AI & Robotics

DeepMind’s StarCraft II AI can already hang with human players, but now it’s ready to handle the best of the best. The team has revealed that its AlphaStar AI can play one-on-one matches in the real-time strategy game at a Grandmaster level for all three factions (Terran, Protoss, Zerg). The AI is better than 99.8 percent of human players on Battle.net, according to DeepMind.

Strong writing makes all the difference about whether a Hollywood show turns out like Game of Thrones or Pee-Wee Herman’s Big Adventure. That’s why Ron Howard and Brian Glazer’s Imagine Entertainment opened an incubator for writers called Imagine Impact. The film and TV industries employ 2.6 million people in the U.S. alone, and those businesses generate $77 billion a year on wages. But…

Fireflies.ai announced the close of a $5 million seed round today to grow its business and continue its effort to create an AI assistant dedicated to surfacing action items and next steps from what people say in meetings. The seed round was led by Canaan Partners along with F7 Ventures and angel investors like former Slack CPO April Underwood, former Slack CMO Bill Macaitis, and Salesforce…

State-of-the-art machine learning algorithms can extract two-dimensional objects from photographs and render them faithfully in three dimensions. It’s a technique that’s applicable to augmented reality apps and robotics as well as navigation, which is why it’s an acute area of research for Facebook. In a blog post today ahead of the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in…