Monthly Archives: December 2022

Meta researchers create AI that masters Diplomacy, tricking human players

Enlarge / A screenshot of an online game of Diplomacy, including a running chat dialog, provided by a Cicero researcher. (credit: Meta AI) On Tuesday, Meta AI announced the development of Cicero, which it claims is the first AI to achieve human-level performance in the strategic board game Diplomacy. It’s a notable achievement because the…

Apple iPhone factory workers clash with police in China

Enlarge / Workers walk outside Hon Hai Group’s Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China, in 2010. (credit: Getty) Violent worker protests have erupted at the world’s largest iPhone factory in central China as authorities at the Foxconn plant struggle to contain a COVID-19 outbreak while maintaining production ahead of the peak holiday season. Workers at the…

Nvidia AI plays Minecraft, wins machine-learning conference award

Enlarge / MineDojo’s AI can perform complex tasks in Minecraft. (credit: Nvidia) A paper describing MineDojo, Nvidia’s generalist AI agent that can perform actions from written prompts in Minecraft, won an Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper Award at the 2022 NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference, Nvidia revealed on Monday. To train the MineDojo framework…

Apple slices its AI image synthesis times in half with new Stable Diffusion fix

Enlarge / Two examples of Stable Diffusion-generated artwork provided by Apple. (credit: Apple) On Wednesday, Apple released optimizations that allow the Stable Diffusion AI image generator to run on Apple Silicon using Core ML, Apple’s proprietary framework for machine-learning models. The optimizations will allow app developers to use Apple Neural Engine hardware to run Stable…

Darknet markets generate millions in revenue selling stolen personal data

Enlarge (credit: Peach_istock via Getty Images) It is common to hear news reports about large data breaches, but what happens once your personal data is stolen? Our research shows that, like most legal commodities, stolen data products flow through a supply chain consisting of producers, wholesalers, and consumers. But this supply chain involves the interconnection…

PCI standards group deflects, assigns blame for melting GPU power connectors

Enlarge / Nvidia’s 12VHPWR power cable adapter, as shipped with an RTX 4080. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Nvidia’s new RTX 4090 and 4080 GPUs both use a new connector called 12VHPWR to deliver power as a way to satisfy ever-more power-hungry graphics cards without needing to set aside the physical space required for three or four…