The PlayStation VR2 is a simultaneously exciting and disappointing development in the virtual reality space. Well-specced, easy to set up, and reasonably light and comfortable, Sony’s latest still can’t shake the fundamental issues that have prevented VR from going mainstream: a lack of compelling content and despite a brand new 4K OLED display, distracting image…
The popular AI image generator Midjourney bans a wide range of words about the human reproductive system from being used as prompts, MIT Technology Review has discovered. If someone types “placenta,” “fallopian tubes,” “mammary glands,” “sperm,” “uterine,” “urethra,” “cervix,” “hymen,” or “vulva” into Midjourney, the system flags the word as a banned prompt and doesn’t…
Posted by Aviral Kumar, Student Researcher, and Sergey Levine, Research Scientist, Google Research Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can learn skills to solve decision-making tasks like playing games, enabling robots to pick up objects, or even optimizing microchip designs. However, running RL algorithms in the real world requires expensive active data collection. Pre-training on diverse datasets…
Posted by Greg Corrado, Distinguished Scientist, and Yossi Matias, VP Engineering and Research, Google Research (This is Part 8 in our series of posts covering different topical areas of research at Google. You can find other posts in the series here.) Google’s focus on AI stems from the conviction that this transformational technology will benefit…
Posted by Hartmut Neven, VP of Engineering, and Julian Kelly, Director of Quantum Hardware, on behalf of the Google Quantum AI Team Many years from today, scientists will be able to use fault-tolerant quantum computers for large-scale computations with applications across science and industry. These quantum computers will be much bigger than today, consisting of…
Posted by John Platt, Distinguished Scientist, Google Research (This is Part 7 in our series of posts covering different topical areas of research at Google. You can find other posts in the series here.) It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a scientist. With the amazing advances in machine learning (ML) and quantum computing, we…
Today, Meta announced new improvements to the Quest platform as part of the v50 OS update, including an experimental feature called “Direct Touch,” which lets users tap and swipe with their bare hands. The company also rolled out an in-game multitasking feature to Meta Quest 2 and upgraded the Meta Quest Touch Pro controllers. While…
Have you been threatened by an AI chatbot yet? Over the past week it seems like almost every news outlet has tried Microsoft’s Bing AI search and found that the chatbot makes up stupid and creepy stuff. It repeatedly told a New York Times tech columnist that it “loved” him, then claimed to be “offended” by…
Posted by Parker Riley, Software Engineer, and Jan Botha, Research Scientist, Google Research Many languages spoken worldwide cover numerous regional varieties (sometimes called dialects), such as Brazilian and European Portuguese or Mainland and Taiwan Mandarin Chinese. Although such varieties are often mutually intelligible to their speakers, there are still important differences. For example, the Brazilian…
It’s been well publicized that Google’s Bard made some factual errors when it was demoed, and Google paid for these mistakes with a significant drop in their stock price. What didn’t receive as much news coverage (though in the last few days, it’s been well discussed online) are the many mistakes that Microsoft’s new search…