US-based glass manufacturer is the company behind Gorilla Glass, a break-resistant glass used to protect screens that’s used on essentially all of the most popular smartphones. Today, the European Commission Corning for anti-competitive practices, alleging that the glassmaker is preventing competition through exclusive supply agreements.

According to the press release, Corning requires mobile phone manufacturers to source all or nearly all of their alkali-AS glass from it, and it also grants rebates to these companies if they do so. Additionally, these phone makers must tell Corning if they receive competitive offers from other glass manufacturers. They aren’t allowed to accept these offers unless Corning cannot match or beat the price.

Similarly, Corning has agreements with companies that process raw glass, forcing them to get all or most of their alkali-AS glass from Corning. They also aren’t allowed to challenge Corning patents.

These charges reinforce how aggressive Corning is in defending its dominant position in the smartphone glass screen market. The latest Apple and Android devices, like the , usually have Gorilla Glass screens, as they’re scratch-resistant and prevent cracking or breaking. While not indestructible, the glass does hold up well against damage. However, Corning’s market dominance coupled with these practices are enough to get the EU’s attention.

A new learning AI has been left to its own devices within an instance of Minecraft as the artificial intelligence learns how to play the game through doing, says AI development company SingularityNET and the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI Alliance). The AI, named AIRIS (Autonomous Intelligent Reinforcement Inferred Symbolism), is essentially starting from nothing inside Minecraft to learn how to play the game using nothing but the game’s feedback loop to teach it.

AI has been set loose to learn a game before, but often in more linear 2D spaces. With Minecraft, AIRIS can enter a more complex 3D world and slowly start navigating and exploring to see what it can do and, more importantly, whether the AI can understand game design goals without necessarily being told them. How does it react to changes in the environment? Can it figure out different paths to the same place? Can it play the game with anything resembling the creativity that human players employ in Minecraft?

VentureBeat reached out to SingularityNET and ASI Alliance to ask why they chose Minecraft specifically.

“Early versions of AIRIS were tested in simple 2D grid world puzzle game environments,” a representative from the company replied. “We needed to test the system in a 3D environment that was more complex and open ended. Minecraft fits that description nicely, is a very popular game, and has all of the technical requirements needed to plug an AI into it. Minecraft is also already used as a Reinforcement Learning benchmark. That will allow us to directly compare the results of AIRIS to existing algorithms.”

They also provided a more in-depth explanation of how it works.

“The agent is given two types of input from the environment and a list of actions that it can perform. The first type of input is a 5 x 5 x 5 3D grid of the block names that surround the agent. That’s how the agent “sees” the world. The second type of input is the current coordinates of the agent in the world. That gives us the option to give the agent a location that we want it to reach. The list of actions in this first version are to move or jump in one 8 directions (the four cardinal directions and diagonally) for a total of 16 actions. Future versions will have many more actions as we expand the agent’s capabilities to include mining, placing blocks, collecting resources, fighting mobs, and crafting.

“The agent begins in ‘Free Roam’”’ mode and seeks to explore the world around it. Building an internal map of where it has been that can be viewed with the included visualization tool. It learns how to navigate the world and as it encounters obstacles like trees, mountains, caves, etc. it learns and adapts to them. For example, if it falls into a deep cave, it will explore its way out. Its goal is to fill in any empty space in its internal map. So it seeks out ways to get to places it hasn’t yet seen.

“If we give the agent a set of coordinates, it will stop freely exploring and navigate its way to wherever we want it to go. Exploring its way through areas that it has never seen. That could be on top of a mountain, deep in a cave, or in the middle of an ocean. Once it reaches its destination, we can give it another set of coordinates or return it to free roam to explore from there.

“The free exploration and ability to navigate through unknown areas is what sets AIRIS apart from traditional Reinforcement Learning. These are tasks that RL is not capable of doing regardless of how many millions of training episodes or how much compute you give it.”

For game development, a successful use-case for AIRIS may include automatic bug and stress tests for software. A hypothetical AIRIS that can run across the entirety of Fallout 4 could create bug reports when interacting with NPCs or enemies, for example. While quality assurance testers would still need to check what the AI has documented, it would speed along a laborious and otherwise frustrating process for development.

Moreover, it is the first step in a virtual world for self-directed learning for AI in complex, omni-directional worlds. That should be exciting for AI enthusiasts as a whole.

Renting in Latin America is restrictive. Most landlords require three months of rent as a deposit and a guarantor that owns property in the same city to co-sign the lease. Santiago Morales, the co-founder and CEO of proptech MoradaUno, said this dynamic makes 40% of prospective renters ineligible. His company wants to get more tenants into rentals by underwriting their risk.

“That’s the largest pain point in the industry today,” Morales told TechCrunch. “People not being able to rent where they want, or they have to, like, rent with roomies, roommates or basically can’t rent. So we said, let’s go fix that. Let’s go solve that problem.”

The result was MoradaUno, a Mexico City-based company that looks to upfront tenant risk for landlords. The company works with real estate brokers by screening and underwriting potential tenants and agreeing to take on their rent payments if the tenants stop paying. Morales said the company’s thorough vetting process, which includes background checks and income verification, weeds out a lot of bad actors from the start. MoradaUno also provides additional optional broker services like legal and home insurance.

The company decided to target brokers, as opposed to landlords themselves, due to the fragmented nature of Mexico’s rental market, Morales said. Unlike in U.S. cities where there is a concentration of large landlords that manage a ton of units, in Mexico, it’s the opposite. Most landlords only own one property.

“It’s all mom and pops, like 97% of the market is mom and pops,” Morales said. “They really depend on this income. So they’re like, ‘Oh, who am I renting to? What happens if they don’t pay?’ There’s a lack of trust there. We say, we can help solve that or bridge that lack of trust with technology.”

The MoradaUno founding team knows the LatAm real estate market well. Morales said he moved to Mexico in early 2020, right before the pandemic, because he was working with proptech Loft, the LatAm marketplace for buying and selling real estate. He was supposed to help them expand into the country but when COVID-19 hit, those plans dried up.

The experience gave him a good foot in the door to LatAm’s real estate challenges and introduced him to Ines Gamboa Sorensen and Diego Llano, his now co-founders. MoradaUno was formed in 2020 and formally launched its product in 2021. MoradaUno has since worked with more than 4,500 brokers and helped close more than 20,000 rentals. Santiago added that the company is processing about 1,000 leases a month and wants to hit 3,000 leases a month by next summer.

The company just raised a $5.6 million Series A round to help with that. The round was co-led by fintech-focused Flourish Ventures and Cometa, a VC firm focused on backing companies building for Spanish-speaking populations. Clocktower Ventures, Picus Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Morales said the capital will be used to help with expansion.

The proptech startup market has been growing in LatAm. There are a few other startups looking to tackle rentals too. Aptuno is one that helps people find and apply for apartments online that is based in Bogota and has raised $7 million in venture funding. Houm is another that looks to bypass the region’s tough rental market by acting as a digital broker. Houm has raised more than $44 million in VC money.

MoradaUno is currently live in four cities in Mexico, but the company wants to boost that by adding six more cities in the near future. Morales added that underwriting tenants is just the beginning and in the future they’d like to be able to offer fintech services like advanced rent payments or even build an AI model for brokers.

“It’s really cool to be able to give access [to] people that otherwise would have not been able to rent,” Morales said. “Now you’re giving them an option. That’s very powerful and exciting. That kind of fuels us every day. And we’re also making the lives of thousands of real estate agents better because they have better tools and more efficient technology.”

DJI has unveiled the new Goggles N3, its cheapest-ever FPV (First Person View) goggles for immersive drone flight. Coming in at under half the price of the Goggles 3, the cut-price N3 version looks like an excellent pairing with the Neo, DJI’s cheapest-ever 4K drone with multiple flight control options, including FPV.

DJI has set the price of the Goggles N3 at $229 / £229 / AU$359, plus the goggles can be purchased in a DJI Neo Motion Fly More Combo for $449 / £449 / AU$839. For context, that Fly More Combo, which includes the Neo selfie drone, RC Motion Controller 3 (rather than the FPV Remote Controller 3), two extra batteries and charging hub plus the Goggles N3, costs less than the Goggles 3 alone.