One of the marvels of human cognition is our ability to simultaneously process information from different sensorial inputs. In most cognitive tasks, humans natively combine information in different form such as audio, language or speech. Recreating this ability has been one of the traditional goals of machine learning(ML). However, the current generation of ML models are dominated by supervised techniques that specialized on a single task in a specific domain. This challenge is very well known and there are several companies advancing the agenda in multi-modal ML. Among those, Meta(Facebook) AI Research(FAIR) have been pioneering several techniques that can work with diverse data inputs such as text, images, vide or audio. Recently, FAIR published a blog post summarizing some of their top contributions to the multi-modal deep learning field.

FAIR contributions to multi-modal deep learning methods are part of a more ambitious plan to develop intelligent systems that resemble the way humans learn. From the multi-modal techniques created by the FAIR team, there are four that lay down the path to more immersive, interactive and intelligent models. Read More

Is this the hype peak of the metaverse? Or are we seeing something emerge that’s been evolving for a long time?

It was about as meta as it gets. After donning VR headsets, Stanford University Professor Jeremy Bailenson and I “stood” in front of his students in a virtual classroom, our avatars watching theirs discuss the nature of virtual existence. Except his students weren’t “there.” The discussion was a recording. The professor and I stood as living avatars among ghosts.

Bailenson, who founded Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, then paused the recording and walked through the class. His avatar gliding, he explained how these playbacks will produce insights into what social life will mean in the “metaverse.” Of course, he doesn’t know what he’ll discover, just like the many companies that are now busily touting this much hyped but as-yet-unformed next evolution of the internet. Read More

#metaverse

The metaverse is the next generation of the internet built on the core principles of immersion, augmentation, automation, decentralization, mobilization, autonomization and real-time activity. Various companies and technologies will come together to combine open-source and proprietary systems to weave standalone VR experiences together using visual, audio and haptic technology. This combination will create digital worlds to drive new types of interaction as well as content creation, socializing and monetization.

The metaverse will also bring multiple new legal implications, especially in the absence of existing standards and precedence. Read More

We investigate how hardware specifications can impact the final run time and the required number of physical qubits to achieve a quantum advantage in the fault tolerant regime. Within a particular time frame, both the code cycle time and the number of achievable physical qubits may vary by orders of magnitude between different quantum hardware designs. We start with logical resource requirements corresponding to a quantum advantage for a particular chemistry application, simulating the FeMo-co molecule, and explore to what extent slower code cycle times can be mitigated by using additional qubits. We show that in certain situations, architectures with considerably slower code cycle times will still be able to reach desirable run times, provided enough physical qubits are available. We utilize various space and time optimization strategies that have been previously considered within the field of error-correcting surface codes. In particular, we compare two distinct methods of parallelization: Game of Surface Code’s Units and AutoCCZ factories. Finally, we calculate the number of physical qubits required to break the 256-bit elliptic curve encryption of keys in the Bitcoin network within the small available time frame in which it would actually pose a threat to do so. It would require 317 × 10⁶ physical qubits to break the encryption within one hour using the surface code, a code cycle time of 1 μs, a reaction time of 10 μs, and a physical gate error of 10−310−3. To instead break the encryption within one day, it would require 13 × 10⁶ physical qubits.Researchers have calculated the quantum computer size necessary to break 256-bit elliptic curve public-key cryptography. …It would require 317 × 10⁶ physical qubits to break the encryption within one hour using the surface code, a code cycle time of 1 μs, a reaction time of 10 μs, and a physical gate error of 10^-3. To instead break the encryption within one day, it would require 13 × 10⁶ physical qubits. Read More

The internet has always financialized our lives. Web3 just makes that explicit.

Twitter has begun allowing its users to showcase NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as profile pictures on their accounts. It’s the latest public victory for this form of … and, you know, there’s the problem. What the hell is an NFT anyway?

There are answers. Twitter calls NFTs “unique digital items, such as artwork, with proof of ownership that’s stored on a blockchain.” In marketing for the new feature, the company offered an even briefer take: “digital items that you own.” That promise, mated to a flood of interest and wealth in the cryptocurrency markets used to exchange them, has created an NFT gold rush over the past year. Last March, the artist known as Beeple sold an NFT at auction for $69.5 million. The digital sculptor Refik Anadol, one of the artists The Alantic commissioned to imagine a COVID-19 memorial in 2020, has brought in millions selling editions of his studio’s work in NFT form. Jonathan Mann, who started writing a song every day when he couldn’t find a job after the 2008 financial collapse, began selling those songs as NFTs, converting a fun internet hobby into a viable living. Read More

For the past year, as NFTs have breached spectacular and speculative heights, we’ve seen a growing amount of skepticism. The most recent wave was touched off by a 138-minute video essay by Canadian media critic Dan Olson that condemned NFTs and other blockchain-based technologies as fundamentally broken and unworkable. In just over a week, it’s garnered more than 3 million views on YouTube. Regardless of your perspective on the video, it’s hard to deny that there’s a lot of bullshit percolating around NFTs. Even hardcore Bitcoiners agree. And despite what the loudest NFT boosters insist, the beatings have continued and morale has not improved.

Any way you cut it, the NFT ecosystem as it stands is a disaster. Read More

On a cold day in January, NFTs started disappearing. Major services like MetaMask and Twitter were suddenly unable to display images associated with newly uploaded tokens, even though the users had clear records of ownership. Something in the distributed, decentralized technology stack had gone terribly wrong.

The problem was the NFT marketplace OpenSea, which was suffering a database outage. The outage brought down OpenSea’s image-loading API, jamming up any service that relied on it to upload tokens. In a scene full of militant decentralizers, a single company had found its way to the center of nearly every product. Reporting on the chaos, Vice spotted one user who had photoshopped the company’s logo to read “ClosedSea.” Read More

#metaverse

Some elements of the metaverse exist today, but we’re a ways off from seeing its full potential — or even knowing precisely what it is. How will the metaverse evolve in the next few years?

While the metaverse promises to be unlike any technology we’ve seen before and will change the way we work and play, it will both borrow from lessons learned by innovations and paradigm shifts that have gone before it as well as bring us to uncharted tech territories.

In this special report, we look at what we know about the metaverse and the companies driving it, its security risks, what the gaming industry is showing us, how the metaverse could impact the environment, how to ensure it’s open and interoperable. Read More

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are so new, weird, and fast that they give even techies future shock. “The street finds its own uses for things,” as William Gibson once wrote. In this case, the blockchain — artists are adopting NFTs today faster than the infrastructure can be built. This delightful inversion of the normal product/market fit challenge puts them in an “uncanny valley.” NFTs are a new form of digital object, and we have yet to see what they are capable of.

Famed multimedia artist Brian Eno asks a great question about NFTs in an interview with Evgeny Morozov in the Crypto Syllabus:

“I want to know what is changing, what is being made different, what is helping, what is moving?”

We need more people like Eno in the conversation. The teams building NFT technology are motivated by the public good and hungry for input from thoughtful critics. The current speculative environment sometimes feels like a distraction from the long-term potential of what we are building, but at the same time, this spike of awareness is a golden opportunity to invite new voices to help clarify the vision and purpose of what we are building.

Eno’s questions are a lens focused on the cultural value of NFTs. Let’s take them one at a time: Read More