Altman fluffs superintelligence to save humanity as OpenAI slashes prices
Everything is AWESOME!!!
OpenAI on Tuesday rolled out its o3-Pro model for ChatGPT Pro and Teams subscribers, slashed o3 pricing by 80 percent, and dropped a blog post from CEO Sam Altman teasing "intelligence too cheap to meter."…
TikTok star Emilie Kiser wasn't home when toddler son drowned
Influencer Emilie Kiser, 26, was not home when her three-year-old son Trigg tragically died after he was found unresponsive in the family's pool in Chandler, Arizona on May 12.
Scientists Built a Badminton-Playing Robot With AI-Powered Skills
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The robot built by [Yuntao Ma and his team at ETH Zurich] was called ANYmal and resembled a miniature giraffe that plays badminton by holding a racket in its teeth. It was a quadruped platform developed by ANYbotics, an ETH Zurich spinoff company that mainly builds robots for the oil and gas industries. "It was an industry-grade robot," Ma said. The robot had elastic actuators in its legs, weighed roughly 50 kilograms, and was half a meter wide and under a meter long. On top of the robot, Ma's team fitted an arm with several degrees of freedom produced by another ETH Zurich spinoff called Duatic. This is what would hold and swing a badminton racket. Shuttlecock tracking and sensing the environment were done with a stereoscopic camera. "We've been working to integrate the hardware for five years," Ma said.
Along with the hardware, his team was also working on the robot's brain. State-of-the-art robots usually use model-based control optimization, a time-consuming, sophisticated approach that relies on a mathematical model of the robot's dynamics and environment. "In recent years, though, the approach based on reinforcement learning algorithms became more popular," Ma told Ars. "Instead of building advanced models, we simulated the robot in a simulated world and let it learn to move on its own." In ANYmal's case, this simulated world was a badminton court where its digital alter ego was chasing after shuttlecocks with a racket. The training was divided into repeatable units, each of which required that the robot predict the shuttlecock's trajectory and hit it with a racket six times in a row. During this training, like a true sportsman, the robot also got to know its physical limits and to work around them.
The idea behind training the control algorithms was to develop visuo-motor skills similar to human badminton players. The robot was supposed to move around the court, anticipating where the shuttlecock might go next and position its whole body, using all available degrees of freedom, for a swing that would mean a good return. This is why balancing perception and movement played such an important role. The training procedure included a perception model based on real camera data, which taught the robot to keep the shuttlecock in its field of view while accounting for the noise and resulting object-tracking errors.
Once the training was done, the robot learned to position itself on the court. It figured out that the best strategy after a successful return is to move back to the center and toward the backline, which is something human players do. It even came with a trick where it stood on its hind legs to see the incoming shuttlecock better. It also learned fall avoidance and determined how much risk was reasonable to take given its limited speed. The robot did not attempt impossible plays that would create the potential for serious damage -- it was committed, but not suicidal. But when it finally played humans, it turned out ANYmal, as a badminton player, was amateur at best. The findings have been published in the journal Science Robotics.
You can watch a video of the four-legged robot playing badminton on YouTube.
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The cheap supplements that CAN heal your liver - and the ones to avoid - plus the perfect amount of coffee to drink to prevent liver disease: SARAH DI LORENZO
The liver is your body's hardest-working organ. It's the place where everything is processed, and plays a central role in weight loss, digestion, immunity, blood sugar control, hormone regulation and more.
Woman, 33, who vanished from London's Hyde Park FOUR months ago 'is found safe and well'
Portia Vincent-Kirby, from Finchley, North London, 'dropped off the face of the earth' after spending the evening with friends on February 21.
Bloated and looking old beyond my years, I finally quit alcohol at 45. Only then did I realise what drinking a bottle of wine a night for two decades had done to me...
Kate Taylor's rock bottom was a blurry 50-second video she had filmed herself one December night in 2021, after drinking her usual bottle of her favourite red wine, Saint-Émilion.
RIP: Bill Atkinson, co-creator of Apple Lisa and Mac
His work set the direction of modern computer interfaces, and much more
Obit Bill Atkinson, widely acclaimed as perhaps the most brilliant computer programmer ever, has succumbed to pancreatic cancer at 74.…
Doctors told me I had anxiety and turned me away... now I'm bedridden
Maisie Moore, 25, from south West London, spends every day sequestered to her bed in a brace given her severe neck pain, alongside high blood pressure, a racing heart and intense nausea.
This was the final proof the Chancellor has no inkling of the mess this country is in: STEPHEN GLOVER
No one will remember Rachel Reeves 's speech yesterday or her fantasy spending review for long, possibly including the Chancellor herself.
England manager Thomas Tuchel says his own mum is 'REPULSED' by Jude Bellingham's behaviour on the pitch and admits his 'explosions' can even 'intimidate' team-mates
In an extraordinary interview, Tuchel encouraged Bellingham to maintain his edge on the pitch, but admitted it can have a negative impact on the team and the perception of him.
The ‘absolutely brilliant’ Essex airport loved by flyers despite surprisingly long delays
It's a popular airport for people to fly from
'These animals proudly carry other countries' flags but only burn the American flag': Trump condemns 'foreign invasion' as he prepares full anti-immigration assault on five US cities and LA enters lockdown
The president went on to call LA 'a trash heap' with 'entire neighborhoods under control' of criminals, adding the government would 'use every asset at our disposal to quell the violence'
Stacey Solomon soaks up the sun in a skimpy orange bikini as the busy mum of five enjoys a relaxing pool day during Lake Como work trip
Stacey Solomon made the most of a work trip to Lake Como, taking the afternoon off for a spot of sunbathing on Tuesday.
Love Island fans call for Sophie Lee to return to villa after 'savage' exit
She was in the villa for less than 48 hours before being dumped, in what fans are calling very 'unfair'
Airlines Don't Want You to Know They Sold Your Flight Data to DHS
An anonymous reader shares a report: A data broker owned by the country's major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers' domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details.
CBP, a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it needs this data to support state and local police to track people of interest's air travel across the country, in a purchase that has alarmed civil liberties experts. The documents reveal for the first time in detail why at least one part of DHS purchased such information, and comes after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detailed its own purchase of the data. The documents also show for the first time that the data broker, called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), tells government agencies not to mention where it sourced the flight data from.
"The big airlines -- through a shady data broker that they own called ARC -- are selling the government bulk access to Americans' sensitive information, revealing where they fly and the credit card they used," Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement. ARC is owned and operated by at least eight major U.S. airlines, other publicly released documents show. The company's board of directors include representatives from Delta, Southwest, United, American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, and European airlines Lufthansa and Air France, and Canada's Air Canada. More than 240 airlines depend on ARC for ticket settlement services.
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Molly-Mae Hague gets her FOURTH parking ticket of the year as she leaves £200k G Wagon outside her Cheshire office while filming her Amazon series
Molly-Mae Hague has been slapped with her fourth parking ticket of the year as she left her £200,000 G Wagon on a street in Cheshire on Wednesday.
Salesforce tags 5 CVEs after SaaS security probe uncovers misconfig risks
The 16 other flagged issues are on customers, says CRM giant
Salesforce has assigned five CVE identifiers following a security report that uncovered more than 20 configuration weaknesses, some of which exposed customers to unauthorized access and session hijacking.…
Trendy designer Cavapoos are most at risk of embarrassing health problem, vets warn
Recently, Cavapoos have become all the rage. But they're the breed most likely to suffer from a troublesome health condition - and it's bad news for owners who have cream carpets.
King's Birthday Flypast: The 'secret' Essex bunker that's the perfect place to watch King's flyover
The flypast is often a spectacle to enjoy in the skies above Essex
Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
The Wikimedia Foundation halted an experiment that would have displayed AI-generated summaries atop Wikipedia articles after the platform's volunteer editor community delivered an overwhelmingly negative response to the proposal. The foundation announced the two-week mobile trial on June 2 and suspended it just one day later following dozens of critical comments from editors.
The experiment, called "Simple Article Summaries," would have used Cohere's open-weight Aya model to generate simplified versions of complex Wikipedia articles. The AI-generated summaries would have appeared at the top of articles with a yellow "unverified" label, requiring users to click to expand and read them. Editors responded with comments including "very bad idea," "strongest possible oppose," and simply "Yuck."
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