

Qualcomm on Wednesday announced the Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform, a System on a Chip built for immersive multimedia experiences including extended reality (XR), on-device artificial intelligence and high-speed connectivity. The SoC will power next-generation Android flagship smartphones and Windows 10 notebooks based on ARM architecture. Xiaomi reportedly will use it in its forthcoming Mi 7 flagship, to be released next year. The SoC incorporates Qualcomm's Spectra 280 image signal processor (ISP), its Adreno 630 visual processing subsystem, and the company's secure processing unit (SPU), which enables improved biometrics security and user or application data key management. The 845 supports Google's TensorFlow and Tensorflow Lite, and Facebook's Caffe/Caffe2 frameworks, as well as the new Open Neural Network Exchange.

The next version of Microsoft's HoloLens may be better at navigating reality than the current version of the mixed-reality headset, thanks to a new coprocessor the company announced Sunday. The second version of HoloLens' custom multiprocessor -- called a "holographic processing unit," or HPU -- will incorporate artificial intelligence technology, Harry Shum, executive vice president of the Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, said at the annual CVPR computer vision event. The new HPU will enable HoloLens to do the kind of deep learning processing that typically is done only in the cloud. HoloLens is designed to be a self-contained holographic computer -- battery, sensors and display are contained in the headset. The HPU allows the headset to negotiate reality without experience-killing latency.

Avnet last week unveiled a beta version of Ask Avnet, an automated virtual assistant that combines artificial intelligence with on-demand access to industry experts. Ask Avnet targets "engineers, designers, hobbyists, makers and purchasing specialists across the electronics supply chain -- which includes the product manufacturing chain," said Kevin Yapp, senior vice president for digital transformation at Avnet. Ask Avnet gathers information from the company's Web-based ecosystem -- including Avnet.com, element14.com Ask Avnet leverages AI to help anticipate a user's next move and provide the best answer, rather than listing all possible answers. Ask Avnet "aims to shorten the amount of time it takes for Avnet customers to access information," Yapp told TechNewsWorld.