Code & Clarity

The Academy Awards, considered the pinnacle of cinematic achievement, just sent a resounding message to Hollywood about the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence. As of this past Friday, any film hoping to contend for an Oscar will need to ensure that all performances and screenplays are entirely the product of human effort. The organization behind the iconic golden statues has now explicitly declared that actors or writers generated by artificial intelligence will be ineligible for any awards. This marks a decisive moment in how a major artistic institution defines creativity in the digital age. These new rules are quite specific. They state that only performances "credited in the film’s legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent" will be considered for an Academy Award. This means that a digital replica or a wholly synthetic character, even if sophisticated, will not qualify. Similarly, any screenplay submitted for consideration...

Get ready for a fascinating twist in the world of self-driving cars and ride-sharing. Uber recently revealed a bold long-term plan: it wants to turn its millions of human drivers’ cars into a vast network of data-gathering sensors. This data would then be fed to companies developing autonomous vehicles and other artificial intelligence models that need to understand the real world. Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, shared this vision at a tech event in San Francisco. He described it as a natural evolution of a program Uber introduced earlier this year called AV Labs. Currently, AV Labs uses a small fleet of Uber-operated cars specially equipped with sensors. However, the ambition is much bigger. Naga confirmed that the company eventually aims to equip its massive global network of drivers with these sensor kits. Imagine the sheer scale of data collection if even a fraction of Uber's millions of drivers worldwide were contributing. This move aims ...

Meta just made a significant move in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence and robotics. The social media giant recently acquired Assured Robot Intelligence, a startup that specializes in teaching robots to understand and adapt to human behavior. This purchase is a clear signal of Meta’s serious ambitions in building human-like robots. The core of what Assured Robot Intelligence, or ARI, brings to Meta is its deep expertise in making robots smarter about us. Their technology focuses on developing what are called foundation models for humanoid robots. Think of these as the fundamental "brains" that allow a robot to learn how to perform all sorts of physical tasks, from simple household chores to more complex labor. The talent joining Meta through this acquisition is particularly noteworthy. ARI’s co-founders, Xiaolong Wang and Lerrel Pinto, are highly respected figures in the AI and robotics community. Wang previously worked at Nvidia and was a pro...

A group of hacktivists has taken down several Ubuntu and Canonical websites, as well as the Linux-based operating system's security API, by launching a distributed denial-of-service attack. This type of attack involves flooding a target with junk traffic until it overloads or crashes. The hacktivists, who call themselves The Islamic Cyber Resistance in Iraq 313 Team, claimed responsibility for the attack on their Telegram channel. They used a DDoS-for-hire service called Beamed, which allows anyone to pay to launch DDoS attacks without needing technical skills or infrastructure. The attack began on Thursday and has been ongoing for around 20 hours, affecting services that Ubuntu users rely on. Ubuntu developers have been discussing the attack on an unofficial community forum, claiming that it affects the operating system's security API and several websites. Users have also reported being unable to update and install Ubuntu due to the attack. Canonical, the company that d...