Perplexity’s Founder Was Inspired by Sundar Pichai. Now They’re Competing to Reinvent Search

Aravind Srinivas credits Google CEO Sundar Pichai for giving him the freedom to eat eggs. Srinivas remembers the moment seven years ago when an interview with Pichai popped up in his YouTube feed. His vegetarian upbringing in India had excluded eggs, as it had for many in the country, but now, in his early twenties, … Read more

Forget Chatbots. AI Agents Are the Future

This week a startup called Cognition AI caused a bit of a stir by releasing a demo showing an artificial intelligence program called Devin performing work usually done by well-paid software engineers. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can generate code, but Devin went further, planning how to solve a problem, writing the code, and then … Read more

Google DeepMind’s Latest AI Agent Learned to Play ‘Goat Simulator 3’

“SIMA takes one step further and shows stronger generalization to new games,” he says. “The number of environments is still very small, but I think SIMA is on the right track. A New Way to Play SIMA shows DeepMind putting a new twist on game playing agents, an AI technology the company has pioneered in … Read more

New bill would let defendants inspect algorithms used against them in court

A pair of Democratic lawmakers are seeking to give defendants more information about algorithms used against them in a criminal trial. Reps. Mark Takano (D-CA) and Dwight Evans (D-PA) reintroduced the Justice in Forensic Algorithms Act on Thursday, which would allow defendants to access the source code of software used to analyze evidence in their … Read more

Mexican regulators tell Amazon to wall off Prime TV, reveal its algorithms and open up delivery

MEXICO CITY — Mexican regulators have ordered online retailers Amazon and Mercado Libre to reveal their algorithms and to wall off TV streaming to avoid stifling competition. Mexico’s Federal Commission on Economic Competition, known by its initials as COFECE, said in a preliminary finding late Tuesday that the two firms control 85% of online sales … Read more

AI Algorithms Can Be Converted Into ‘Sleeper Cell’ Backdoors, Research Shows

While AI tools offer new capabilities for web users and companies, they also have the potential to make certain forms of cybercrime and malicious activity much more accessible and powerful. Case in point: Last week, new research was published that shows large language models can actually be converted into malicious backdoors, the likes of which … Read more

Y Combinator-backed Guac trains algorithms to predict grocery demand

Poor grocery demand forecasting is responsible for more waste than you might expect. According to one source, grocery stores in the U.S. toss 10% of the roughly 44 billion pounds of food that the country produces annually. It’s not only bad for the environment — food waste is a major source of carbon emissions — … Read more

Parental Advisory: This Chatbot May Talk to Your Child About Sex and Alcohol

The highest ratings went to AI services for education like Ello, which uses speech recognition to act as a reading tutor, and Khan Academy’s chatbot helper Khanmigo for students, which allows parents to monitor a child’s interactions and sends a notification if content moderation algorithms detect an exchange violating community guidelines. The report credits ChatGPT’s … Read more

Here’s How Violent Extremists Are Exploiting Generative AI Tools

“We’re going to partner with Microsoft to figure out if there are ways using our archive of material to create a sort of gen AI detection system in order to counter the emerging threat that gen AI will be used for terrorist content at scale,” Hadley says. “We’re confident that gen AI can be used … Read more

5 Key Updates in GPT-4 Turbo, OpenAI’s Newest Model

OpenAI recently announced multiple new features for ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools during its recent developer conference. The upcoming launch of a creator tool for chatbots, called GPTs (short for generative pretrained transformers), and a new model for ChatGPT, called GPT-4 Turbo, are two of the most important announcements from the company’s event. This … Read more