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Devin Coldewey

Devin Coldewey
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These days even niche industries have concerned souls looking for more eco-friendly options for materials and processes, from washing machine waste to artificial wool. Lingrove is taking on laminates — thin layers of wood and other materials — with a carbon-negative option that they claim performs better while looking...
OpenAI is expanding its internal safety processes to fend off the threat of harmful AI. A new “safety advisory group” will sit above the technical teams and make recommendations to leadership, and the board has been granted veto power — of course, whether it will actually use it is...
A new Seattle biotech organization will be funded to the tune of $75 million to research “DNA typewriters,” self-monitoring cells that could upend our understanding of biology. The collaboration between the University of Washington, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and the Allen Institute is already underway. Called the Seattle Hub for Synthetic...
The problem of alignment is an important one when you’re setting AI models up to make decisions in matters of finance and health. But how can you reduce biases if they’re baked into a model from biases in its training data? Anthropic suggests asking it nicely to please, please...
Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked. A video called “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal...
Ukrainian synthetic voice startup Respeecher is finding success despite not just bombs raining down on their city, but a wave of hype that has raised up sometimes controversial competitors. A new $1M in funding should help the company add a few studios to its media and gaming clients. Respeecher is...
As if still-image deepfakes aren’t bad enough, we may soon have to contend with generated videos of anyone who dares to put a photo of themselves online: with Animate Anyone, bad actors can puppeteer people better than ever. The new generative video technique was developed by researchers at Alibaba Group’s...
Few would disagree that 2023 was, in the world of technology at least, dominated by artificial intelligence. The dictionaries have taken note in their “word of the year” lists, and notably all the AI-related words they highlight are, in fact, existing words that have been appropriated and regurgitated with...
For years, dedicated Star Trek fans have been using AI in an attempt to make a version of the acclaimed series Deep Space 9 that looks decent on modern TVs. It sounds a bit ridiculous, but I was surprised to find that it’s actually quite good — certainly good...
Inmates in correctional facilities around the country have wildly varying levels of opportunity to prepare for life after release. Nucleos is a startup that hopes to make the kind of e-learning tools we tend to take for granted available to inmates with an all-in-one service that’s free for them...