Barbados’ plans to claim sovereignty over digital land remain inscrutable.
This morning, my colleague Andrew Thurman put out a piece for this website about the government of Barbados, and its plans to establish a so-called “metaverse embassy.”
The metaverse is a kind of multiplayer social space in virtual reality; think Second Life or Playstation Home – a place where virtual people live virtual lives, entirely on a screen. Proponents say it’s like a copy of the real world, only better, since users don’t have to abide by the laws of physics. For skeptics, it’s cringey at best and dystopian at worst: a comprehensive new framework for digital surveillance and intrusive advertising. Read More
Daily Archives: November 18, 2021
Why You Absolutely Must Invest In The Metaverse
Since Mark Zuckerberg announced on October 28 that Facebook would now be known as the Meta Platform, or simply Meta, its share price has risen by more than 9%, which is more than double what the Nasdaq NDAQ -1% has done.
If you don’t know what the Metaverse is – think of it as a virtual world. There are many types of virtual worlds. Facebook wants to be the biggest one. Say what you will about Facebook’s foray into the metaverse (they’ll probably censor people in these new parallel universes), Zuckerberg’s move into this space shows that within the Big Tech juggernauts, this guy is ahead of the curve. Read More
Metaverse similar to rise of internet: Matthew Ball
The metaverse is the next venue for body dysmorphia online
Some people are excited to see realistic avatars that look like them. Others worry it might make body image issues even worse.
In Facebook’s vision of the metaverse, we will all interact in a mashup of the digital and physical worlds. Digital representations of ourselves will eat, talk, date, shop, and more. That’s the picture Mark Zuckerberg painted as he rebranded his company Meta a couple of weeks ago.
…If avatars really are on their way, then we’ll need to face some tough questions about how we present ourselves to others. How might these virtual versions of ourselves change the way we feel about our bodies, for better or worse? Read More
AI’s Smarts Now Come With a Big Price Tag
As language models get more complex, they also get more expensive to create and run. Some companies are locked out.
Calvin Qi, who works at a search startup called Glean, would love to use the latest artificial intelligence algorithms to improve his company’s products.
Glean provides tools for searching through applications like Gmail, Slack, and Salesforce. Qi says new AI techniques for parsing language would help Glean’s customers unearth the right file or conversation a lot faster.
But training such a cutting-edge AI algorithm costs several million dollars. So Glean uses smaller, less capable AI models that can’t extract as much meaning from text. Read More
Internet-Augmented Dialogue Generation
The largest store of continually updating knowledge on our planet can be accessed via internet search. In this work we study giving access to this information to conversational agents. Large language models, even though they store an impressive amount of knowledge within their weights, are known to hallucinate facts when generating dialogue (Shuster et al., 2021); moreover, those facts are frozen in time at the point of model training. In contrast, we propose an approach that learns to generate an internet search query based on the context, and then conditions on the search results to finally generate a response, a method that can employ up-to-the-minute relevant information. We train and evaluate such models on a newly collected dataset of human-human conversations whereby one of the speakers is given access to internet search during knowledge driven discussions in order to ground their responses. We find that search-query based ac cess of the internet in conversation provides superior performance compared to existing approaches that either use no augmentation or FAISS-based retrieval (Lewis et al., 2020) Read More
Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Ongoing
In cooperation with IARPA, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is currently running three challenges related to processing of unconstrained in-the-wild face images. The Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) is an ongoing evaluation of face recognition algorithms applied to large image databases sequestered at NIST. Algorithms may be submitted to NIST at any time, and results will be posted when ready, usually within two weeks. Homepage
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