What if AI could interpret your imagination, turning images in your mind into reality? While that sounds like a detail in a science fiction, researchers have now accomplished exactly this. Researchers found that they could reconstruct highly accurate images from brain activity by using the popular stable diffusion (扩散) image generation model. The authors wrote that unlike previous studies, they didn’t need to train the AI models to create these images.

The researchers said that they first predicted a potential representation, which is a model of the image’s data, from fMRI (功能性磁共振成像) signals. Then, the model was processed and noise was added to it through the diffusion process. Finally, the researchers decoded (解码) text representations from fMRI signals and used them as input to produce a final constructed image.

The researchers wrote that a few studies have produced good reconstructions of images but it was only after training. This resulted in limitations because training complex models are challenging and there are not many samples to work with. Prior to this new study, no other researchers had tried using diffusion models for visual reconstruction.

In the past, we’ve seen other examples of how brainwaves and brain functions can create images. In 2014, a Shanghai - based artist Jody Xiong used sensors to connect sixteen people with disabilities to balloons of paint. The people would then use their thoughts to burst specific balloons and create their own paintings.

With the advancement of AI, more and more researchers have been testing the ways AI models can work with the human brain. In a January 2022 study, researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands trained an AI network on fMRI data from 1, 050 unique faces and converted the brain imaging results into actual images. The study found that the AI was able to perform reconstruction. In the latest study, the researchers found that current diffusion models can now achieve high-quality visual reconstruction.

Have you ever yelled at your computer because it wasn't working? Your computer couldn't “yell” back-until now. AI researchers are now working on computers that can argue and perhaps even win debates with humans.

IBM scientists published a paper in Nature on March 17 about their new AI system-Project Debater. After listening to arguments from its opponent (对手), the system can search around 400 million online articles in less than five minutes. It looks for ideas that can support its own argument.

Testing on the system began in 2019 when it debated with Harish Natarajan, a professional debater who holds the world record for most debate competition victories. The debate topic was whether or not preschool should be funded. Although the AI lost the debate in the end based on the audience vote, the audience said it did very well. Interestingly, 58 percent of the audience said that Project Debater increased their knowledge about the topic. Also Project Debater has shown strength at making impressive and logical opening statements in the debate, according to Scientific American.

After competing with various human debaters, the AI system's overall performance remains poorer, “sounding awkward during an argument,” said Scientific American.

In other words, the arguments in the AI system's debates don't sound like a real human conversation. “Project Debater is far from perfect, and its missteps show just how difficult-and how human-argumentation and debate are,” said Chris Reed of the University of Dundee in the UK.

Humans and technology have been facing off for decades. In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue became the first computer to defeat a reigning (卫冕的) chess champion, So after two decades, have IBM's researchers just reproduced a “Deep Blue” to debate? It's much more than that, the researchers said. Argument and debate are basic capabilities of human inteligence, and it's a step outside of AI's comfort zone to enter this area, according to the article in Nature.

There is mounting evidence that the smartphone era is fading. Phone sales have been in gentle decline since 2016, as slower technological improvement has led to people upgrading less often.

The current big idea is virtual-reality (VR) headsets, promoted in part by pandemic lockdowns. More promising are glasses for experiencing augmented reality (AR), in which computer graphics are overlaid on the real world. Most of America’s big tech firms-among them Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft-as well as Asian giants like ByteDance (TikTok’s Chinese owner) and Sony, are developing or selling VR or AR headsets. What has so far been a niche (有利可图的) market is about to become very crowded.

What does seem to be under way, however, is a gradual movement by consumers towards a series of new wearable devices. These include voice-activated smart headphones, which can make calls, read messages and more, and smart watches, which handle scheduling, navigation and fitness. Many health-tech gadgets measure everything from blood sugar to sleep patterns. In some countries unit sales of these “wearables” are already close to sales of smart phones.

People are not about to ditch their phones, any more than they threw out their laptops a decade ago. But as they interact more often with earphones or, soon glasses, more of them will come to use their phone as a kind of back office, primarily there to provide processing muscle for other gadgets. As chips get even smaller, phones may not be needed even for that.