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This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

The surprising truth about which homes have heat pumps

The news: Heat pumps, which use electricity to both heat and cool homes, are now just as common in low-income households in the US as they are in wealthier ones. This bucks the trend among consumer climate technologies, many of which are much more likely to be adopted by the wealthy.

Why it matters: Heating buildings is a huge climate problem—roughly 10% of global emissions come from our efforts to keep our indoor spaces comfortable. But while governments are eager for people to adopt new appliances that could replace systems that burn fossil fuels, historically, such changes haven’t been distributed equally. Heat pumps, at least in the US, seem to be different. That’s good news.

The big picture: The number of households that rely on heat pumps is still small, and there’s no guarantee that they will continue to be adopted at equal rates by households with different incomes. But financial incentives could help to bring the cost savings and climate progress associated with heat pumps to everyone, not just the rich. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

The Twitter accounts that impersonate Chinese celebrities for clout and cash

A growing number of Twitter accounts have been impersonating outspoken Chinese intellectuals or celebrities. Their posts, which frequently criticize the Chinese government, often draw hundreds of thousands of followers before the deception is publicly exposed.

Although Twitter has been banned in China since 2009, more Chinese users have been accessing the platform with VPN tools in recent years. It’s also become a place rife with spam, scams, and content farms, which has only gotten worse under Elon Musk’s reign. But the emergence of accounts that impersonate Chinese celebrities who don’t have a Twitter presence—likely to farm followers—is a new, and worrying, trend. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

Zeyi’s story is from China Report, his weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Reddit is doubling-down on its controversial API plans
Its CEO is committed to pushing through the changes, in spite of user pushback. (The Verge)

2 Microsoft has been temporarily blocked from buying Activision Blizzard
Which is good news for US regulators, and a blow to Microsoft’s ambitions. (BBC)

3 Nvidia is officially a trillion dollar company
And demand for its chips is showing no signs of waning. (WSJ $)
Oracle’s star is on the rise, too. (Economist $)
These simple design rules could turn the chip industry on its head. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Binance has pushed back against US regulators 
The embattled crypto exchange argued that its business was in danger of folding. (NYT $)

5 NASA has designed a climate change-fighting plane
It’s lighter, faster, and a whole lot more green than traditional airplanes. (Vox)
This is what’s keeping electric planes from taking off. (MIT Technology Review)

6 How the 2024 US election could play out on Twitter
Republican candidates are likely to get special treatment, for starters. (New Yorker $)

7 Inside the race to bring flying taxis to market
A handful of companies are vying to be the first—but safety concerns abound. (FT $)
Saudi Arabia is launching a new airline carrier in 2025. (Bloomberg $)
These aircraft could change how we fly. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Silicon Valley’s jobseekers are pivoting to AI
While it’s still tough to find a job, specializing in AI is smart career future-proofing. (Bloomberg $)
Less brutal commutes would help to lure employees back to offices. (NY Mag $)
How ChatGPT will revolutionize the economy. (MIT Technology Review)

9 We should try to embrace the world’s noises
👂
Over-reliance on noise-canceling tech can leave us hypersensitive to the slightest sound. (Wired $)

10 Creator economy start-ups are in freefall
📉
Their hopes of capitalizing on creators’ popularity have been dashed. (The Information $)

Quote of the day

“It’s a damn ghost town.”

—Rachel Leamy, who runs a shoeshine business in San Francisco, tells the Washington Post how the once-vibrant city is significantly emptier than it was pre-pandemic

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————

By: Rhiannon Williams
Title: The Download: heat pumps for everyone, and fake Twitter accounts in China
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/14/1074709/the-download-heat-pumps-for-everyone-and-fake-twitter-accounts-in-china/
Published Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:10:00 +0000

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The metaverse fashion stylists are here

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1 day ago

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September 26, 2023

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1f496

When I met Jenni Svoboda, she was in the midst of designing a beanie with a melted cupcake top, sprinkles, and doughnuts for ears.

“It’s something you’d probably never wear in real life,” she said with a laugh. But Svoboda isn’t designing for the physical world. She’s designing for the metaverse. Svoboda is working in a burgeoning, if bizarre, new niche: fashion stylists who create or curate outfits for people in virtual spaces.

Keep an eye out for #Forever21 dropping the FIRST of their line of LIMITED beanies starting today at 3 PM EST!

Grab em while you can! They WONT be on sale for 24 hours!

Thank you @Forever21 for the chance to collab on these
💖
#Forever21 #Metaverse #Roblox @Roblox #RobloxUGC pic.twitter.com/h3Y5ennidP

— Love (@Lovespunn) December 5, 2022You can’t touch digital fabric, and if you’re not on virtual platforms like Decentraland and Roblox, you can’t even see these outfits. Nevertheless, metaverse stylists are increasingly being sought after as frequent users seek help dressing their avatars—often in experimental, wildly creative looks that defy personal expectations, societal standards, and sometimes even physics.

Most digital stylists balance their metaverse clients with real-world gigs. Michaela Leitz-Askalan, for example, runs a plus-size styling business in the real world but decided to start selling her services as a metaverse fashion stylist after hanging out in the 3D virtual world Decentraland, where her outfits got her compliments from strangers.

Another stylist, British reality television fashion expert Gemma Sheppard, made the jump to styling people in digital spaces after her goddaughter asked her to buy a pair of $60 sparkly shoes for her Roblox avatar three Christmases ago.

But not all metaverse stylists started out doing a real-world version of the job. Svoboda spends her days designing digital clothing and accessories on Roblox, where her unique fashion sense has made her an it-girl. People are lining up to pay to learn from her.

Being a metaverse fashion stylist isn’t currently a gig that can pay all the bills on its own. Leitz-Askalan says that metaverse styling accounts for about 20% of her income in a good month, and both she and Sheppard juggle multiple jobs in real life.

They say it’s still worth it, though, because the job offers the unique opportunity to work in a new medium and learn new skills. Leitz-Askalan launched her metaverse styling business a couple of years ago, meeting with clients on Discord, a chat platform popular with gamers. She designed lookbooks to help them dress their avatars on platforms like Decentraland, DressX, and Auroboros.

Her clients get an expertly curated outfit; she gets $49 in cryptocurrency. To Leitz-Askalan’s clients, it’s well worth the money. “People are like, ‘I want to try crazy things,’” she says. “And I love that.”

Svoboda is primarily a creator designing clothing and accessories for Roblox avatars, but she has begun to style clients’ avatars as well, and she’s meticulous about working out how to do it.

“We have to trial-and-error it,” she says. Svoboda will often look through users’ history of outfits, ask who their favorite artists and influencers are, and then create looks that fit their aesthetic.

“People give me notes and I go into the [Roblox] catalogue and pick out stuff that represents them,” she says. Svoboda also helps people snag their favorite influencers’ outfits, creating detailed “what they wore” pages linking to products.

None of them say it out loud, but it’s likely that some stylists are at least partly attracted by the potential to jump into what’s potentially a very lucrative market early in the game.

The metaverse fashion industry is growing rapidly, and companies like Roblox are already raking in hundreds of millions of dollars on digital clothes. In 2022, over 11.5 million creators made 62 million clothing and accessory items on Roblox alone. DressX, an online digital fashion marketplace, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding since its launch in 2020 and is one of a few brands Meta is working with to launch its own avatar fashion marketplace for its virtual platform, Horizon Worlds. And the world of haute couture is experimenting with independent metaverse projects after successful runs on other platforms, such as Gucci’s “vault” where people can browse exclusive digital fashions and play games.

Not all these outfits are pricey; indeed, many can be obtained for free. But there’s a growing market of super-exclusive outfits released in collaboration with designers that cost hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on Roblox, whose demographic veers young but is increasingly diverse in terms of age and socioeconomic status,

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————

By: Tanya Basu
Title: The metaverse fashion stylists are here
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/07/1064364/the-metaverse-fashion-stylists-are-here/
Published Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2022 09:59:32 +0000

Did you miss our previous article…
https://mansbrand.com/the-download-europe-vs-chinese-evs-and-making-ai-vision-less-biased/

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The Download: Europe vs Chinese EVs, and making AI vision less biased

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1 day ago

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September 26, 2023

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This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Europe is working to slow down the global expansion of Chinese EVs

Earlier this month, the European Commission announced it is launching an anti-subsidy investigation into electric vehicles coming from China.

The move has long been in the making. The rapid recent growth in popularity of Chinese-made electric vehicles in Europe has raised alarms for the domestic automobile industry on the continent. No matter how it shakes out, an official inquiry could hurt the expansion of the Chinese EV business at a critical moment. Read the full story.

—Zeyi Yang

These new tools could make AI vision systems less biased

Computer vision systems are everywhere. They help classify and tag images on social media feeds, detect objects and faces in pictures and videos, and highlight relevant elements of an image.

However, they are riddled with biases, and they’re less accurate for images of Black or brown people and women. And there’s another problem: the current ways researchers find biases in these systems are themselves biased, sorting people into broad categories that don’t properly account for the complexity that exists among human beings.

Two new papers by researchers at Sony and Meta propose new ways to measure biases in computer vision systems so as to more fully capture the rich diversity of humanity. Developers could use these tools to check the diversity of their data sets, helping lead to better, more diverse training data for AI. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

Getty Images promises its new AI contains no copyrighted art

The news: Getty Images is so confident its new generative AI model is free of copyrighted content that it will cover any potential intellectual-property disputes for its customers.

The background: The generative AI system, announced yesterday, was built by Nvidia and is trained solely on images in Getty’s image library. It does not include logos or images that have been scraped off the internet without consent, and the company is confident that the creators of the images—and any people that appear in them—have consented to having their art used.

Why it matters: The past year has seen a boom in generative AI systems that produce images and text. But AI companies are embroiled in numerous legal battles over copyrighted content, after prominent artists and authors sued them. Read the full story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

What’s changed since the “pause AI” letter six months ago?

Last week marked six months since the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a nonprofit focusing on existential risks surrounding artificial intelligence, shared an open letter signed by famous people such as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Yoshua Bengio.

The letter called for tech companies to “pause” the development of AI language models more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4 for six months—which didn’t happen, obviously.

Melissa Heikkilä, our senior AI reporter, sat down with MIT professor Max Tegmark, the founder and president of FLI, to take stock of what has happened since, and what should happen next. Read the full story.

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Monday.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Here’s what’s lurking inside Meta’s AI database
A whole lot of Shakespeare, erotica, and, err, horror written for children. (The Atlantic $)
Meta’s latest AI model is free for all. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Hollywood’s writers’ strike may be nearing its end
A tentative agreement has been reached, though AI is still a sticking point. (Insider $)
It’ll still take plenty of time to get your favorite shows back on air, though. (Engadget)

3 FBI agents haven’t been trained to use facial recognition properly
But that’s not stopping the bureau from using it anyway. (Wired $)
A TikTok account has been doxxing random targets using the tech. (404 Media)
The movement to limit face recognition tech might finally get a win. (MIT Technology Review)

4 Making new antibiotics is an expensive business
And plenty of companies have gone bankrupt trying to make it happen. (WSJ $)
The future of a US plant that makes drugs for kids is hanging in the balance. (Bloomberg $)

5 A US regulator is combing through Wall Street’s private messages
Bankers are not supposed to use WhatApp and Signal to discuss work matters. (Reuters)

6 To live longer, we need to rid ourselves of old cells
Enter a host of enthusiastic startups ready to rise to the challenge. (Economist $)
Can we find ways

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————

By: Rhiannon Williams
Title: The Download: Europe vs Chinese EVs, and making AI vision less biased
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/26/1080306/the-download-europe-vs-chinese-evs-and-making-ai-vision-less-biased/
Published Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2023 12:10:00 +0000

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What’s changed since the “pause AI” letter six months ago?

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September 26, 2023

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This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here

Last Friday marked six months since the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a nonprofit focusing on existential risks surrounding artificial intelligence, shared an open letter signed by famous people such as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Yoshua Bengio. The letter calling for tech companies to “pause” the development of AI language models more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4 for six months.

Well, that didn’t happen, obviously.

I sat down with MIT professor Max Tegmark, the founder and president of FLI, to take stock of what has happened since. Here are highlights of our conversation. 

On shifting the Overton window on AI risk: Tegmark told me that in conversations with AI researchers and tech CEOs, it had become clear that there was a huge amount of anxiety about the existential risk AI poses, but nobody felt they could speak about it openly “for fear of being ridiculed as Luddite scaremongerers.” “The key goal of the letter was to mainstream the conversation, to move the Overton window so that people felt safe expressing these concerns,” he says. “Six months later, it’s clear that part was a success.”

But that’s about it: “What’s not great is that all the companies are still going full steam ahead and we still have no meaningful regulation in America. It looks like US policymakers, for all their talk, aren’t going to pass any laws this year that meaningfully rein in the most dangerous stuff.”

Why the government should step in: Tegmark is lobbying for an FDA-style agency that would enforce rules around AI, and for the government to force tech companies to pause AI development. “It’s also clear that [AI leaders like Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei] are very concerned themselves. But they all know they can’t pause alone,” Tegmark says. Pausing alone would be “a disaster for their company, right?” he adds. “They just get outcompeted, and then that CEO will be replaced with someone who doesn’t want to pause. The only way the pause comes about is if the governments of the world step in and put in place safety standards that force everyone to pause.”

So how about Elon … ? Musk signed the letter calling for a pause, only to set up a new AI company called X.AI to build AI systems that would “understand the true nature of the universe.” (Musk is an advisor to the FLI.) “Obviously, he wants a pause just like a lot of other AI leaders. But as long as there isn’t one, he feels he has to also stay in the game.”

Why he thinks tech CEOs have the goodness of humanity in their hearts: “What makes me think that they really want a good future with AI, not a bad one? I’ve known them for many years. I talk with them regularly. And I can tell even in private conversations—I can sense it.”

Response to critics who say focusing on existential risk distracts from current harms: “It’s crucial that those who care a lot about current problems and those who care about imminent upcoming harms work together rather than infighting. I have zero criticism of people who focus on current harms. I think it’s great that they’re doing it. I care about those things very much. If people engage in this kind of infighting, it’s just helping Big Tech divide and conquer all those who want to really rein in Big Tech.”

Three mistakes we should avoid now, according to Tegmark: 1. Letting the tech companies write the legislation. 2. Turning this into a geopolitical contest of the West versus China. 3. Focusing only on existential threats or only on current events. We have to realize they’re all part of the same threat of human disempowerment. We all have to unite against these threats. 

Deeper Learning

These new tools could make AI vision systems less biased

Computer vision systems are everywhere. They help classify and tag images on social media feeds, detect objects and faces in pictures and videos, and highlight relevant elements of an image. However, they are riddled with biases, and they’re less accurate when the images show Black or brown people and women.

And there’s another problem: the current ways researchers find biases in these systems are themselves biased, sorting people into broad categories that don’t properly account for the complexity that exists among human beings.

New tools could help: Sony has a tool—shared exclusively with MIT Technology Review—that expands the skin-tone scale into two dimensions, measuring both skin color (from light to dark) and skin hue (from red to yellow). Meta has built a fairness evaluation system called FACET that takes geographic location and lots of different personal characteristics into account, and it’s making its data set freely available. Read more from me here.

Bits and Bytes

Now

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————

By: Melissa Heikkilä
Title: What’s changed since the “pause AI” letter six months ago?
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/26/1080299/six-months-on-from-the-pause-letter/
Published Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2023 11:15:04 +0000

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