Big construction projects are notorious for delays and running over budget. An Israeli company says it has a high tech solution to get everything back on track. 

At a hospital construction project in England, project manager Bruce Preston says he is juggling millions of pieces to help the nearly $200 million project take shape. “We have 2,300 rooms and spaces that we need to keep track of to know exactly what’s going on in everyone one of those spaces.”

Tracking progress is usually done by hand. But on this job, a 360-degree camera attached to a hard hat is capturing every inch of the site using artificial intelligence to compare the images to the building’s blueprints. Preston points to a computer screen to show how it works, saying, “it’ll tell you green if it’s all done and orange where there’s work still to do.” 

Tech firm Buildots says their AI system catches mistakes before they become a costly problem. “How many times does the industry lose money because it finds out way down the line that we missed something?” asks Buildots Co-founder Aviv Leibovici.

Construction is estimated to be a $10 trillion industry worldwide, and a report from McKinsey Global Institute, a management consulting company, says about $1.6 trillion are wasted every year by productivity problems.

By Kyle Wiggers

Signaling its interest in text-generating AI systems like ChatGPT, Quora this week launched a platform called Poe that lets people ask questions, get instant answers and have a back-and-forth dialogue with AI chatbots.

Short for “Platform for Open Exploration,” Poe — which is invite-only and currently only available on iOS — is “designed to be a place where people can easily interact with a number of different AI agents,” a Quora spokesperson told TechCrunch via text message.

“We have learned a lot about building consumer internet products over the last 12 years building and operating Quora. And we are specifically experienced in serving people who are looking for knowledge,” the spokesperson said. “We believe much of what we’ve learned can be applied to this new domain where people are interfacing with large language models.”

Poe, then, isn’t an attempt to build a ChatGPT-like AI model from scratch. ChatGPT — which has an aptitude for answering questions on topics ranging from poetry to coding — has been the subject of controversy for its ability to sometimes give answers that sound convincing but aren’t factually true. Earlier this month, Q&A coding site Stack Overflow temporarily banned users from sharing content generated by ChatGPT, saying the AI made it too easy for users to generate responses and flood the site with dubious answers.

By Meghmala Chowdhury

Riffusion was developed by Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros as a side project. It stores audio in sonograms, which are two-dimensional images. Riffusion, an AI model that makes music from text prompts by constructing a visual representation of sound and converting it to audio for playback, was launched on Thursday by a couple of IT enthusiasts. It applies visual latent diffusion to sound processing in a novel manner using a fine-tuned version of the Stable Diffusion 1.5 image synthesis model. The X-axis in a sonogram depicts time (the left-to-right order in which the frequencies are played), and the Y-axis is the frequency of the sounds.

The color of each pixel in the image, meanwhile, shows the volume of the sound at that specific instant in time. A sonogram can be processed using stable diffusion because it is a sort of image. With the help of examples of sonograms that were connected to descriptions of the sounds or musical genres they represented, Forsgren and Martiros trained a unique Stable Diffusion model. With this knowledge, Riffusion can produce fresh music on demand based on text prompts that specify the genre of music or sound you like, such as “jazz,” “rock,” or even keystrokes on a keyboard. Riffusion creates the sonogram image, converts it to sound using Torchaudio, and then plays it back as audio.