“Within Five Years, We Will Merge the Real and the Virtual”
We are talking at the Technical University of Sofia, in a lab where the next generations of augmented and virtual reality are being built. Assoc. Prof. Agata Manolova, dean of the Faculty of Telecommunications, explains why we are not yet living in the metaverse and how close we are to a virtual reality indistinguishable from the real thing. It is a thoroughly engineering-minded conversation about the virtual and the big questions it raises.
02The AI Detective: Can Technology Give Us Back the Truth?
After a Digital Stories experiment with almost 2,000 participants showed that we can no longer tell AI-generated images and texts from real ones, it is time for the next step: could artificial intelligence itself become our salvation in this unequal battle for the truth? Radostin Cholakov, from the Rhodope village of Barutin, and his friend Delyan Boychev, both finishing high school this year and both already accomplished in the world of neural networks and computer vision, decided to find out. AI creates remarkable images today, but can it tell truth from lies and judge which picture was made by a human and which by an algorithm?
03Iva Gumnishka: Using AI to Give People Hope
Iva Gumnishka came back to Bulgaria from an Ivy League university with a dream: to make the most high-tech industry of all help the people who need it most, and to make that model sustainable. Her company, Humans in the loop, has spent six years giving work to refugees, people in deep poverty and people living in war zones, from Afghanistan to Venezuela, as they annotate the data that teaches artificial intelligence to see. What does it feel like to give a livelihood to 1,000 people scattered around the world?
04Why Is Everyone Listening to Andrej Karpathy?
“There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding,’ where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” With those words, on February 2 of last year, a world-famous programmer founded an entirely new field: a world in which software is made not by writing code but by explaining in human language. Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and a builder of Tesla’s self-driving cars, has just joined Anthropic. What future does he see, and what kind of man is one of the prophets of the age of advanced artificial intelligence?
05“In the World of AI, Everyone Can Find Something Exciting”
Yordan Darakchiev leads the only program in Bulgaria where, in just a year, you can gain enough knowledge to start working in artificial intelligence. How did Yordan, an astrophysicist by profession, come to create a venture that has now given so many people the fundamentals five times over, and how do its graduates go on to research institutes, to companies like Tesla and Meta, to promising startups, and even to ventures of their own? What does it take to succeed in machine learning, how does this kind of technology help us understand the world we live in, and which directions in artificial intelligence are the most exciting ones to watch?
06Can AI Make Elections Fairer?
The day after tomorrow we will once again head to the ballot box, however old-fashioned that may sound (and essentially be). Yes, we live in strange times, but with all the possibilities technology gives us today, can we really not take measures so that the next elections are fairer, more impartial and free of obvious violations? This is not about politics but about technology. Not propaganda and campaigning, but data science and artificial intelligence, and how they can be of direct use in a matter so important to all of us.
07Hush! The Algorithm Is Dreaming…
How does artificial intelligence dream? Deep dreaming reveals what algorithms see before they “get the job done.” The result is magical and surreal, and could easily pass for the work of a human artist, because it peers beyond the visible and finds its own patterns, accents, nuances and stirring images in photos and paintings. Could this technology also help us understand more about how our own brains work…
