This White Paper grew a bit as a wrote it, but it is essentially an update to my Virtual Humans book, covering and bringing together things I've learnt and thought and talked about since then, and also reflecting that we're now in the era of LLMs.
Click here to download a free copy!
Quite a nice roundup of current avatar tech.
https://medium.com/metaverses/digital-humans-the-amazon-echos-of-the-metaverse-5763a2dd50b6
One thing I did spot in iHuman was the Baby X work, which apparently was the initial testbed for the Soul Machines technology. Looked a bit more convincing than the old Milo demo.
https://www.soulmachines.com/resources/research/baby-x/
Finally got around to watching iHuman. Feel like watching again to plot on my AI Landscape model all the different ways it uses "AI". It also conflates AGI with Superhuman AI, and the idea that AGI will be able to replace almost all human workers despite a) it noting that it might take the energy of a small city to power one and b) lots of jobs need physical skills which we haven't cracked for robots yet. It doesn't stay into "sentient AI" at all, and a good 50% of it is about "basic" neural net style pattern recognition for marketing/intelligence/surveillance/military purposes. Nice visuals though.