 |
|
|
|||||
On June 8, Elon Musks chatbot, Grok, launched into a tirade of antisemitic, white supremacist, and misogynistic tweets on X, including making multiple comments praising Adolf Hitler. The incident comes just days after xAI, the artificial intelligence startup powering Grok, received clearance to operate 15 natural gas turbines at its data center outside Memphis. The turbines will be permitted to release a certain amount of emissions each yearincluding nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, and formaldehydewhich, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), are a threat not only to the environment, but also to the health of local community members. Now, as Grok comes under fire for hate speech, its parent company is facing a lawsuit for potentially violating the Clean Air Act. Heres what to know about Groks most recent problematic rant, and the controversial data center fueling the chatbot: What happened with Grok? In a series of replies highlighted by users on Tuesday, Grok used the antisemitic dog whistle phrase every damn time, violently described acts of sexual assault, and repeatedly praised Hitler. This isnt the first time that the chatbots algorithm has regurgitated misinformation or hate speech, either: During the 2024 presidential election, Grok spread misinformation for over a week, and this May, a tweak to the chatbot’s programming caused it to constantly repeat false claims about white genocide in South Africa, which were repeatedly supported by Musk himself. Grok was explicitly developed as an anti-woke alternative to other chatbots, and was trained on data pulled from the increasingly conservative environment on X with few guardrails around extremist content, but the most recent comments were particularly vitriolic. In response, the Grok account tweeted that it was actively working to remove the inappropriate posts, and Musk himself added that Grok was too eager to please and be manipulated. Following the incident, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced she was stepping down. Amidst all of this chaos, it mightve been easy to miss the news that xAI is actively investing even more fundsand greenhouse gas emissionsinto furthering the AI technology that powers Grok. Why xAI is facing an NAACP lawsuit for its South Memphis data center Currently, xAI is developing the AI technology that powers Grok using a supercomputer facility called Colossus outside of Memphis, Tennessee. Data centers like Colossus generally require a lot of energy because, on average, running AI software takes about 10 times the electricity of equivalent non-AI software. Due to this massive demand, the majority of AI data centers can’t count on the existing grid to provide enough power for their purposes at any given time. So, companies like xAI turn to their own, outside power sources for a constant supply of fuel. On July 2, regulators at the Shelby County Health Department granted xAI permission to operate 15 natural gas turbines to fuel the data center. The permit gives xAI clearance to emit certain amounts of pollution every 12 months to power Colossus, including 87 tons of nitrogen oxides, 94 tons of carbon monoxide, 73 tons of particulate pollution, and 9.8 tons of formaldehyde (a known carcinogen), among others. But, according to the SELC, thats not a full accounting of the total pollution. On June 15, on behalf of the NAACP, the SELC sent a letter to xAI signaling its intent to sue the company over continued use of unpermitted gas turbines at its South Memphis data center, alleging that the company violated the Clean Air Act by operating dozens of polluting turbines without permits or public oversight. In a press release, the SELC claims that, after xAI began its operations at the data center in June 2024 (long before the county granted this most recent permission), the company began installing dozens of methane gas turbines without any permits. Aerial images obtained by SELC revealed 35 turbines at the site in March, and follow-up thermal images obtained in April showed that nearly all of the turbines were emitting significant amounts of heat, indicating they were running, the release reads. New satellite images show that, while the company has removed some smaller-sized turbines, it has recently installed three larger turbines. The statement goes on to note that gas turbines release smog-forming pollution and chemicals that are tied to increases in asthma, respiratory diseases, heart problems, and certain cancers, adding that the South Memphis data center is located near several predominantly Black communities that are already overburdened with industrial pollution. In May, the SELC also claimed that it had uncovered documents indicating that xAI plans to install between 40 and 90 methane gas turbines at a second South Memphis data center, though that finding was quickly refuted by the Greater Memphis Chamber. Currently, the NAACPs lawsuit against xAI is still pending. In regard to the Shelby County Health Departments recent turbine approvals, the SELC argued in a July 2 press release that the decision ignores the facilitys continued use of turbines not covered by the permit and months of intense public pushback. The decision to give xAI an air permit for its polluting gas turbines flies in the face of the hundreds of Memphians who spoke out against the companys permit request, Amanda Garcia, an SELC Senior Attorney, said in the release. Instead of confronting long-standing air pollution problems in South Memphis, the Shelby County Health Department is turning a blind eye to obvious Clean Air Act violations in order to allow another polluter to set up shop in this already-overburdened community without appropriate protections.
Category:
E-Commerce
Intangible is the first tool that could make generative AI video truly usable. The new web appcreated by Pixar, Apple, Google, and Unity alumniis trying to change the user experience of generative AI video by letting you fully control your video using a 3D interface, thus solving the lack of control of current text prompts. Think about it as a 3D animation program that lets you control the stage, characters, and camera in your film, with a generative AI rendering engine that will turn those elements into reality. Intangible’s current version feels half-baked, and it will not produce The Godfather yet, but its definitely a step in the right direction for the generative AI video user experience.“To deliver professional-grade results in creative industries like film, advertising, events, and games, the directors, producers, and every creative on the team needs control over set design, shot composition, art direction, pacing, cameras, and more to deliver on the creative vision,” Intangible chief product officer Charles Migos tells me over email. “Current AI models are reliant on extensive prompting, and language alone isn’t enough to convey creative intent. By providing generative AI models with spatial intelligence, Intangible allows creatives to get closer to professional-grade results with less prompting, more feel, and more control.”Migos is right that we need a better way to control the imagination of generative AI video engines. While generative AI video is getting to the point at which it is truly indistinguishable from reality, creating it is like rolling the dice. There’s still a chasm between the vision in your mind and what comes out of Google’s Veo 3 or Kling. This makes it pretty much unusable for everything but memes, skits, storyboards, and the occasional ad stunt.While some AI models let you set camera paths or define some characters and objects using images, the prompts that create the videos are inherently limited by the interpretable nature of language. Every person and AI visualizes any given text differently. Thats the beauty of reading a book, but it’s a limitation when it comes to creating what you have in mind. That’s why Alfred Hitchcock meticulously planned his films using storyboards, so that everyone in the production could truly visualize the intangible nature of his imagination to faithfully capture Cary Grant’s desperation as a biplane tried to kill him in North by Northwest.[Image: Intangible]Spatial intelligenceMigos and CEO Bharat Vasan believe that to truly unleash the power of generative AI for video production, we must add spatial intelligence to the interface. Computer vision expert Fei-Fei Li, known as the godmother of artificial intelligence, has defined spatial intelligence as the ability, both in humans and artificial intelligence systems, to perceive, interpret, reason about, and interact with the three-dimensional world. This involves not just recognizing objects, but understanding their positions, relationships, and functions within a physical space, and being able to act upon that understanding.“By building in interactive 3D from the outset, Intangible’s world model gives generative AI image and video generation models the ability to be more precise, without extensive prompting,” Vasan says. This precision is what current text-to-video tools fundamentally lack. When you describe a scene in words, you’re forcing the AI to interpret spatial relationships through languagean inherently imprecise translation that often results in the AI changing things and adding objects or actions that you didnt have in mind. Intangible grounds generative AI models in structured 3D scenes with real camera control and spatial logic, which Vasan says “provides best-in-class coherence in the results, which we further improve with object descriptions, reference imagery, and fine-tuning models [LoRAs, or low-rank adaptations]. The goal is to address one of the biggest complaints about current AI video tools: the lack of coherence and continuity between frames.”[Image: Intangible]How it worksThe platform allows users to build custom 3D scenes using drag-and-drop objects, set up cameras, and control them. The interface is pretty simple: You can start from a preset scene or with a blank world. Theres a general viewport that shows you the scene, with a ground ready for you to start dropping buildings, characters, and other objects from a library of more than 5,000 assets.At the bottom of the interface, a toolbox gives you access to all you need. To the left, icons allow you to open a scene panel in which you can add and reorder all the shots that will form your final video. In the center, a central prompt allows you to add new objects using text. To its left, there are three icons to add objects to the scene. The first one allows you to display a palette to pick an object from the library of premade assets. Then there is an icon to add primitiveslike spheres, cubes, or pyramidsto create your own basic objects. Finally, a third button lets you add what the company calls “interactables”: cameras, characters, waypoints to tell the camera where to move, and “populators,” which will fill your scene with variations of the same objects, like bushes or shrubs in a forest.Working in this interface is pretty straightforward. Objects in the scene can be moved around with standard 3D handles, with arrows to move, cubes to scale, and arches to rotate the objects in all three axes. The interfaceat least using Chrome in my Macbook Air 15 with M2 chipwas sluggish but usable, with some serious pauses at the beginning of the session, which got better later on.To the right of the prompt field, there are two icons that switch between edit and visualization modes. The latter opens a side panel on the right of the screen that contains all you need to tell the generative AI how to render your scene: how the objects look, how they interact with each other, what the lighting and the atmosphere look like, and anything else you want to define. There are also options to set up the time of the day or the final look of your video, which includes modes like photorealism, 3D cartoon, or film noir. Once you write your prompt, click the “generate” button . . . and thats it.The idea is good. I tried it (here, its free for now), and it works-ish. I started from one of the templates, a Roman urban scene. I quickly added an elephant, positioned and scaled it up with the object handles, and then I clicked on the visualization icon to set the prompt (a premade one was already there), and clicked on generate.The results were just okay. Intangible does what the company claims, but it still makes mistakes. You can see it in the way it rendered this scene with a giant elephant in a Roman street. The Colosseum is gone, replaced by a mountain and some pointy things I cant identify. There are rendering mistakes as well, and the people are wearing the wrong clothesthat is, unless I missed the history class in which they teach that Romans wore jeans and Daisy Dukes.Once you have your shot, you can turn it into a video. This is where things get disappointing. I thought Intangible would use its own generative AI engine to directly interpret the 3D scene itselfas Nvidia demonstrated six years agoand turn it into a final photorealistic video using the objects to guide the final rendering. In reality, it feeds your still image to the latest version of Klinga popular, pretty realistic rendering engine from China that can turn any image into a living video, following a prompt. If you are a 3D artist, you will be better off combining your current workflow using Kling or any other image-to-video generative AI (as some people are already doing).If you are starting from scratch with 3D software, Intangible can work for you even if it is nowhere near perfect. The software will get better: In the next three years, we expect tools like Intangible will be able to cover all aspects of preproduction and digital production for existing forms of media, Migos and Vasan tell me. They also believe that AI tools bring an opportunity to expand visual storytelling as an art form, creating new categories that human creativity thrives in, as linear, interactive, and immersive media blend. . . . We expect tools like Intangible to be both simple and powerful enough that it empowers a new generation of creatives, not just those who are technical or prompting experts.For now, despite the glitches, Intangibles premise is the right one: People need a better way to control AI video because text is not a good interface when you are trying to visualize an idea. Spatial intelligence may be the key to solving it. At the very least, this new software shows that, when it comes to artificial intelligence, we still need to work on a better, more natural, and precise user experience.
Category:
E-Commerce
After years of research, learning, and development, Ikea says it’s ready to release a line of products it hopes will change the smart home game. The Swedish furniture manufacturer and retailer announced Wednesday that it will release 20 smart home products in January 2026 that it calls its “biggest step” yet to make smart home technology open, simple, and affordable. Ikea has released smart light bulbs and systems before, and previously partnered with Sonos for speakers, but this relaunched smart home line was designed to be universal. [Photo: Ikea] “Our goal is to make the smart home easy to use, easy to understand, and within reach for the many,” Ikea of Sweden’s range manager David Granath said in a statement. The heart of Ikea’s smart home system will be Dirigera, a hub that’s compatible with the smart home technical standard Matter. That means Ikea’s line will work with smart home devices across different brands. It’s a system built for versatility and designed specifically to lower the threshold for consumers to get started on their own smart home systems. [Photo: Ikea] Ikea didn’t reveal much about the products other than to say the goal was not to add technology for technology’s own sake. Instead, Ikea wants to build a smarter smart home that’s supportive and adaptable. Forthcoming products will replace the functions of existing products, Granath confirmed to The Verge, and a pair of Bluetooth speakers being released ahead of the wider January launch act as a preview. Nattbad, coming out this month, was designed to look like a vintage speaker in yellow, pink, or black, while Blomprakt, a table speaker-lamp that will come in beige, black, and blue, will be released in October. Both are minimal but attractive and signal Ikea’s general direction for home tech design. [Photo: Ikea] “We understand how people want to furnish with sound in a way that adds atmosphere and feels natural in the home,” Granath says. “Our aim is to make sound accessible, functional, and enjoyable without adding complexity.” This is smart home tech made easy. And if Ikea can deliver for consumers like it thinks it can, more connected homes could soon be coming to the massesand the retailer will mark its territory in the smart home space.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||