Technology

The question of whether a machine can create art, or anything at all, is at the heart of many a philosophical debate and has been for decades. But whether itworth something on the market That point has been settled definitively today as a portrait-like image issuing from an AI sold for nearly half a million dollars at auction.

&Edmond de Belamy,& whom you see above, such as he is, is one of several members of a fictitious family created by a &generative adversarial network,& in turn created by French AI engineers and artists Obvious.

GANs comprise two parts, for which terminology differs but Obvious calls the &generator& and the &discriminator.& Both visual recognition models are given a set of data to ingest, in this case 15,000 portraits from the last 600 years or so. Based on this data, the generator attempts to create new portraits, and the discriminator tries to identify those portraits as either authentic or artificial. The less sure the discriminator is that an image is artificial, the closer it tends to be to the authentic portraits.

The Belamy family is the result of this process playing out many times, producing the strange, distorted faces that have a dreamlike, and also nightmarish, quality to them.

They&re also unmistakably computer-generated. The patriarch and Count of the family, for instance, though the colors and gross figure are interesting and in broad strokes painterly, the pattern of stippling (or whatever you want to tall it) is a telltale mark of a computer attempting to create consistent texture. His wife, the Countess, has a psychedelic oil-slick quality to her hair and dress thatquite unnatural, and what appears to be craquelure on closer inspection is revealed to be an intricate warping structure reminiscent of Photoshop effects.

&It is an attribute of the model that there is distortion,& explainedHugo Caselles-Dupré, from Obvious, to Christie&s. &The Discriminator is looking for the features of the image — a face, shoulders — and for now it is more easily fooled than a human eye.&

Obviously it doesn&t quite match the old masters. But as you can see from the variety evinced by the Belamy clan, the system has a remarkable range and one can intuitively grasp the type of painting this is — perhaps each even reminds you of a real one.

The full Edmond.

Certainly someone thought that Edmond at least was worth having; Obvious estimated that the painting (though surely a print) would fetch perhaps €10,000 on the block. Imagine the groupsurprise when the bidding escalated to $432,500 — obviously $500 too much for one of the bidders. The new owner remains anonymous, though we may learn more later. For all we know it is Obvious itself (unlikely) or some art holdings company speculating that this early AI piece may become an historic one.

As for the signature, a rather tongue-in-cheek solution was lit on by the team: At the bottom right of Edmondcanvas is part of the algorithm that created him (though far from all the code required to do so).

The work page is a bit more specific: &generative Adversarial Network print, on canvas, 2018, signed with GAN model loss function in ink by the publisher, from a series of eleven unique images, published by Obvious Art, Paris, with original gilded wood frame.&

We&re no closer to getting at the heart of art, deciding whether these generated constructs count as art, and if so, by whom, but itinteresting nevertheless. Even if these aren&t exactly the kind of thing you&d want to hang on your wall. Thattrue of most art anyway.

To keep up with the rising demand for short-term rentals in U.S. cities and compete with the home-sharing giant Airbnb, travel booking siteExpedia has picked up a pair of venture-backed hospitality startups, Pillow and ApartmentJet.

Employees of both companies will join Expedia . The company declined to disclose the financial terms of the deals.

&Acquiring Pillow and ApartmentJet will help unlock urban growth opportunities that, over time, will contribute to HomeAwayability to add an even broader selection of accommodations to its marketplace and marketplaces across Expedia Group brands, ensuring travelers always find the perfect place to stay,& the company explained in a statement.

Expedia paid $3.9 billion for HomeAway and its portfolio of travel brands in 2015. The deal was its first major move in thealternative accommodations space, as well as the beginning of a series of efforts to outdo VC darling Airbnb. Its latest targets provide software tools for property managers to easily manage short-term rentals on Airbnb competitors like HomeAway and VRBO.

Located in San Francisco, Pillow helps residents list their apartments as short-term rentals without violating their leases. Itraised a total of $16.5 million in VC backing since 2013, including a$13.5 millionround last year led by Mayfield, with participation fromSterling.VC, Peak Capital Partners, Expansion VC, Chris Anderson, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dennis Phelps andVeritas Investments.

ApartmentJet helps property owners earn money off vacancies. Founded in 2016, the Chicago-headquartered startup had raised a reported $1.2 million in capital from Network Ventures and BlueTree.

Bellevue-based Expedia Group owns several travel brands, including HomeAway, VRBO, Travelocity, trivago, Orbitz and Hotels.com. The company is both an active investor in and acquirer of startups.

Expediashares rose 9.4 percent Thursday after itsthird-quarter earnings beat analyst expectations.The company posted $3.28 billion in revenue, a notable increase from last year$2.97 billion.

Avery Haskell says he first knew he wanted to be an astronaut ever since he was a boy growing up in Houston near NASA Johnson Space Center.

The 24-year-old Stanford graduate who counts Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan as his heroes grew up in an entrepreneurial family. In the early days of the internet his mother, an accountant in the oil and gas industry, and father, an information technology technician for a railroad, launched their own startup called &Neighbornet& — an early version of Zillow (which never got off the ground).

Haskell himself bounced around the startup industry, with forays into launching a crowdfunding startup and stints at a few mobile technology companies, before landing on his current venture, Shuttle.

Launched earlier this year out of the Alchemist Accelerator and co-founded with cybersecurity expert and Wickr co-founder, Nico Sell, Shuttle is aiming to be the web and mobile-based booking agent for spaceflight.

&Space is my first love,& said Haskell, who helped found the Stanford Space Initiative at his alma mater. &I&ve always wanted to be an astronaut and help more people become astronauts. I thought it would be cool to get more people to go to space and get more people interested in space travel.&

Haskell met Sell at the Alchemist Accelerator, where she first worked as a mentor to the young entrepreneur. But she quickly became enamored with the idea of working at the edge of a new kind of frontier market. The day that Sell agreed to be the chair of Shuttle was the day Elon MuskSpaceXlanded two booster rockets back on earth nearly simultaneously.

&I&m following Elon into space,& said Sell. &When I first started working with Avery I had asked ‘Arewe really ready for that now& And after working with him I&m convinced that we are.&

Purchasing tickets on a flight listed on Shuttle isn&t the same as buying a plane ticket on Kayak, primarily because the price points are higher to the point of near-absurdity if you&re not a member of the super rich.

Offerings will range from trips on Virgin Galactic trips that will cost upwards of $250,000 in the near term to low-end packages that will include a zero-gravity flight aboard a tricked-out Boeing 747 for the low, low price of just under $5,000 per seat.

The company is actually taking orders for its first zero gravity flight, which it expects to launch from San Francisco in March 2019. That&ll give roughly 34 people the opportunity to experience weightlessness for around 8 minutes.

&Our mission is to open space up to everyone,& says Haskell. &We want to get more people to space so that the price goes down and so that more people can see earth from space and become private astronauts.&

Eventually, as more space tourism offerings become available, the company expects to sell additional packages. &Therea luxury space hotel thatbeing built right now,& says Sell. &Ita million dollars a night and a 12 night minimum and every 90 minutes you see a sunset and a sunrise. Pretty soon theregoing to be a moon walk and a space walk that are available too.&

Shuttle is hoping to be the hub that aggregates all of these offers into a single one-stop shopping and media experience for consumers interested in seeking out existing planets and boldly going where only few men (and women) have gone before. And the company will offer virtual space tours and tickets to launches for the plebes who can&t afford an actual ride.

Initially, expect the ultra-rich or the ultra-subsidized to be the only folks that will be able to take these trips. Sell sees a lot of opportunities in corporate packages for business customers — likening it to a trip to Kelly SlaterSurf Ranch for an executive retreat.

Sell believes that there will be upwards of 100,000 people in the next 10 years who&ll be willing to plunk down the $50,000 to $250,000 that it will cost to go to space.

Already, the company has $1.66 million in bookings off of 8 customers on four Virgin Galactic flights and four Zero Gravity Charters with commission rates of 5 percent to 10 percent on flights that average $250,000 per ticket.

As for what comes next, Haskell has some speculations. &We will probably be able to build a base on the moon very soon. By 2030 thata possibility. Within my lifetime it will be pretty common for people to travel to and from other planets in space,& he said.

For him, the importance of Shuttle is getting Earthhuman residents to realize the fragility of our existence on the tiny blue ball we all share. Haskell said his favorite quote from Carl Sagan was &We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.& And if thattrue, Haskell believes that the experience of traveling through the cosmos may be a way for humans to come to a better understanding of themselves as well.