When a stranger reached out to Dulce Volantin with an offer of financial help, she was initially skeptical. However, her life and that of her partner, Valarie Zayas, were at a precarious juncture. They were renting a bed in a dormitory-style living arrangement on Venice Beach, Los Angeles, having met in prison years earlier and found love after escaping involvement with gangs. Dulce’s battle with mental illness had led to hospitalizations, while Valarie juggled temporary jobs to supplement Dulce’s disability aid.

Their journey had included sleeping in their car, staying with family for an extended period, and resorting to donating plasma and selling clothes to afford motels. But on the seventh day, they found themselves with nothing in their pockets. Against her initial doubts, Dulce returned the stranger’s phone call, which turned out to be a genuine and life-changing offer. The call was from the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, part of a unique experiment aimed at curbing homelessness, which continues to rise despite substantial spending.

With an elegant mane of sleek black hair and subtle makeup, Zaein possesses the ability to sing, deliver the latest news, and even showcase luxury fashion items. But Zaein is no ordinary South Korean celebrity; she stands as one of the nation’s most active virtual avatars, brought to life through the marvels of deepfake technology.

In South Korea, the embrace of artificial intelligence (AI) has become pervasive, permeating various sectors, from news presentations featuring Deepfake anchors to the emergence of AI-driven pastors.

LinkedIn announced on Tuesday its plans to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) features into its core services, revolutionizing how recruiters find job candidates and simplifying ad campaign creation for marketing professionals. Leveraging technology from OpenAI, in which Microsoft has invested, LinkedIn aims to enhance user interactions on its platform. With over 950 million members, LinkedIn primarily generates revenue by offering recruiters, marketing, and sales professionals access to its vast data repository.

Traditionally, these users had to employ data filters, keywords, and other search engine techniques to navigate LinkedIn’s database. This involved translating natural queries, such as “I want to hire a software developer with 10 years of experience in Minneapolis,” into language comprehensible to the platform’s database. The new AI-infused features now allow recruiters to ask questions naturally, with the computer responding with additional queries. For instance, it may inquire if the recruiter is open to considering qualified applicants in other cities where the company has offices or individuals with slightly different job titles but similar skill sets.

Researchers at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) in Los Altos, California, have introduced an innovative technique that combines engineering constraints with generative AI in the vehicle design process. This groundbreaking approach allows vehicle designers to incorporate factors such as aerodynamic drag and vehicle dimensions into the generative AI process seamlessly.

Traditionally, designers employ publicly available text-to-image generative AI tools early in their creative process. However, Toyota’s new method enables designers to input initial design sketches and engineering requirements into this process, significantly reducing the number of iterations required to align design and engineering considerations.

Recording an audiobook is no easy feat, especially for seasoned voice actors. However, the growing demand for audiobooks, coupled with major streaming platforms like Spotify dedicating space to them, has led MIT and Microsoft researchers to embark on an innovative project. They are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to transform online texts into audiobooks. In collaboration with Project Gutenberg, the world’s oldest and perhaps most extensive repository of open-license ebooks, they aim to generate 5,000 AI-narrated audiobooks. This impressive collection includes literary classics such as “Pride and Prejudice,” “Madame Bovary,” “Call of the Wild,” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” The researchers recently published an arXiv preprint detailing their endeavors.

Mark Hamilton, a PhD student at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a lead researcher on the project, explains their goal: “What we wanted to do was create a massive amount of free audiobooks and give them back to the community. Lately, there’s been a lot of advances in neural text-to-speech, which are these algorithms that can read text, and they sound quite human-like.”

The real estate industry is undergoing a significant transformation thanks to the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which are revolutionizing various aspects of the real estate journey. According to David Conroy, Director of Emerging Technology at the National Association of Realtors (NAR), AI adoption in the real estate sector has experienced a remarkable surge, particularly within the last 10 months, driven by innovative tools like ChatGPT.

These AI tools are playing a pivotal role in refining and optimizing numerous processes within the real estate sector. They are enhancing presentations, identifying property attributes using valuation models to optimize sale prices, and even forecasting how property renovations might affect their value.

Visa, the renowned payments processor, has introduced a $100 million venture fund dedicated to supporting generative artificial intelligence (AI) startups. This move by Visa aligns with the growing trend of investors showing substantial interest in the AI sector throughout this year. Notable names such as Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google have already ventured into the AI space, driven by the remarkable popularity of chatbot ChatGPT.

Generative AI, which has garnered significant attention within the technology landscape, is a transformative technology that generates entirely new content by leveraging knowledge acquired from historical data.

Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa, highlighted the significance of generative AI by stating, “While much of generative AI so far has been focused on tasks and content creation, this technology… will also meaningfully change commerce in ways we need to understand.”

Visa’s venture fund signals a strategic move to explore and invest in the potential of generative AI, recognizing its capability to bring about substantial changes in various aspects of commerce and beyond.

By Impact Lab