Enlarge / Still images taken from videos generated by Google Veo. (credit: Google / Benj Edwards)

On Tuesday at Google I/O 2024, Google announced Veo, a new AI video-synthesis model that can create HD videos from text, image, or video prompts, similar to OpenAI's Sora. It can generate 1080p videos lasting over a minute and edit videos from written instructions, but it has not yet been released for broad use.

Veo reportedly includes the ability to edit existing videos using text commands, maintain visual consistency across frames, and generate video sequences lasting up to and beyond 60 seconds from a single prompt or a series of prompts that form a narrative. The company says it can generate detailed scenes and apply cinematic effects such as time-lapses, aerial shots, and various visual styles

Since the launch of DALL-E 2 in April 2022, we've seen a parade of new image synthesis and video synthesis models that aim to allow anyone who can type a written description to create a detailed image or video. While neither technology has been fully refined, both AI image and video generators have been steadily growing more capable.

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Ars Technica AI Reporter and tech historian Benj Edwards has co-written a book on the Virtual Boy with Dr. Jose Zagal. In this exclusive excerpt, Benj and Jose take you back to Nintendo of the early '90s, where a unique 3D display technology captured the imagination of legendary designer Gunpei Yokoi and set the stage for a daring, if ultimately ill-fated, foray into the world of stereoscopic gaming.

Seeing Red: Nintendo's Virtual Boy is now available for purchase in print and ebook formats.

A full list of references can be found in the book.

Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as a future for video games and looking for technological solutions that made business sense? Or was the Virtual Boy primarily the result of Nintendo going “off script” and seizing a unique, and possibly risky, opportunity that presented itself? The answer is probably a little bit of both.

As it turns out, the Virtual Boy was not an anomaly in Nintendo’s history with video game platforms. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate strategy that was consistent with Nintendo’s way of doing things and informed by its lead creator Gunpei Yokoi’s design philosophy.

Enlarge / An image Ilya Sutskever tweeted with this OpenAI resignation announcement. From left to right: New OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, President Greg Brockman, Sutskever, CEO Sam Altman, and CTO Mira Murati. (credit: Ilya Sutskever / X)

On Tuesday evening, OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever announced that he is leaving the company he co-founded, six months after he participated in the coup that temporarily ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Jan Leike, a fellow member of Sutskever's Superalignment team, is reportedly resigning with him.

"After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI," Sutskever tweeted. "The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the excellent research leadership of @merettm. It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly."

Sutskever has been with the company since its founding in 2015 and is widely seen as one of the key engineers behind some of OpenAI's biggest technical breakthroughs. As a former OpenAI board member, he played a key role in the removal of Sam Altman as CEO in the shocking firing last November. While it later emerged that Altman's firing primarily stemmed from a power struggle with former board member Helen Toner, Sutskever sided with Toner and personally delivered the news to Altman that he was being fired on behalf of the board.

Enlarge / A video still of Project Astra demo at the Google I/O conference keynote in Mountain View on May 14, 2024. (credit: Google)

Just one day after OpenAI revealed GPT-4o, which it bills as being able to understand what's taking place in a video feed and converse about it, Google announced Project Astra, a research prototype that features similar video comprehension capabilities. It was announced by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on Tuesday at the Google I/O conference keynote in Mountain View, California.

Hassabis called Astra "a universal agent helpful in everyday life." During a demonstration, the research model showcased its capabilities by identifying sound-producing objects, providing creative alliterations, explaining code on a monitor, and locating misplaced items. The AI assistant also exhibited its potential in wearable devices, such as smart glasses, where it could analyze diagrams, suggest improvements, and generate witty responses to visual prompts.

Google says that Astra uses the camera and microphone on a user's device to provide assistance in everyday life. By continuously processing and encoding video frames and speech input, Astra creates a timeline of events and caches the information for quick recall. The company says that this enables the AI to identify objects, answer questions, and remember things it has seen that are no longer in the camera's frame.

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On Monday, OpenAI employee William Fedus confirmed on X that a mysterious chart-topping AI chatbot known as "gpt-chatbot" that had been undergoing testing on LMSYS's Chatbot Arena and frustrating experts was, in fact, OpenAI's newly announced GPT-4o AI model. He also revealed that GPT-4o had topped the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, achieving the highest documented score ever.

"GPT-4o is our new state-of-the-art frontier model. We’ve been testing a version on the LMSys arena as im-also-a-good-gpt2-chatbot," Fedus tweeted.

Chatbot Arena is a website where visitors converse with two random AI language models side by side without knowing which model is which, then choose which model gives the best response. It's a perfect example of vibe-based AI benchmarking, as AI researcher Simon Willison calls it.

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On Monday, OpenAI debuted GPT-4o (o for "omni"), a major new AI model that can ostensibly converse using speech in real time, reading emotional cues and responding to visual input. It operates faster than OpenAI's previous best model, GPT-4 Turbo, and will be free for ChatGPT users and available as a service through API, rolling out over the next few weeks, OpenAI says.

OpenAI revealed the new audio conversation and vision comprehension capabilities in a YouTube livestream titled "OpenAI Spring Update," presented by OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and employees Mark Chen and Barret Zoph that included live demos of GPT-4o in action.

OpenAI claims that GPT-4o responds to audio inputs in about 320 milliseconds on average, which is similar to human response times in conversation, according to a 2009 study, and much shorter than the typical 2–3 second lag experienced with previous models. With GPT-4o, OpenAI says it trained a brand-new AI model end-to-end using text, vision, and audio in a way that all inputs and outputs "are processed by the same neural network."

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On Monday, Stack Overflow and OpenAI announced a new API partnership that will integrate Stack Overflow's technical content with OpenAI's ChatGPT AI assistant. However, the deal has sparked controversy among Stack Overflow's user community, with many expressing anger and protest over the use of their contributed content to support and train AI models.

"I hate this. I'm just going to delete/deface my answers one by one," wrote one user on sister site Stack Exchange. "I don't care if this is against your silly policies, because as this announcement shows, your policies can change at a whim without prior consultation of your stakeholders. You don't care about your users, I don't care about you."

Stack Overflow is a popular question-and-answer site for software developers that allows users to ask and answer technical questions related to coding. The site has a large community of developers who contribute knowledge and expertise to help others solve programming problems. Over the past decade, Stack Overflow has become a heavily utilized resource for many developers seeking solutions to common coding challenges.

Enlarge / A still image of a robotic quadruped armed with a remote weapons system, captured from a video provided by Onyx Industries. (credit: Onyx Industries)

The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is currently evaluating a new generation of robotic "dogs" developed by Ghost Robotics, with the potential to be equipped with gun systems from defense tech company Onyx Industries, reports The War Zone.

While MARSOC is testing Ghost Robotics' quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicles (called "Q-UGVs" for short) for various applications, including reconnaissance and surveillance, it's the possibility of arming them with weapons for remote engagement that may draw the most attention. But it's not unprecedented: The US Marine Corps has also tested robotic dogs armed with rocket launchers in the past.

MARSOC is currently in possession of two armed Q-UGVs undergoing testing, as confirmed by Onyx Industries staff, and their gun systems are based on Onyx's SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS), which features an AI-enabled digital imaging system and can automatically detect and track people, drones, or vehicles, reporting potential targets to a remote human operator that could be located anywhere in the world. The system maintains a human-in-the-loop control for fire decisions, and it cannot decide to fire autonomously.

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Microsoft has introduced a GPT-4-based generative AI model designed specifically for US intelligence agencies that operates disconnected from the Internet, according to a Bloomberg report. This reportedly marks the first time Microsoft has deployed a major language model in a secure setting, designed to allow spy agencies to analyze top-secret information without connectivity risks—and to allow secure conversations with a chatbot similar to ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. But it may also mislead officials if not used properly due to inherent design limitations of AI language models.

GPT-4 is a large language model (LLM) created by OpenAI that attempts to predict the most likely tokens (fragments of encoded data) in a sequence. It can be used to craft computer code and analyze information. When configured as a chatbot (like ChatGPT), GPT-4 can power AI assistants that converse in a human-like manner. Microsoft has a license to use the technology as part of a deal in exchange for large investments it has made in OpenAI.

According to the report, the new AI service (which does not yet publicly have a name) addresses a growing interest among intelligence agencies to use generative AI for processing classified data, while mitigating risks of data breaches or hacking attempts. ChatGPT normally  runs on cloud servers provided by Microsoft, which can introduce data leak and interception risks. Along those lines, the CIA announced its plan to create a ChatGPT-like service last year, but this Microsoft effort is reportedly a separate project.

Enlarge / Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Inflection AI UK Ltd., during a town hall on day two of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024. Suleyman joined Microsoft in March. (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft is working on a new large-scale AI language model called MAI-1, which could potentially rival state-of-the-art models from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, according to a report by The Information. This marks the first time Microsoft has developed an in-house AI model of this magnitude since investing over $10 billion in OpenAI for the rights to reuse the startup's AI models. OpenAI's GPT-4 powers not only ChatGPT but also Microsoft Copilot.

The development of MAI-1 is being led by Mustafa Suleyman, the former Google AI leader who recently served as CEO of the AI startup Inflection before Microsoft acquired the majority of the startup's staff and intellectual property for $650 million in March. Although MAI-1 may build on techniques brought over by former Inflection staff, it is reportedly an entirely new large language model (LLM), as confirmed by two Microsoft employees familiar with the project.

With approximately 500 billion parameters, MAI-1 will be significantly larger than Microsoft's previous open source models (such as Phi-3, which we covered last month), requiring more computing power and training data. This reportedly places MAI-1 in a similar league as OpenAI's GPT-4, which is rumored to have over 1 trillion parameters (in a mixture-of-experts configuration) and well above smaller models like Meta and Mistral's 70 billion parameter models.

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On Thursday, renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, formerly of OpenAI and Tesla, tweeted a lighthearted proposal that large language models (LLMs) like the one that runs ChatGPT could one day be modified to operate in or be transmitted to space, potentially to communicate with extraterrestrial life. He said the idea was "just for fun," but with his influential profile in the field, the idea may inspire others in the future.

Karpathy's bona fides in AI almost speak for themselves, receiving a PhD from Stanford under computer scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li in 2015. He then became one of the founding members of OpenAI as a research scientist, then served as senior director of AI at Tesla between 2017 and 2022. In 2023, Karpathy rejoined OpenAI for a year, leaving this past February. He's posted several highly regarded tutorials covering AI concepts on YouTube, and whenever he talks about AI, people listen.

Most recently, Karpathy has been working on a project called "llm.c" that implements the training process for OpenAI's 2019 GPT-2 LLM in pure C, dramatically speeding up the process and demonstrating that working with LLMs doesn't necessarily require complex development environments. The project's streamlined approach and concise codebase sparked Karpathy's imagination.

Enlarge / The Claude AI iOS app running on an iPhone. (credit: Anthropic)

On Wednesday, Anthropic announced the launch of an iOS mobile app for its Claude 3 AI language models that are similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. It also introduced a new subscription tier designed for group collaboration. Before the app launch, Claude was only available through a website, an API, and other apps that integrated Claude through API.

Like the ChatGPT app, Claude's new mobile app serves as a gateway to chatbot interactions, and it also allows uploading photos for analysis. While it's only available on Apple devices for now, Anthropic says that an Android app is coming soon.

Anthropic rolled out the Claude 3 large language model (LLM) family in March, featuring three different model sizes: Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet, and Claude Haiku. Currently, the app uses Sonnet for regular users and Opus for Pro users.

Enlarge / Part of the cover illustration from "The Applesoft Tutorial" BASIC manual that shipped with the Apple II computer starting in 1981. (credit: Apple, Inc.)

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.

Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.

What is BASIC?

In its most traditional form, BASIC is an interpreted programming language that runs line by line, with line numbers. A typical program might look something like this: