Apple. Anthropic. Disney Research. Google. Meta. Microsoft. NVIDIA. OpenAI. Few places outside Silicon Valley can claim R&D hubs from all of these companies. Fewer still are concentrated in a city of just over 400,000 people—roughly half the size of San Francisco. Over the past two decades, however, many of the world’s most influential technology companies…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology. But it’s high…
Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce, and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are a rapid, scalable way to teach them to do new things, but the robots often fail when they’re pulled out of virtual worlds…