On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Have you ever wondered how movies like The Lion King, The Irishman, or Gemini Man were made? How did they create such realistic animals, de-age actors, or clone them? The answer is artificial intelligence (AI), the technology that is transforming the way movies are produced and consumed. In this blog post, we will explore some of the amazing ways that AI is taking over Hollywood, and what it means for the future of entertainment. AI for Visual Effects One of the most obvious applications of AI in movies is visual effects (VFX), the process of creating or enhancing images that are not captured by a camera. VFX can be used to create realistic environments, creatures, objects, or characters that would be impossible or too expensive to film in real life. For example, in The Lion King (2019), AI was used to generate photorealistic animals and landscapes based on real footage and data. In The Irishman (2019), AI was used to de-age the actors by altering their facial features and expressions....