ByteDance has developed a generative model that can use a single photo to generate photorealistic video of humans in motion. Called OmniHuman-1, the multimodal system supports various visual and audio styles and can generate people doing things like singing, dancing, speaking and moving in a natural fashion. ByteDance says its new technology clears hurdles that hinder existing human-generators — obstacles like short play times and over-reliance on high-quality training data. The diffusion transformer-based OmniHuman addressed those challenges by mixing motion-related conditions into the training phase, a solution ByteDance researchers claim is new. Continue reading ByteDance’s AI Model Can Generate Video from Single Image

OpenAI has unveiled a new frontier model, OpenAI o3, which it claims can “reason” through challenges involving math, science and computer programming. Available to safety and research testers, it is expected to be available to individuals and businesses this year. OpenAI o3 is said to be over 20 percent more efficient at common programming tasks than its predecessor OpenAI o1 and beat a company scientist on a programming test. Model o3 is part of a broader effort to create AI systems that can reason through complex problems. In late December Google debuted a similar platform, the experimental Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Mode. Continue reading OpenAI Previews Two New Reasoning Models: o3 and o3-Mini

Anthropic, maker of the the popular Claude AI chatbot, has updated its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), designed and implemented to mitigate the risks of advanced AI systems. The policy was introduced last year and has since been improved, with new protocols added to ensure AI models are developed and deployed safely as they grow more powerful. This latest update offers “a more flexible and nuanced approach to assessing and managing AI risks while maintaining our commitment not to train or deploy models unless we have implemented adequate safeguards,” according to Anthropic. Continue reading Anthropic Updates ‘Responsible Scaling’ to Minimize AI Risks

Apple researchers have gone public with new multimodal methods for training large language models using both text and images. The results are said to enable AI systems that are more powerful and flexible, which could have significant ramifications for future Apple products. These new models, which Apple calls MM1, support up to 30 billion parameters. The researchers identify multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as “the next frontier in foundation models,” which exceed the performance of LLMs and “excel at tasks like image captioning, visual question answering and natural language inference.” Continue reading Apple Unveils Progress in Multimodal Large Language Models

IBM says it has made a significant improvement in its deep learning techniques, by figuring out a way to divide the data among 64 servers running up to 256 processors. Up until now, companies have run deep learning on a single server, because of the difficulty of synchronizing data among servers and processors. With IBM’s new capability, deep learning tasks will benefit from big improvements in speed, enabling advances in many different tasks. Customers using IBM Power System servers will have access to the new technology. Continue reading IBM Divides Data Among Servers, Speeds Up Deep Learning

The advent of 4K TVs presents much the same conundrum that HD did when it arrived: fabulous new display technology but very little content. One solution is to upscale HD and 2K content to 4K, but the result isn’t always ideal. “Generally, any form of scaling creates an adverse effect on the image, even though the 4K display is better,” said Graham Loveridge, Pixelworks SVP of strategic marketing and business development. “That’s because the pixels are being stretched. You’re creating a ramp rather than a sharp transition.” Continue reading Pixelworks Enables Content Owners to Upscale HD/2K to 4K

In its effort to get apps, games and entire desktops running on the cloud, Amazon is launching two new Web services. The first, AppStream, enables developers to run and render an application in Amazon’s cloud. It can then be distributed to users on a variety of platforms. The second, WorkSpaces, will allow virtual desktops to be managed through Amazon’s cloud, a solution that Amazon claims would run for less than half the cost of a company maintaining its own virtualization servers. Continue reading Amazon Unveils New Web Services to Stream From the Cloud