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3 Powerful Talks from TED This Week That Are Already Available Live to Watch

TED Robot butler

The TED conference took place this past week and some of the talks have already been released. While most of the year the TED social channels repackage and release talks from past events, this is the one moment when you can actually watch talks close to when they were first presented live. Going through the … Read more

Google Uses AI to Reimagine The Wizard of Oz (and Maybe the Future of Hollywood)

Oz at Sphere

This past week, a closed group of attendees at a private Google event got a first look at an ambitious project that has been in the works for nearly a year to digitally remaster the original 1939 footage from the film The Wizard of Oz and somehow make it fit onto the 16k digital screens … Read more

The Backstory of How Dubai’s Museum of the Future Was Imagined Is Worth Reading

Future museum

Thirty percent of the visitors to the Museum of the Future in Dubai have never been to a museum before. That’s just one of the fascinating insights that emerge from this interview VentureBeat did with the museum’s creative director Brendan McGetrick about the inspiration and creation of the immersive experiences that are inside the museum. I was … Read more

How NFL’s New 8k “Hawk Eye” Cameras Offer an Interesting Model for Truth and Verification

Hawk Eye

Rather than relying on chains and the human eye to measure whether teams have achieved a first down in NFL football games next season, the league is turning to Sony 8k cameras with a new technology known as “hawk eye” to precisely and instantly measure whether a first down was achieved. The idea is to verify the … Read more

Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant Is Exactly What Anyone in Business Really Needs

Adobe AI assistant

This past month Adobe launched a super useful enhancement that I’ve been testing it for a bit. The Adobe AI Assistant has a number of features to help anyone more easily understand what contracts are actually saying. Given most contracts are in PDF format, it’s a perfect extension to have this built into Adobe. The … Read more

Unnecessary Enhancement and the Upscaling Backlash Against Netflix

Netflix

What if everything doesn’t need to be better? A series of 80s shows originally released at a 4:3 aspect ratio and with non-HD level filming have been digitally “enhanced” with AI to make them higher quality and in the typical widescreen format preferred now. The upscaling is a disaster. Anyone watching immediately notices inconsistencies, weird AI-generated remnants and … Read more

The Subtle Master Plan Behind De Beers New DiamondProof In-Store Verification Device

DiamondProof

A little over six months ago, De Beers Group announced the DiamondProof “diamond verification instrument” at a jewelry trade show in Las Vegas. The idea was that this device could sit inside a retail jewelry location and immediately distinguish between a natural diamond versus a lab-grown diamond. The official announcement for the device included this telling line: “with research … Read more

This Genetic Engineering Startup Wants to Make Fluorescent Bunnies and Actual Unicorns

pet_gene_editing

In case you needed more life imitating fiction, a startup known as The Los Angeles Project is using gene editing to experiment with doing some “crazy” things to animals—including making glow-in-the-dark rabbits, cats that are hypo-allergenic and maybe, one day, actual unicorns. As founder and biohacker Josie Zayner says, “I think, as a human species, it’s kind of … Read more

The Secret of Startup Success Might Be Who Is Willing to Lose Money the Longest

Netflix streaming

Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Uber … all dominant players in their industry. What if the secret to their success is just that they were all willing to lose money for longer than any of their competitors? An article I read this week suggested that perhaps the ten year journeys of both Netflix and Hulu to now … Read more

What The AI-Enhanced Beatles Grammy Award Win Tells Us About the Future of Memories

BEATLES GRAMMY

In case you missed it, at this past weekend’s Grammy Awards, the Beatles took home the win for Best Rock Performance for the AI-assisted track “Now and Then.” Before you go down the rabbit hole of seeing this as the first step in the music apocalypse, it’s important to note exactly what was done here. … Read more

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In addition to Non-Obvious Thinking, Rohit is the author of 10 books on trends, the future of business, building a more human brand with storytelling and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world.

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