Image: Maurice NORBERT (Shutterstock)
What happened with AI this week? Well, the passage of the European Union’s AI Act—a landmark piece of regulation that seeks tackle the potential harms of the AI industry—is a pretty big deal. It could totally reshape how European nations’ relationship to the technology. But a lot of less consequential if no less weird and entertaining stuff happened this week. The French AI startup Mistral released a new large language model and it’s apparently pretty good. Elon Musk’s baby momma (Grimes) may be working on a new plush doll named after Grok, Musk’s annoying AI chatbot. A British court decided that it’s totally cool for a software program to make legal rulings. People are using AI programs to talk to the dead and some researchers think that ChatGPT actually suffers from “seasonal depression.” In short: regulations or not, the AI industry is definitely going to keep making things weird for everybody for the foreseeable future.