This Week in New Age Technology: 11_1_2021
Bite sized news on disruptive technology, every week.
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Virtual Reality🕶
Facebook Goes Full Metaverse, Changing Parent Company Name to “Meta”
Facebook's had a dizzying month.
On October 5th, Frances Haugen testified before the US Senate that "The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people."
She revealed thousands of internal documents referencing a litany of societal harms caused by their platforms.
Since then, they've doubled down on their move to become a Metaverse company, by changing the parent company's name to “Meta”.
They also removed the requirement to sign in to a Facebook account in order to use the Oculus Quest headset, and they plan to rename the Oculus brand to Meta Quest.
Lastly, just this week they acquired the Netflix streaming VR equivalent "Within".
So don't be surprised if by this time next year you find yourself watching the next Squid Games through a headset.
Robotics🤖
Deepmind Acquires Rigid Body Physics Simulator MuJoCo
Next, this Week DeepMind acquired the rigid body physics simulator, MuJoCo, and made the project open sourced.
Now any robotics researcher looking to train artificial intelligence agents can do so without the $3,000 institutional license.
The significance of this is best expressed through the lens of OpenAi's past project, Dactyl, a robot hand trained using 30,000 CPU cores.
OpenAI dropped funding for their Robotics team in July this year, citing lack of high fidelity data sets to train robots, and high simulator compute costs.
So it's likely DeepMind is trying to spur an influx of quality data, to further accelerate robotic development in the coming years.