Taco Bell has experimented with an AI order taker since 2023, but several embarrassing videos of people using the service have shown up. Such as this guy that orders a mountain dew but keeps getting asked what he’d like to drink with that.
This isn’t that unlike McDonalds which tried, and then turned off, the bots.
Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl has placed three new ads on YC’s job board for “AI agents only” and has set aside a $1 million budget total to make it happen.
They don’t want to hire people, but AI agents – and they are paying $1 million to ‘hire’ them.
What they do want is fully AI powered content creation agents “that never sleeps and always ships”. It will autonomously produce “high-quality” SEO-pleasing blog posts and tutorials on how to use its product, then wants the AI to watch engagement metrics and use that to autonomously improve the audience for its content, too.
Within a week, they had about 50 applicants.
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Engineers at Intel released an open-source tool that tries to quantify the issues from increasing amounts of upscalers, frame generators, and AI rendering techniques. Ironically, the tool itself is an AI trained on large datasets. Their paper about the methodology is located here.
CGVQM is a video quality metric that predicts perceptual differences between pairs of videos.
Like PSNR and SSIM, it compares a ground-truth reference to a distorted version (e.g. blurry, noisy, aliased).What sets CGVQM apart is that it is the first metric calibrated for distortions from advanced rendering techniques, accounting for both spatial and temporal artifacts.
CGVQM is available for free on github and uses PyTorch optimized for CUDA GPUs though it does work on CPUs.
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How do you know when AI generated frames on your graphics card or in video playback look bad? Some folks at Intel published a paper and shared a dataset for a technique called CGVQM+D: Computer Graphics Video Quality Metric and Dataset – which tries to quantify the image quality issues created by using AI generation techniques like neural supersampling, novel-view synthesis, path tracing, neural denoising, frame interpolation, and variable rate shading.
It’s no secret AI agents are starting to take over customer service and other tasks. So, instead of communicating via expensive text-to-speech conversion, why not use their own language.
Gibberlink allows AIs to skip unnecessary speech synthesis and recognition and communicate using beeps and bleeps like R2D2.
People have converted their Big Mouth Billy Bass to use Alexa. Now people are augmenting their Big Mouth Billy Bass with ChatGPT AI. You can check out his github project here.
This guy gave his version an Arnold personality:
Drone warfare is very real as the conflict in Ukraine has shown the world. Cheap, re-purposed drone airplanes deliver bombs behind enemy lines and small copters are being used to deliver decisive and deadly grenades to entrenched positions. Hoog created this distopian instructional video that imagines how bad things could get and how to protect yourself from packs of rogue robots.
While this version is tongue-in-cheek, the reality is that swarms of cheap drones can absolutely overwhelm and kill larger, well-equipped enemy forces.
Real anti-drone weapons are already being developed
When I was on a 8 week sabbatical a number of years ago, I took an artistic welding class. It was a ton of fun. Sugar Metal Customs does custom ironwork, but also teaches some classes from making metal roses to giant metal flails for your medieval fantasies.
Maybe pick up a skill that AI can’t replace?
Reddit user “loozerr” found that if you ask Copilot “is there a script to activate Windows 11,” Copilot will happily share a how-to guide that includes a script you can run to activate the OS.
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IBM has a good video on what vector databases are and how they’re used by AI systems.