A herd of migrating SpotMinis is at the mercy of mother Nature in a Planet Earth parody from video artist NIXOLAS (a.k.a. Nicholas King). In the distant future, we find that the versatile critters created by Boston Dynamics became “apex predators” who once ruled the Earth, but now find themselves scavenging for scraps in a barren wasteland.
Using a program called Golaem, which lets artists create and manipulate realistic digital crowds, King teamed up with fellow artists Vojislav Milanovic, Ramtin Ahmadi, and Nawaz Ahmed to create a prescient parody of the David Attenborough series.
King said the entire video took about two or three weeks, and at his Instagram site, you can see some of the behind-the-scenes work, including animating the Boston Dynamics robo-dogs and the ragdoll physics of the creatures.
In the video, the sonorous English narrator implies that the robots themselves are responsible for the destruction of their environment. The video has drawn a lot of comparisons to Horizon Zero Dawn, but King mentioned in a comment he’s never played the game.
The creepily aggressive SpotMinis from Boston Dynamics made the rounds of the internets a few weeks back, with a video showing one of the creatures with a mechanical arm opening a door for his headless buddy.
In a follow-up video, ominously titled “Testing Robustness,” we saw a determined SpotMini fight his way through the door despite his human handler’s best attempts to stop him. Boston Dynamics has released few actual details about the robots themselves, instead letting us speculate as they unveil videos showcasing our new robot overlords.
The SpotMini was unleashed on the world in 2016 with a video showcasing its dance moves, which is truly some nightmare fuel. The Spot Mini weighs about 55 pounds (66 with the arm) and can carry 30 pounds. Using its sensors, it can climb stairs, open doors, and pick up objects.
It’s not really clear what Boston Dynamics’ robots are for, however. Its robot BigDog has been used by the defense department, and the company was briefly bought and then sold by Google. Now they seem content to just build a robot army with better and better capabilities. Isn’t that how Skynet started?
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.