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Written & Compiled by Macklin Andrick, GPJ Sr. Creative Technologist
GPJ Experience Technology is your trusted guide through the latest technological shifts and how they might benefit your next experience.
Another week, another opportunity to explore some of the weird and wild things going on in the tech world! IBM launches WatsonX foundation models for enterprise, Las Vegas builds the world’s largest ball (sorta) and the Texas Rangers are using AI to win their next championship by analyzing plays biometrics along with weather patterns.
The World’s Largest Spherical Structure
At 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, this futuristic entertainment venue in Las Vegas is being billed as the world’s largest spherical structure. Its bowl-shaped theater reportedly contains the world’s highest-resolution wraparound LED screen. And its exterior is fitted with 1.2 million hockey puck-sized LEDs that can be programmed to flash dynamic imagery on a massive scale – again, reportedly the world’s largest.
IBM Launches New WatsonX Foundation Models for Enterprise
Last week, IBM launched an AI platform that gives generative AI customers an option to stay within its ecosystem. Called watsonx, the generative AI foundation model is designed for enterprises to build, tune, deploy and manage foundation models for talent acquisition, customer care, IT operations and application modernization. Because it’s a foundation model, a form of generative AI that trained on terabytes of unstructured data, watsonx doesn’t need to be repeatedly trained on new data sets for each new function to which it’s assigned — it can be transferred to any number of functions and tasks with minor tuning.
NASA Uses VR and AI to Create Virtual Data Worlds
As part of its data visualization research, NASA is experimenting with virtual and mixed reality at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. The aim is to improve the analysis and interpretation of complex data, particularly in relation to the size and distance of geological features on Mars. NASA has always played an important role in the history of virtual reality, and was instrumental in developing the technology in the early 1980s. Today, the US space agency continues to rely on VR for astronaut training and Mars simulations to better understand the Red Planet.
Shutterstock Expands Deal With OpenAI to Build Generative AI Tools
Over the next six years, OpenAI will license data from Shutterstock, including images, videos and music, as well as any associated metadata. Shutterstock, in turn, will gain “priority access” to OpenAI’s latest tech and new editing capabilities that’ll let Shutterstock customers transform images in Shutterstock’s stock content library. Shutterstock says that, in addition, OpenAI will work with it to bring generative AI capabilities to mobile users through Giphy, the GIF library Shutterstock recently acquired from Meta.
Instagram’s Threads Surpasses 100 Million Users
Posts on Threads can be up to 500 characters long and include photos or videos that are up to five minutes long. Threads is initially available in 100 countries, including the US, but not in the European Union. Meta plans to eventually hook Threads into ActivityPub, the decentralized social media protocol that also powers Mastodon. When it’s enabled, Threads users will be able to interact with Mastodon users and take their accounts with them to other clients that support the ActivityPub standard. You can follow GPJ now on threads @gpjexperiencemarketing.
AI Moneyball: One MLB Team Bets Data Will Take It to the World Series
The Texas Rangers MLB club uses AI for everything from game strategy and lineup decisions at the major league level to player development and pitch design in the minor leagues, as well as for drafting and trading players. Traditional solutions, which include both data lakes and warehouses, turned out to be expensive and inefficient for the quantity and type of data the Rangers front office use. “Our warehouse was fine when we were just looking at things like hits or discrete events,” Rangers’ Assistant Director of Research Alexander Booth explains. “But when we start analyzing player positions, frame-by-frame data, biomechanics data, weather data, it’s really hard to do those transformations inside a warehouse.”
More Cool Stuff We Found
- Affordable 3D Printers
- Hallucinations in AI
- AI Chip Wars: Is AMD Ready to Challenge Nvidia’s Market Dominance?
- Want to hire an AI agency? You’re in luck
- Three areas of retail technology companies should be paying attention to
- a16z Releases Open-source Repository for Developers to Host AI Companions
- PoisonGPT: How we hid a lobotomized LLM on Hugging Face to spread fake news
- Nicki Minaj Enraged By Deepfake Video
- Synthesizing Artistic Cinemagraphs from Text
Missed a previous Creative Tech Byte? Find them all here.
