Nintendo Saw Record Q1 Profit and NASA Launched a Free Streaming Service in This Week’s Tech Roundup
Google also used AI to transform brain scans into music.
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This week, the tech industry continued to grapple with the continuous development and omnipresence of AI. At Google, researchers from the company conducted a study alongside Osaka University to test the “music stimulus” that listeners experience when streaming a song, using their brain activity to produce new music. Meta, meanwhile, is testing out a feature for Instagram that flags content as having been generated using AI.
On the streaming side, NASA has entered the race with a new streamer of its own presenting science-focused live coverage and original series. And, in the business corner, Nintendo reported its best first quarter to date following the release of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Below, Hypebeast has rounded up the top tech stories of the week so you can stay up to date on trends in the industry.
Google Researchers Used AI To Transform Brain Scans Into Music
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Researchers from Google and Osaka University joined forces on an interesting study that converted brain scans into music. Five volunteers were selected to undergo fMRI scans, whilst simultaneously being played music across 10 different genres. The volunteers’ brain activity was then uploaded into an AI platform the researchers had built called Brain2Music.
Researchers took the output of Brain2Music and funneled it into another AI tool, Google’s AI-assisted at-home music production program, MusicLM, to create streamable songs.
In the published study, researchers reported that the experiment allowed them to consider “the musical stimuli that human subjects experienced, with respect to semantic properties like genre, instrumentation, and mood.”
Nintendo Saw a Record-Breaking First Quarter Profit
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Popular releases like Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and The Super Mario Bros. Movie have resulted in a standout year for Nintendo. The company reported a record-breaking first quarter for 2023, in which operating profits increased by 82%, equating to a ¥185.4 billion ($1.3 billion USD) increase.
Building on the success of Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros., Nintendo has also experienced an uptick in Switch sales. This past quarter, the company sold 3.91 million units, compared to 3.43 million units the same time last year.
Instagram Testing Out Labels for Posts Generated by AI
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Meta is now flagging content that was created using AI. The company is testing out labels for Instagram that subtly note if an image is AI-generated, reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi reported.
Last month, Meta rolled out its own text-to-image AI program called Llama 2. The Instagram feature centers on content produced specifically by that program, showing up as a message accompanying content that simply reads, “generated by Meta AI.”
In the tab for the potential feature, Meta describes that “content created with AI is typically labeled so that it can be easily identified.” Users will have to wait and see if the company decides to actually launch it on Instagram.
NASA Launched a Free Streaming Service
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NASA is adding on to the growing list of streaming services available to the masses. The only difference, however, is that NASA+ will be completely free. The space agency has created a streamer that will showcase its live coverage and new original video series for informational, exploratory science content.
“Our vision is to inspire humanity through a unified, world-class NASA web experience,” NASA chief information officer Jeff Seaton said. “NASA’s legacy footprint presents an opportunity to dramatically improve the user experience for the public we serve. Modernizing our main websites from a technology standpoint and streamlining how the public engages with our content online are critical first steps in making our agency’s information more accessible, discoverable, and secure.”
NASA+ is set to release in the coming months and will be available acrossiOS, Android, web and a majority of streaming boxes including Roku, Fire TV and Apple TV.
