Toolbox

Sohonet has acquired 5th Kind, a cloud-based video collaboration platform for the film and TV production industry. Over the last decade, 5th Kind has helped thousands of creatives streamline their increasingly complex workflows with a cloud-based asset management and discovery platform that enables key stakeholders to securely collaborate at global scale, across the entire content lifecycle.

Sohonet’s real-time remote collaboration technology and world-class media network combined with 5th Kind’s near-time dailies review functionality and powerful asset workflow platform will provide a secure, integrated and scalable collaborative experience for filmmakers. The pairing will unlock significant opportunities for productions to reduce costs and timelines, especially as more creative workflows centralize assets and workflows in the cloud.

“Content creation today is increasingly global, complex and data intensive,” said Chuck Parker, CEO of Sohonet. “As Sohonet becomes a creative-centric asset hub and workflow management platform, we are focused on connecting industry talent with the tools and resources they need, to the many places that they now work--on set, on-prem facilities, at home, private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure locations.”

On what changes this will bring to the industry, Parker noted, “With more than 60 production facility partners supporting high-speed on-set communications for over 700 soundstages at premium locations across the globe, we believe we will soon deliver on the much-discussed efficiency and effectiveness of cloud-first workflows by enabling the near-time upload of original camera files (OCF) from the production’s video village directly to the cloud.”

Parker added, “Productions will no longer be required to spend time and energy on a bifurcated workflow where proxies created on set for editorial and full resolution video assets are sent to the post partner via hard drives. By delivering the OCF directly into public, private or hybrid cloud repositories, productions can choose to anchor their postproduction workflows in the cloud. This allows their postproduction partners and creatives from around the world to collaborate quickly and cost effectively.”

“Real-time collaboration between often geographically dispersed creative teams is a critical success factor for driving efficiency and generating commercial returns,” said Joe Zaller, founder of Devoncroft Partners, a market research and strategic consulting firm in the M&E Industry. “So, it makes sense that Sohonet would seek to expand its services by adding 5th Kind to its portfolio.”

Parker concluded, “As we integrate 5th Kind capabilities more deeply into Sohonet, we are excited and energized about the opportunity to provide our connected storytellers the power of asset search, identification and workflow orchestration as they navigate and mitigate the complexity of today’s content creation workflows.”

Even if you haven't tried artificial intelligence tools that can write essays and poems or conjure new images on command, chances are the companies that make your household products are already starting to do so.

Mattel has put the AI image generator DALL-E to work by having it come up with ideas for new Hot Wheels toy cars. Used vehicle seller CarMax is summarizing thousands of customer reviews with the same "generative" AI technology that powers the popular chatbot ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, Snapchat is bringing a chatbot to its messaging service. And the grocery delivery company Instacart is integrating ChatGPT to answer customers' food questions.

Coca-Cola plans to use generative AI to help create new marketing content. And while the company hasn't detailed exactly how it plans to deploy the technology, the move reflects the growing pressure on businesses to harness tools that many of their employees and consumers are already trying on their own.

"We must embrace the risks," said Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey in a recent video announcing a partnership with startup OpenAI — maker of both DALL-E and ChatGPT — through an alliance led by the consulting firm Bain. "We need to embrace those risks intelligently, experiment, build on those experiments, drive scale, but not taking those risks is a hopeless point of view to start from."

Indeed, some AI experts warn that businesses should carefully consider potential harms to customers, society and their own reputations before rushing to embrace ChatGPT and similar products in the workplace.

"I want people to think deeply before deploying this technology," said Claire Leibowicz of The Partnership on AI, a nonprofit group founded and sponsored by the major tech providers that recently released a set of recommendations for companies producing AI-generated synthetic imagery, audio and other media. "They should play around and tinker, but we should also think, what purpose are these tools serving in the first place?"

Some companies have been experimenting with AI for a while. Mattel revealed its use of OpenAI's image generator in October as a client of Microsoft, which has a partnership with OpenAI that enables it to integrate its technology into Microsoft's cloud computing platform.

But it wasn't until the November 30 release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, a free public tool, that widespread interest in generative AI tools began seeping into workplaces and executive suites.

"ChatGPT really sort of brought it home how powerful they were," said Eric Boyd, a Microsoft executive who leads its AI platform. "That's changed the conversation in a lot of people's minds where they really get it on a deeper level. My kids use it and my parents use it."

There is reason for caution, however. While text generators like ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing chatbot can make the process of writing emails, presentations and marketing pitches faster and easier, they also have a tendency to confidently present misinformation as fact. Image generators trained on a huge trove of digital art and photography have raised copyright concerns from the original creators of those works.

"For companies that are really in the creative industry, if they want to make sure that they have copyright protection for (the outputs of) those models, that's still an open question," said attorney Anna Gressel of the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, which advises businesses on how to use AI.

A safer use has been thinking of the tools as a brainstorming "thought partner" that won't produce the final product, Gressel said.

"It helps create mock ups that then are going to be turned by a human into something that is more concrete," she said.

And that also helps ensure that humans don't get replaced by AI. Forrester analyst Rowan Curran said the tools should speed up some of the "nitty-gritty" of office tasks — much like previous innovations such as word processors and spell checkers — rather than putting people out of work, as some fear.

"Ultimately it's part of the workflow," Curran said. "It's not like we're talking about having a large language model just generate an entire marketing campaign and have that launch without expert senior marketers and all kinds of other controls."

For consumer-facing chatbots getting integrated into smartphone apps, it gets a little trickier, Curran said, with a need for guardrails around technology that can respond to users' questions in unexpected ways.

Public awareness fueled growing competition between cloud computing providers Microsoft, Amazon and Google, which sell their services to big organizations and have the massive computing power needed to train and operate AI models. Microsoft announced earlier this year it was investing billions more dollars into its partnership with OpenAI, though it also competes with the startup as a direct provider of AI tools.

Google, which pioneered advancements in generative AI but has been cautious about introducing them to the public, is now playing catch up to capture its commercial possibilities including an upcoming Bard chatbot. Facebook parent Meta, another AI research leader, builds similar technology but doesn't sell it to businesses in the same way as its big tech peers.

Amazon has taken a more muted tone, but makes its ambitions clear through its partnerships — most recently an expanded collaboration between its cloud computing division AWS and the startup Hugging Face, maker of a ChatGPT rival called Bloom.

Hugging Face decided to double down on its Amazon partnership after seeing the explosion of demand for generative AI products, said Clement Delangue, the startup's co-founder and CEO. But Delangue contrasted his approach with competitors such as OpenAI, which doesn't disclose its code and datasets.

Hugging Face hosts a platform that allows developers to share open-source AI models for text, image and audio tools, which can lay the foundation for building different products. That transparency is "really important because that's the way for regulators, for example, to understand these models and be able to regulate," he said.

It is also a way for "underrepresented people to understand where the biases can be (and) how the models have been trained," so that the bias can be mitigated, Delangue said.

Matt O'Brien & Haleluya Hadero are AP technology writers

I climbed into the front seat of the air taxi, buckled the seat belt and braced as the aircraft lifted off. The futuristic cityscape of Busan, South Korea, dropped away, and a digital avatar popped up on the windscreen with a message.

I couldn't answer as a wave of motion sickness hit me. The virtual reality goggles combined with motion-simulating seats pitching back and forth and side to side made it feel like I was actually hovering and maneuvering in the air. They also made me so nauseous I had to close my eyes for the rest of the three-minute journey.

Welcome to the metaverse — sort of.

South Korean company SK Telecom's air taxi mockup was one of the eye-catching demonstrations at MWC, or Mobile World Congress, the world's biggest telecom industry trade show. Tech companies and wireless carriers at this week's expo in Barcelona displayed advancements to connect people and businesses online, increasingly in new virtual reality worlds dubbed the metaverse.

Visitor Mark Varahona also felt woozy after trying the flight experience but is still considering buying a virtual reality headset, the hardware needed to enter any immersive digital universe.

"I was thinking to buy it before coming here. And maybe now I will buy them," he said. "They look quite nice."

The metaverse exploded in popularity after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in late 2021 pronounced it the next big thing for the internet, renaming his social media empire and socking tens of billions into the idea.

He portrayed it as 3D community where people can meet, work and play — doing everything from trying on digital clothes, holding a virtual meeting or taking a trip online.

But doubts about the viability of the metaverse have been creeping in as the initial hype wears off. Sales of virtual reality headsets in the U.S. slipped 2% by December from the previous year, according to NPD Research. Reality Labs, which makes Meta Quest headsets, posted an operating loss of $13.7 billion in 2022.

Meta has said it plans to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the metaverse. When asked for an update, the company said, "Our expansion in Europe was always a long-term one planned over a number of years. We remain committed to Europe."

The "metaverse has not gone away," said Ben Wood, principal analyst at CCS Insight. "But I think there's a lot more skepticism about what role it's going to play, particularly in the consumer domain beyond the obvious areas of things like gaming."

The definition of the metaverse has been hard to pin down, adding to the skepticism. It is not the same as virtual reality and its cousin, augmented reality, said Tuong Nguyen, a Gartner analyst specializing in emerging technologies.

"So AR and VR very closely related to the metaverse in the same way that computers are related to the Internet," he said. "Think of it instead as evolution of the Internet, which changes the way that we interact with the world."

So how should SK Telecom's flight simulator be defined?

"Technically, it's not metaverse, but kind of metaverse," said Ken Wohn, a company manager.

South Korea's biggest telecom provider teamed up last year with California's Joby Aviation to develop an electric air taxi service to the country.

One day the air taxis might operate autonomously, using high-speed 5G wireless connections, Wohn said.

It was a different experience at French wireless company Orange's metaverse demonstration, where users were transported to a futuristic neon-hued technoscape with lightning bolts, giant robots and a falcon carrying a green orb in its talons.

A dancing figure appeared, representing the movements of a real-life dancer wearing motion-capture gear. It was a dazzling display, though what consumer purpose it had was not immediately clear.

Miguel Angel Almonacid, Orange's network strategy director for Spain, said it demonstrates how new 5G networks will eliminate lag for metaverse users watching something happening far away.

The metaverse might be more suited to practical purposes in the workplace, analysts said.

"That's where we'll see traction first because the barriers aren't as high," said Gartner's Nguyen. For example, a worker could use augmented reality glasses to pull up diagnostics or an instruction manual.

Spanish startup La Frontera uses the metaverse to provide virtual meetings with "realistic avatars," Marta Ortiz, a business development executive, said as she guided me through the company's metaverse.

We arrived first on a beach, with boulders, palm trees and a light blue sea. Her avatar appeared, a head and shoulders with disembodied hands hovering in front of her chest. We entered a nearby conference room with a boardroom table, where I used handheld controllers to pick up 3D objects like a toy ray gun and a bottle of Champagne.

Other metaverse applications include training for risky, repetitive or highly detailed procedures, like surgery.

The beach disappeared, replaced by an overturned tanker truck on fire. A fire extinguisher hung in midair. Ortiz told me to grab it with my virtual hand and spray it at the flames, which started to die down.

The virtual world also could be useful for showcasing products too big to move easily, like private jets.

Or they could be too small for humans.

The scene changed to a sci-fi setting, with crimson walls rising up around us, representing the inside of a blood vessel. Reddish-brown doughnut-shaped blood cells floated past, followed by spiky orbs. The blood vessel's wall opened up, exposing pulsing white streaks on a blue background, depicting neurons in a brain.

La Frontera works with pharmaceutical companies to "show how a drug works in the body at a cellular level," Ortiz said. In this case, it was a medicine to treat multiple sclerosis, which attacks brain neurons.

Speed around a French village in the video game Gran Turismo and you might spot a Corvette behind you trying to catch your slipstream.

The technique of using the draft of an opponent's racecar to speed up and overtake them is one favored by skilled players of PlayStation's realistic racing game.

But this Corvette driver is not being controlled by a human — it's GT Sophy, a powerful artificial intelligence agent built by PlayStation-maker Sony.

Gran Turismo players have been competing against computer-generated racecars since the franchise launched in the 1990s, but the new AI driver that was unleashed last week on Gran Turismo 7 is smarter and faster because it's been trained using the latest AI methods.

"Gran Turismo had a built-in AI existing from the beginning of the game, but it has a very narrow band of performance and it isn't very good," said Michael Spranger, chief operating officer of Sony AI. "It's very predictable. Once you get past a certain level, it doesn't really entice you anymore."

But now, he said, "this AI is going to put up a fight."

Visit an artificial intelligence laboratory at universities and companies like Sony, Google, Meta, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and it's not unusual to find AI agents like Sophy racing cars, slinging angry birds at pigs, fighting epic interstellar battles or helping human gamers build new Minecraft worlds -- all part of the job description for computer systems trying to learn how to get smarter in games.

But in some instances, they are also trying to learn how to get smarter in the real world. In a January paper, a University of Cambridge researcher who built an AI agent to control Pokémon characters argued it could "inspire all sorts of applications that require team management under conditions of extreme uncertainty, including managing a team of doctors, robots or employees in an ever-changing environment, like a pandemic-stricken region or a war zone."

And while that might sound like a kid making a case for playing three more hours of Pokémon Violet, the study of games has been used to advance AI research — and train computers to solve complex problems — since the mid-20th century.

Initially, AI was used on games like checkers and chess to test at winning strategy games. Now a new branch of research is more focused on performing open-ended tasks in complex worlds and interacting with humans, not just for the purpose of beating them.

"Reality is like a super-complicated game," said Nicholas Sarantinos, who authored the Pokémon paper and recently turned down a doctoral offer at Oxford University to start an AI company aiming to help corporate workplaces set up more collaborative teams.

In the web-based Pokémon Showdown battle simulator, Sarantinos developed an algorithm to analyze a team of six Pokémon — predicting how they would perform based on all the possible battle scenarios ahead of them and their comparative strengths and weaknesses.

Microsoft, which owns the popular Minecraft game franchise as well as the Xbox game system, has tasked AI agents with a variety of activities — from steering clear of lava to chopping trees and making furnaces. Researchers hope some of their learnings could eventually play a role in real-world technology, such as how to get a home robot to take on certain chores without having to program it to do so.

While it "goes without stating" that real humans behave quite differently from fictional video game creatures, "the core ideas can still be used," Sarantinos said. "If you use psychology tests, you can take this information to conclude how well they can work together."

Amy Hoover, an assistant professor of informatics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who's built algorithms for the digital card game Hearthstone, said "there really is a reason for studying games" but it is not always easy to explain.

"People aren't always understanding that the point is about the optimization method rather than the game," she said.

Games also offer a useful testbed for AI — including for some real-world applications in robotics or health care — that's safer to try in a virtual world, said Vanessa Volz, an AI researcher at the Danish startup Modl.ai, which builds AI systems for game development.

But, she adds, "it can get overhyped."

"It's probably not going to be one big breakthrough and that everything is going to be shifted to the real world," Volz said.

Japanese electronics giant Sony launched its own AI research division in 2020 with entertainment in mind, but it's nonetheless attracted broader academic attention. Its research paper introducing Sophy last year made it on the cover of the prestigious science journal Nature, which said it could potentially have effects on other applications such as drones and self-driving vehicles.

The technology behind Sophy is based on an algorithmic method known as reinforcement learning, which trains the system by rewarding it when it gets something right as it runs virtual races thousands of times.

"The reward is going to tell you that, 'You're making progress. This is good,' or, 'You're off the track. Well, that's not good,'" Spranger said.

The world's best Gran Turismo players are still finishing ahead of Sophy at tournaments, but average players will find it hard to beat — and can adjust difficulty settings depending on how much they want to be challenged.

PlayStation players will only get to try racing against Sophy until March 31, on a limited number of circuits, so it can get some feedback and go back into testing. Peter Wurman, director of Sony AI America and project lead on GT Sophy, said it takes about two weeks for AI agents to train on 20 PlayStations.

"To get it spread throughout the whole game, it takes some more breakthroughs and some more time before we're ready for that," he said.

And to get it onto real streets or Formula One tracks? That could take a lot longer.

Self-driving car companies adopt similar machine-learning techniques, but "they don't hand over complete control of the car the way we are able to," Wurman said. "In a simulated world, there's nobody's life at risk. You know exactly the kinds of things you're going to see in the environment. There's no people crossing the road or anything like that."

Matt O'Brien is an AP technology writer