It's been a busy month for Midjourney. This week, the generative AI startup released its sophisticated new video tool, V1, which lets users make short animated clips from images they generate or upload. The current version of Midjourney's AI video tool requires an image as a starting point; generating videos using text-only prompts is not supported. Midjourney did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Disney and Universal reiterated statements made by its executives about the lawsuit, including Disney's legal head Horacio Gutierrez alleging that Midjourney's output amounts to "piracy."

Step 1-2: the agent makes a plan via MPC with the initial unaligned world model, resulting in a failed action for mining iron ore. Step 3: by comparing real trajectories with the world model predictions, WALL-E learns a critical rule that if the tool is not proper to the material being mined, the action will fail. Step 4-5: the learned rule helps the world model make accurate predictions for transitions that were predicted mistakenly in MPC. Step 6: the agent accordingly modifies its plan and replaces stone pickaxe with an iron pickaxe toward completing the task. Can large language models (LLMs) directly serve as powerful world models for modelbased agents? While the gaps between the prior knowledge of LLMs and the specified environment's dynamics do exist, our study reveals that the gaps can be bridged by aligning an LLM with its deployed environment and such "world alignment" can be efficiently achieved by rule learning on LLMs. Given the rich prior knowledge of LLMs, only a few additional rules suffice to align LLM predictions with the specified environment dynamics. To this end, we propose a neurosymbolic approach to learn these rules gradient-free through LLMs, by inducing, updating, and pruning rules based on comparisons of agent-explored trajectories and world model predictions. Our embodied LLM agent "WALL-E" is built upon model-predictive control (MPC). By optimizing look-ahead actions based on the precise world model, MPC significantly improves exploration and learning efficiency. Compared to existing LLM agents, WALL-E's reasoning only requires a few principal rules rather than verbose buffered trajectories being included in the LLM input. On open-world challenges in Minecraft and ALFWorld, WALL-E achieves higher success rates than existing methods, with lower costs on replanning time and the number of tokens used for reasoning. In Minecraft, WALL-E exceeds baselines by 15-30% in success rate while costing 8-20 fewer replanning rounds and only 60-80% of tokens. This leads to safety risks agent's action per step is controlled by and suboptimality of generated trajectories.

Enabling robots to understand language instructions and react accordingly to visual perception has been a long-standing goal in the robotics research community. Achieving this goal requires cutting-edge advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics engineering. Thus, this paper mainly investigates the potential of integrating the most recent Large Language Models (LLMs) and existing visual grounding and robotic grasping system to enhance the effectiveness of the human-robot interaction. We introduce the WALL-E (Embodied Robotic WAiter load lifting with Large Language model) as an example of this integration. The system utilizes the LLM of ChatGPT to summarize the preference object of the users as a target instruction via the multi-round interactive dialogue. The target instruction is then forwarded to a visual grounding system for object pose and size estimation, following which the robot grasps the object accordingly. We deploy this LLM-empowered system on the physical robot to provide a more user-friendly interface for the instruction-guided grasping task. The further experimental results on various real-world scenarios demonstrated the feasibility and efficacy of our proposed framework. See the project website at: https://star-uu-wang.github.io/WALL-E/

Eugenia Kuyda defended AI companion bots during an interview with Fox News Digital and argued that dating app Replika is just one of many possible solutions to loneliness. AI, or artificial intelligence, is a branch of computer science that is designed to understand and store human intelligence, mimic human capabilities including the completion of tasks, process human language and perform speech recognition. AI is the leading innovation in technology today and its primary goal is to eliminate tedious tasks and assist in immediately accessing extremely detailed and hyper-focused information and data. AI has the ability to consume and process massive datasets and develop patterns to make predictions for the completion of future tasks. While the interest in AI around the world is growing, the science poses an existential crisis for jobs, companies, whole industries and potentially human existence.

Fox News correspondent Grady Trimble has the latest on fears the technology will spiral out of control on'Special Report.' With the growing presence of artificial intelligence in the everyday lives of people around the world, many tech leaders have spoken out about the controversial and revolutionary new technology. Some of the biggest names in tech have differing opinions on AI and how it will impact society as a whole. Even though forms of AI technology have been around for quite a while, AI has exploded in importance this year, and dominated conversation of late, in part because of how quickly the technology has advanced. What follows are thoughts from the tech industry's biggest players on AI: its potential, capabilities, economic impact, risks, and future.

There Will Be Blood begins nearly in silence. Its stunning opening 20 minutes follow a solitary figure as he struggles through an American wasteland, digging, bleeding, building. In its howling quiet, its violent yet graceful choreography, the film presents an iconic image of the ravages of greed, the inextricable link between the mythology of American exceptionalism and the circuits of capital--a lone tragic hero representing the creation of the American dream as well as its inevitable apocalyptic end. Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 epic begins with one of cinema's greatest depictions of the desire and despair at the heart of American capitalism. But then, so does WALL-E. Nearly everything about the knockout opening of Anderson's masterpiece is also true of Pixar's masterpiece, released in theaters the following year, and, as of this week, the first film from the animation studio to be inducted into the vaunted Criterion Collection.

Science fiction is one of the most popular genres. It's ideal for people who like to dream about what could become real one day. However, not all technological advancements are portrayed as a good thing in sci-fi movies. In multiple cases, artificial intelligence is developed, or it builds malicious intentions over time, and it decides to take over the entire world or at least part of it. It often does this even if it means hurting those who built it in the first place -- the humans.

When we think about the future of our world and what exactly that looks like, it's easy to focus on the shiny objects and technology that make our lives easier: flying cars, 3D printers, digital currencies and automated everything. In the opening scene of the animated film WALL-E – which takes place in the year 2805 – a song from "Hello, Dolly!" happily plays in the background, starkly contrasting the glimpse we get of our future planet Earth: an abandoned wasteland with heaping piles of trash around every corner. Humans had all evacuated Earth by this point and were living in a spaceship, where futuristic technology and automation left them overweight, lazy and completely oblivious to their surroundings. Machines do everything for them, from the hoverchairs that carry them around, to the robots that prepare their food. Glued to their screens all day, which have taken control of their lives and decisions, humans exhibit lazy behaviors like video chatting the person physically next to them.

The Benthic Rover II is the size of a compact car, although it rocks fat treads, making it more like a scientific tank. That, along with the two googly-eye-like flotation devices on its front, gives it a sort of WALL-E vibe. The robot's mission: To prowl the squishy terrain in search of clues as to how the deep ocean processes carbon. That mission begins with a wild ride, 180 miles off the coast of Southern California. Completely untethered, the robot free falls for two and a half hours, landing on the abyssal plains--great stretches of what you might generously call muck.

From helpful companions to murderous automatons, these are the best movie robots in sci-fi. Robots are everywhere these days. Most people will find them in Boston Dynamics YouTube videos, on the road as self-driving cars or even in homes as tiny autonomous vacuum cleaners. And of course, you can find plenty of robots on the big screen too. Even before writer Karel Capek introduced the term'robot' in his 1920 science-fiction play R.U.R., androids and automatons featured in films as early as 1907.