Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot goes electric

Boston Dynamics has recently unveiled an all-electric version of its Atlas humanoid robot, just a day after retiring its hydraulic predecessor. This new iteration of Atlas showcases a more fluid, albeit still slightly jerky, movement compared to earlier models and marks a significant design shift towards a sleeker, more cartoonish appearance, resembling robots like Agility’s Digit and Apptronik’s Apollo. The robot's enhanced mobility and capabilities, including a unique head design with a round display and simpler, three-fingered hands, reflect a departure from strictly human-like features to improve functionality and interaction.

Boston Dynamics' CEO Robert Playter emphasized the commercial and industrial potential of the new Atlas, noting its pilot testing at Hyundai facilities slated for next year with broader production goals further out. The robot's design focuses on practicality in industrial settings, boasting custom actuators at joints for greater range of motion and robustness. The new Atlas is designed to perform complex tasks with enhanced agility, like quick turning and lifting heavy objects, which are essential for integrating into existing workflows without needing major spatial redesigns.

This shift to electric and the focus on more adaptable and resilient designs highlight Boston Dynamics’ commitment to advancing robotic technology in practical applications, moving beyond the viral spectacle of robot capabilities to real-world functionality. The company aims to maintain the Atlas name for commercialization, signaling a strategic decision to leverage its established brand while progressing toward robots that are both practical and capable of complex tasks, paving the way for more advanced implementations in various industries.

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VASA-1: Ultra-realistic AI video from a single photo

A new research paper published by Microsoft introduces "VASA," a novel framework designed to create realistic talking face videos from a single photo and speech audio. VASA-1, their premier model, not only achieves precise lip synchronization with the audio but also captures a wide range of facial expressions and natural head movements, enhancing the realism and liveliness of the generated avatars. This technology operates within a new facial dynamics model and leverages a sophisticated face latent space to produce high-quality videos in real-time, capable of running at up to 40 frames per second with minimal latency, thanks to its efficient use of cutting-edge hardware like the NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU.

The versatility of VASA is demonstrated through its ability to handle various inputs and conditions. It effectively processes out-of-distribution inputs like artistic images and non-English audio, proving its robustness. Additionally, it offers extensive control over the generated content, allowing users to adjust factors such as gaze direction, head distance, and emotional expression to suit specific requirements. These features underscore its potential for creating highly personalized and interactive AI-driven content.

Addressing potential ethical concerns, the creators of VASA emphasize that their technology is intended for positive uses, such as enhancing educational tools, aiding communication, and providing therapeutic support. Despite the risks associated with possible misuse for impersonating real individuals, the team is committed to responsible AI development. They aim to contribute to forgery detection advancements and ensure the technology enhances human well-being, reflecting a balanced approach to innovation and ethical responsibility in AI research.

NVIDIA Speech and Translation AI Models Set Records for Speed and Accuracy

NVIDIA's recent advancements in artificial intelligence for speech and translation have set new industry standards in both speed and accuracy. The NVIDIA Parakeet and Canary models are leading the charts on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard, with Parakeet models offering a variety of configurations tailored to different user needs, boasting rapid transcription speeds and robust noise handling capabilities. On the other hand, the Canary model excels in multilingual speech recognition and translation, supporting languages like English, German, French, and Spanish with remarkable accuracy and efficiency.

The Parakeet-TDT model, a standout within the Parakeet family, delivers the highest accuracy and operates substantially faster than its counterparts by efficiently predicting both tokens and their durations, reducing unnecessary computations. This model is optimized for quick and accurate speech recognition, showcasing NVIDIA's commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI technology. Meanwhile, the Canary model integrates advanced techniques in its encoder-decoder structure, achieving significant compute and memory efficiencies, and facilitating seamless transitions between transcription and translation tasks.

NVIDIA has also pioneered in custom voice creation with its P-Flow model, which won the LIMMITS '24 challenge. P-Flow can generate high-quality personalized speech in real-time and extend its zero-shot TTS capabilities to multiple languages using minimal voice prompts. This technology not only enhances the naturalness and likeness of synthesized speech but also broadens the scope for multilingual applications. As NVIDIA continues to refine these technologies, their potential applications in various sectors are expansive, setting new benchmarks for what AI can achieve in natural language processing and beyond.

Other stuff

• Meta announces Megalodon, LLM with Unlimited Context Length

• Logitech mouse and keyboard users are getting a free AI upgrade

• Alphabet X’s Bellwether harnesses AI to help predict natural disasters

• Reddit CPO talks new features — better translations, moderation, and dev tools

• Stability AI is giving more developers access to its next-gen text-to-image generator

• OpenAI Introduced a series of updates to the Assistants API

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