It’s difficult to describe your initial reaction when you see Genie 3 spit out a forest that you can actually walk through. Mostly I wonder. A hint of discomfort beneath. At the edges, the trees aren’t quite right. No rasterizer could handle the way the light bends. However, you are free to relocate, and the world continues on. This straightforward fact—generated, not loaded—is what is currently subtly shaking some areas of the gaming industry. After a year of trusted-tester demos and screenshots leaked to Reddit, Google DeepMind finally released Project Genie to its AI Ultra subscribers in late January. The…
Author: Taylor Lowery
These days, it’s not the orange light from the desert or the palm trees that greet you as you stroll around Arizona State’s Tempe campus. It’s how frequently students bring up AI in casual conversation, such as at the coffee cart, outside the library, or in between classes, just as a previous generation might have brought up Wikipedia or email. The majority of the nation hasn’t quite caught up to how quickly things have changed. Universities across the country are moving swiftly, which is something they don’t typically do. According to surveys, between 80 and 90 percent of college students…
Modular smartphones seemed like a joke for a very long time. It’s the kind of thing engineers would roll their eyes at if you brought it up over dinner. LG gave it a shot. Google gave it a shot. Both appeared somewhat embarrassed as they left. Ten years later, however, we are once more discussing phones that can be disassembled, reassembled, and kept functional long after the typical upgrade cycle would have pushed them into a drawer. It’s difficult to ignore how subtly this comeback has been developing. There were no glitzy keynote addresses, celebrity endorsements, or eye-catching teaser videos.…
The smartphone industry is currently experiencing an odd silence, the kind that typically precedes something loud. The shelves of any electronics store, whether in San Francisco, Seoul, or Karachi, still look familiar: Xiaomi, with its eye-catching packaging and aggressive pricing, slides into the center, followed by Apple and Samsung. However, the battle on those shelves is no longer primarily about screens or cameras. It has to do with something less obvious, something built into the chips, the software, or the way the phone seems to know what you want before you ask. That invisible territory is being contested by three…
There’s something almost absurd about the idea. Every email you’ve ever written, every grainy phone video, every spreadsheet sitting forgotten on a corporate server somewhere in Virginia — all of it, in theory, fitting inside a coffee cup. Not a metaphorical coffee cup. A real one. The kind sitting next to your keyboard right now. That’s the promise scientists have been chasing for years, and last month a team at the University of Missouri pushed it a little closer to reality. Their work, published in PNAS Nexus, takes a stab at one of the field’s most stubborn problems: once you…
There’s a particular kind of fluorescent light that hums above the produce section of any large grocery store, and lately, walking under it feels different. The lemons are still stacked the way they always were. The child is still wearing earbuds while replenishing yogurt. But somewhere up near the ceiling tiles, behind a smoked-glass dome the size of a softball, a camera is doing more than recording footage. It’s measuring the distance between your eyes. InformationDetailsTopicBiometric surveillance in U.S. retailPrimary Companies CitedWegmans, Amazon (Whole Foods, Amazon Go), Rite AidTechnology in UseFacial recognition, palm-to-pay, license plate readers, gait & voice trackingKnown…
The speed at which a buzzword can disappear is peculiar. Three years ago, every magazine cover, keynote address, and awkward LinkedIn post featured the metaverse. Because of it, Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his business. Companies scrambled to purchase digital land parcels that were never used. Then, almost without warning, the topic of conversation changed. Nowadays, if you walk into a tech conference, you’ll hear murmurs about “spatial computing” in the same tone that people used to reserve for “the next internet.” InformationDetailsTopicThe shift from Metaverse to Spatial ComputingOriginal Hype PeakLate 2021 to early 2022Key CatalystFacebook’s rebrand to Meta…
Something is changing in boardrooms from Singapore to New York, as evidenced by the way executives now discuss artificial intelligence. AI was the desired slide at the back of the deck not too long ago; it was the futuristic gesture, the optimistic flourish. The same slide has a different weight these days. When it shows up, there’s a feeling that the room is quieter, the questions are more pointed, and no one is quite sure who should respond. CategoryDetailsTopicCorporate AI Governance & Boardroom AccountabilityPrimary ConcernAI misinformation, hallucinations, deepfake fraud, biased automationKey StakeholdersBoards of Directors, CEOs, CIOs, Chief Risk Officers, InvestorsBoards…
A browser that updates more quickly than most people change their bed linens has a subtly unsettling quality. New stable versions of Chrome, the program that powers about two-thirds of all screens worldwide, will soon be released every two weeks. With the release of Chrome 153 on September 8, Google’s four-week schedule from 2021 is essentially being halved. It’s more significant than it seems. The way Google frames things is predictable. They claim that because the web is always evolving, developers and users should have quicker access to new features, performance enhancements, and fixes. Alright. Observing this, however, gives the…
The thought that the gadget you currently have on your nightstand—the one you picked up at two in the morning to check the time, the one you tapped through on your way to work in the morning—might know more about your health than your doctor does is subtly unsettling. However, that’s about where we are. For years, researchers have been tugging at this thread, and the picture that is emerging on the other end is beginning to look serious. Key InformationDetailsTopicSmartphone-based health predictionLead Study SourceJAMA Network Open — University of Michigan, 2024Sample Size557 adults monitored over 15 daysPrincipal InvestigatorProf. Aidan…
