Police and federal agencies have found a controversial new way to skirt the growing patchwork of laws that curb how they use facial recognition: an AI model that can track people using attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories.  The tool, called Track and built by the video analytics company Veritone, is used by 400 customers, including state and local police departments and universities all over the US. It is also expanding federally: US attorneys at the Department of Justice began using Track for criminal investigations last August. Veritone’s broader suite of AI tools, which […]

Imagine going for dinner with a group of friends who switch in and out of different languages you don’t speak, but still being able to understand what they’re saying. This scenario is the inspiration for a new AI headphone system that translates the speech of multiple speakers simultaneously, in real time. The system, called Spatial Speech Translation, tracks the direction and vocal characteristics of each speaker, helping the person wearing the headphones to identify who is saying what in a group setting.  “There are so many smart people across the world, and the language barrier prevents them from having the […]

It’s not easy being one of Silicon Valley’s favorite benchmarks.  SWE-Bench (pronounced “swee bench”) launched in November 2024 to evaluate an AI model’s coding skill, using more than 2,000 real-world programming problems pulled from the public GitHub repositories of 12 different Python-based projects.  In the months since then, it’s quickly become one of the most popular tests in AI. A SWE-Bench score has become a mainstay of major model releases from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—and outside of foundation models, the fine-tuners at AI firms are in constant competition to see who can rise above the pack. The top of the […]