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Meta’s impressive, photorealistic digital replicas of real places built using its “Hyperscape” capture tech, which uses the cameras on a Quest 3 or Quest 3S VR headset to scan a room, have so far been solitary spaces. If you wanted to visit a virtual version of a room in your house (or of Gordon Ramsay’s home kitchen), you could only do it on your own. But beginning this week, Meta is rolling out the ability to share links that will let other people visit Hyperscape rooms with you in a Quest 3 or 3S VR headset or via the Meta…

Google has announced it's testing a new AI-powered search tool, Scholar Labs, that's designed to answer detailed research questions. But its demonstration highlighted a bigger question about finding "good" science studies. How much will scientists trust a tool that forgoes typical ways of gauging a study's popularity with the scientific establishment in favor of reading the relationships between words to help surface good research? The new search tool uses AI to identify the main topics and relationships in a user's query and is currently available to a limited set of logged-in users. The demo video from Scholar Labs featured a…

Google filed a motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit brought by anti-corporate diversity activist Robby Starbuck, who claimed Google’s AI falsely associated him with sexual assault allegations and a white nationalist. Starbuck’s claims against Google came after he filed a similar lawsuit against Meta, whose AI he claimed falsely asserted that he’d participated in the January 6th riot at the US Capitol. But Meta settled that lawsuit in August and even hired Starbuck as an advisor to help address “ideological and political bias” in its AI chatbot, The Wall Street Journal reported. The outlet noted last month that so far,…

Current and former OpenAI employees have grown increasingly frustrated by the fact that the company hasn't allowed them to donate their equity to charity in years. But OpenAI has finally seemed to bow to pressure, sending out an email from the company's equity team stating that current and former employees with eligible shares will be able to participate, according to a memo viewed by The Verge. A lot of money is on the line: It could give employees who got six-figure equity deals in 2019 the chance to donate millions of dollars to charity. A source familiar with the situation…