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Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” Beta, which has been gradually rolling out over the past couple of years, is now available to anyone who’s paid for the feature in North America, CEO Elon Musk has announced.
“Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is now available to anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen,” Musk tweeted, “assuming you have bought this option.”
The rollout of the beta software kicked off in 2020 with a small number of customers and has since gradually expanded to be available to around 160,000 drivers as of October this year. Getting access to the beta has typically required that drivers hit a minimum safety threshold with Tesla’s built-in Safety Score feature as well as logging 100 miles using the company’s advanced driver-assist feature Autopilot.
In recent weeks, there have been reports that these requirements have been loosened for drivers—reporting that Tesla owners have been able to access the “full self-driving” beta without hitting any particular requirements. Musk’s assertion that the feature is now available to “anyone who requests it in North America suggests these requirements may no longer be in force. Read more...
Amazon to Shut Down Food Delivery Business in India
Amazon has announced that it will shut down its food delivery business in India by the end of the year. The retailer entered the market less than three years ago, but it's already decided to pull out.
The decision comes as no surprise to many industry watchers, who have been questioning Amazon's commitment to the vertical for some time. The company launched Amazon Food in May 2020 in parts of Bengaluru and quickly expanded the service across the city, tying up with additional restaurants. However, it never heavily promoted or marketed the platform—a fact that has led many insiders to believe that Amazon's move into food delivery was more about exploring new opportunities than establishing a sustainable presence in an established field.
When launching Amazon Food, CEO Jeff Bezos said: "Customers have been telling us for some time that they would like to order prepared meals on Amazon in addition to shopping for all other essentials." This is particularly relevant in present times as they stay home safe."
The company's statement today says: "We don't take these decisions lightly." It added: "We are discontinuing these programs in a phased manner to take care of current customers and partners and we are supporting our affected employees during this transition." Read more...
Transformers have played a crucial role in natural language processing tasks in the last decade. Their success attributes mainly to their ability to extract and exploit temporal information.
This case with transformers as well, and the domain was computer vision. Introducing transformers to vision tasks was a huge success, bringing numerous similar studies afterward.
ViT inspired many researchers to dive deeper into the rabbit hole of transformers to see how further they can go in different tasks. Most of them focused on image-related tasks, and they obtained really promising results. However, the application of ViTs into the video domain remained an open problem, more or less.
When you think of it, transformers, more importantly, attention-based architectures, look like the perfect structure to be used with videos. They are the intuitive choice for modeling the dependency in natural languages and extracting contextual relationships between the words. A video also contains these properties, so why not use the transformer to process videos? This is the question the authors of ViViT asked, and they came up with an answer.
Most state-of-the-art video-related solutions use 3D-convolutional networks (3DConvNets), but their complexity makes it challenging to achieve proper performance on commodity devices. Some studies focused on adding the self-attention property of transformers into the 3D-CNNs to better capture long-term dependencies within the video. Read more...
Black Friday is one of the most anticipated days of the year. After all, who doesn’t love good deals? Soon, you'll be doing your Black Friday shopping in the metaverse as a superhero, anime character, or anything else you want to represent you.
But what about the data?
The cool thing about the metaverse is that it not only revolutionises the entire shopping experience; it also introduces a paradigm shift to how businesses treat user data.
We all know how online shopping works. While we browse, a platform tracks our demographic information (age, gender, location), actions and interactions. In Web3 virtual worlds, users will decide whether they want to share any of their data and more importantly they could potentially get paid for granting access to their data.
Consider a traditional supermarket: Cameras monitor and analyse the number of people in a specific location at a specific time where they spend most of their time and whether they look at products on the bottom, upper or highest shelves while shopping. Retailers can use the data they’ve collected to identify customer purchasing patterns and strategise product placement. Data can be collected about details like lighting, background music, mannequin placement, wallpaper and even employee uniforms and can be used to make decisions that impact customer behaviour. Read more...
Binance has released a new site that explains its proof-of-reserves system. The company is starting with BTC reserves. Right now, Binance has a reserve ratio of 101%. It means that the company has enough bitcoins to cover all users’ balances.
This move comes a couple of weeks after the collapse of FTX, another popular crypto exchange. In FTX’s case, the company faced a liquidity crisis. It stopped processing withdrawals because it couldn’t meet demand from investors and end users.
Crypto companies — and crypto exchanges in particular — have been trying to be more transparent about user funds since then. It means sharing more information about hot and cold wallets. But there’s still a lot of work ahead before you can completely trust crypto exchanges and how they handle funds.
A few weeks ago, Binance started by sharing wallet addresses with billions of dollars worth of crypto assets. With this move, the company proved that it does indeed hold a lot of assets and it can process a ton of withdrawals. But the company didn’t state clearly whether those are user assets, or Binance’s own balance sheet, or a mix of both.
With today’s new proof-of-reserves site, Binance clarified that point by saying that BTC wallets included in the proof-of-reserves system don’t include Binance’s own funds. Read more...
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