chat: AI news

Taco Bell is outsourcing the drive-thru. Yum Brands (YUM), which owns the Mexican fast-food chain, has announced plans to expand its Voice AI technology to “hundreds” of stores around the country by the end of the year .  And it’s already thinking of a global expansion of AI order-takers. Right now, more than 100 Taco Bell locations in 13 states rely on AI to take customer orders at the drive-thru.  Company officials say that has resulted in improved order accuracy, shorter wait times, and higher profits .

Now imagine, little readers, the great surprise of Pinocchio, upon waking, to find that he was no longer a wooden marionette, but that he had become a boy like all the others!  He gave a glance around him and, instead of a bed of straw, he saw a room beautifully furnished. Jumping down from his bed, he found prepared for him a nice new suit, a new cap, and a pair of new shoes . He had scarcely dressed himself when, like all boys who have a new suit, he put his hands into his pockets; and just imagine his surprise when he pulled out a small pocketbook of mother-of-pearl, on which were written these words: “The Fairy with the Blue Hair returns the forty cents to her dear Pinocchio and thanks him with all her heart.”  Opening the pocketbook, he found, instead of forty pennies, forty pieces of gold. Afterward he went to look in the looking-glass and he did not know himself .  He saw no longer the reflection of a wooden marionette, but the image of a bright and intelligent boy...

"O Socrates, I used to be told, before I knew you, that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits' end. "And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think.  "For my soul and my tongue are really torpid , and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons —and very good ones they were, as I thought —at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is .  "And I think that you are very wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician."

null (PREDICATE) Format: (null <exp> ) Required arguments: 1 <exp> : any Lisp expression The predicate null returns T if <expr> evaluates to the empty list; NIL otherwise. null is just the same as not, but is the preferred form to use when the purpose is to test whether a list is empty . Examples: > (null '(picard riker)) NIL > (null (rest '(picard))) T

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ' nil .' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors . 

No answer is also an answer.                 —Anon   

"The concept of nothingness, a profound and often misunderstood notion, occupies a central place in both Eastern and Western philosophies.  "It is a topic that challenges our basic understanding of reality, existence, and the self.  "Far from being a mere absence or void, nothingness has been interpreted in various philosophical traditions as a fundamental principle that can offer deep insights into the nature of the universe and our place within it.  "This exploration aims to shed light on these interpretations, comparing the nuanced views of Eastern and Western thought and uncovering the rich philosophical implications of nothingness."

"Listen Sariputra, this Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is this Body. This Body is not other than Emptiness and Emptiness is not other than this Body. The same is true of Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations, and Consciousness. "Listen Sariputra, all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness; their true nature is the nature of no Birth no Death, no Being no Non-being, no Defilement no Purity, no Increasing no Decreasing. "That is why in Emptiness, Body, Feelings, Perceptions, Mental Formations and Consciousness are not separate self entities."

"The good Cause of all is both of much utterance, and at the same time of briefest utterance and without utterance; as having neither utterance nor conception, because It is superessentially exalted above all, and manifested without veil and in truth, to those alone who pass through both all things consecrated and pure, and ascend above every ascent of all holy summits, and leave behind all divine lights and sounds, and heavenly words, and enter into the gloom, where really is, as the Oracles say, He Who is beyond all.  "For even the divine Moses is himself strictly bidden to be first purified, and then to be separated from those who are not so, and after entire cleansing hears the many-voiced trumpets, and sees many lights, shedding pure and streaming rays; then he is separated from the multitude, and with the chosen priests goes first to the summit of the divine ascents, although even then he does not meet with Almighty God Himself, but views not Him (for He is viewless) bu...

Meta’s AI assistant incorrectly said that the recent attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump didn’t happen, an error a company executive is now attributing to the technology powering its chatbot and others. In a company blog post published on Tuesday, Joel Kaplan, Meta’s global head of policy, calls the responses of its AI to questions about the shooting unfortunate .  He says Meta AI was first programmed to not respond to questions about the attempted assassination but the company removed that restriction after people started noticing.  He also acknowledges that “in a small number of cases, Meta AI continued to provide incorrect answers , including sometimes asserting that the event didn’t happen —which we are quickly working to address.”

Disappointing quarterly results from Microsoft melted $340 billion of stock market value on Tuesday from it and rival heavyweights racing to dominate artificial intelligence technology, while Nvidia and other AI chip sellers rallied after results from Advanced Micro Devices. The gains in chipmakers and losses in their biggest customers underscored a divide in the AI landscape, with investors recently questioning whether Wall Street's AI rally may have become overextended . "Microsoft reported some deceleration in its core cloud business, but a huge increase in capex [capital expenditure]. That represents a transfer of wealth from Microsoft shareholders to Nvidia shareholders," said Gil Luria, senior software analyst at D.A. Davidson. In its report after the bell, Microsoft said revenue from its Intelligent Cloud unit —home to the Azure cloud-computing platform —jumped 19% to $28.5 billion in the quarter ended June 30, but missed analysts' estimates of $28.7 billion, ...

Perplexity AI on Tuesday debuted a revenue-sharing model for publishers after more than a month of plagiarism accusations .  Media outlets and content platforms including Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and WordPress.com are the first to join the company’s Publishers Program . The announcement follows an onslaught of controversy in June, when Forbes said it found a plagiarized version of its paywalled original reporting within Perplexity AI’s Pages tool, with no reference to the media outlet besides a small “F” logo at the bottom of the page. Weeks later, Wired said it also found evidence of Perplexity plagiarizing Wired stories, and reported that an IP address “almost certainly linked to Perplexity and not listed in its public IP range” visited its parent company’s websites more than 800 times in a three-month span. The artificial intelligence startup, which specializes in AI-assisted search and aims to compete with Google, raised new funding in Apr...

The Chinese Embassy in the U.S. rejected the [Sam Altman] characterization of America and China as competitors rather than collaborators, and highlighted recent examples of cooperation on artificial intelligence. A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy told Newsweek :  "China has consistently advocated that the development of artificial intelligence should adhere to principles that are human-centered and promote benevolence.  "China believes that AI development should be fair and inclusive, ensuring that all countries equally enjoy the benefits brought by AI, and has no intention of seeking dominance in this field. "In July this year, the 78th United Nations General Assembly adopted China's proposed resolution on ' Enhancing International Cooperation on AI Capacity Building ' by consensus, with over 140 countries, including the United States, co-sponsoring it."

Avi Schiffmann, a Harvard dropout who built a Webby Award-winning website that tracks COVID-19, is working on an AI device called Friend . As the name suggests, the neck-worn device is designed to be treated as a companion. The company said today it will start taking preorders of its basic white version, which is priced at $99 and expected to ship in January 2025. Rather than focusing on productivity, the device is just a thin layer that connects to your phone via Bluetooth and constantly listens to you, in a bid to combat loneliness. You can tap on the walkie-talkie button on the hardware and talk to the device. It will send you an in-app response to it like a text, and since Friend is listening to you all the time, it also can proactively send a message . For instance, it might wish you good luck before an interview. 

Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington professor emeritus of computer science and the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, told Salon that the Harris deepfake ad, "to the naked eye," was "surprisingly well done." While frequent X users who saw the clip could click through to the original post and see the original poster disclose it was a parody, Etzioni said that with more than 130 million views, some users are bound to see Musk's post, which only includes the caption "This is amazing" with a laughing crying emoji, and believe it to be "informative" if not "genuine."  That dynamic creates a disinformation problem that's four-pronged, he [Etzioni] explained. First , more and more Americans consume part if not all of their news from social media, which allows "true fact" to live "side-by-side with falsehoods."  The second is in the way people "tend to be visual animals" and react in a ...

It's not out of the question that a book about AI might have been written using AI, [Thad] McIlroy told PW [ Publishers Weekly ] —and in fact, a small portion of the book did employ AI tools.  “I would say that about 1% of the book overall was touched by AI,” he explained, pointing out a section in which he leads readers through an exercise of chatting with Claude.ai, as well as a section demonstrating how he used ChatGPT to create all the alt-text for the images to make the book accessible, thus making them more accessible to people with visual impairments. But as for using AI to write the book, McIlroy said, he didn’t. Nevertheless, he surmised that Ingram's filters had mistakenly identified the book as having been generated using AI — a mistake indicative of the AI moment we now find ourselves in . Fortunately for McIlroy, an Ingram employee reached out almost as soon as he raised the issue on social media. By Monday, the issue was sorted out and the restriction removed, ju...

According to a new statement, the White House realizes open source is key to artificial intelligence (AI) development -- much like many businesses using the technology .  On Tuesday, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) issued a report supporting open-source and open models to promote innovation in AI while emphasizing the need for vigilant risk monitoring.  The report recommends that the US continue to support AI openness while working on new capabilities to monitor potential AI risks but refrain from restricting the availability of open model weights .  

"For many, the notion of incorporating AI into goals of care conversations will conjure nightmarish visions of a dystopian future wherein we entrust deeply human decisions to algorithms .  "We share these apprehensions . However, our experience in geriatrics, palliative, and critical care reinforces how  Difficult it can be for families to make decisions for incapacitated patients.  Surrogates experience profound emotional and psychological stress,  Written advance directives have not proven as effective as hoped, and  Most critically ill patients have never engaged in comprehensive advance care planning. In addition,  Clinicians are imperfect prognosticators and  There are large disparities in access to palliative care across race and ethnicity, geography, and economic class. "Given these significant limitations, and the inexorable advancements in AI, it behooves us to consider how AI could be safely, ethically, and equitably deployed to help surrogat...

Avenda Health released a study last month that involved ten doctors who each assessed 50 different prostate cancer cases.  Avenda’s Unfold AI software detected cancer with 84.7% accuracy, while physicians who tried to detect cancer manually fell between 67.2 percent and 75.9 percent . The study, done in partnership with UCLA Health and published in the Journal of Urology , also found that by using AI to assist with cancer contouring, predictions of cancer size were 45 times more accurate and consistent with AI than without it. “We saw the use of AI assistance made doctors both more accurate and more consistent, meaning doctors tended to agree more when using AI assistance ,” assistant adjunct professor of urology, surgery, and bioengineering at UCLA and senior author of the study Shyam Natarajan said in a statement.

By studying electrical patterns in the brain, [György] Buzsáki seeks to understand how our experiences are represented and saved as memories .  New studies from his lab and others have suggested that the brain tags experiences worth remembering by repeatedly sending out sudden and powerful high-frequency brain waves.  Known as “sharp wave ripples,” these waves, kicked up by the firing of many thousands of neurons within milliseconds of each other, are “like a fireworks show in the brain,” said Wannan Yang, a doctoral student in Buzsáki’s lab [at NYU] who led the new work, which was published in Science in March. They [sharp wave ripples] fire when the mammalian brain is at rest, whether during a break between tasks or during sleep. Sharp wave ripples were already known to be involved in consolidating memories or storing them. The new research shows that they’re also involved in selecting them —pointing to the importance of these waves throughout the process of long-term mem...

Researchers at the New York University School of Medicine reported…that they had improved the memory of lab animals by tinkering with the length of a dynamic signal in their brains… The feat is exciting in its own right, with the potential to enhance recall in people someday, too .  But it also points to a more comprehensive way of thinking about memory, and it identifies an important clue, rooted in the duration of a neural event, that could pave the way to a greater understanding of how memory works. Since the 1980s, scientists have been tuning in to short bursts of synchronized neural activity in the brain area called the hippocampus. The activity consists of complex, cascading electrical patterns that, when recorded, “sound like an explosion,” said Shantanu Jadhav, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University.  Since their discovery, these sharp wave ripples  have been associated with memory because they arise when neurons suddenly replicate their prior firing patterns in ...

"Sleep is assumed to subserve homeostatic processes in the brain; however, the set point around which sleep tunes circuit computations is unknown.  "Slow-wave activity (SWA) is commonly used to reflect the homeostatic aspect of sleep; although it can indicate sleep pressure, it does not explain why animals need sleep.  "This study aimed to assess whether criticality may be the computational set point of sleep .  "By recording cortical neuron activity continuously for 10–14 d in freely behaving rats, we show that normal waking experience progressively disrupts criticality and that sleep functions to restore critical dynamics .  "Criticality is perturbed in a context-dependent manner, and waking experience is causal in driving these effects.  "The degree of deviation from criticality predicts future sleep/wake behavior more accurately than SWA, behavioral history or other neural measures.  "Our results demonstrate that perturbation and recovery of crit...

Mortlock says he was contracted for 52 episodes but around the time of recording the 30th episode, production shut down. "The producer messaged us saying they were cancelling the series. They didn't say specifically why, but I imagine they just weren't getting the return on investment they were looking for," he said. While he was disappointed and wasn't paid out for the remaining episodes, Mortlock said that kind of unpredictability wasn't uncommon in the entertainment industry . Around a year after the job ended, a sound engineer who was working with him on the project sent through a video of another episode of the series that had been uploaded to YouTube. But Mortlock says that they had never recorded the episode and alleges the company used artificial intelligence (AI) to replicate his voice and the voices of the three other voice actors. "We didn't know this was going to happen. They didn't ask us, they didn't even let us know and they def...

While some publicly-traded players are treating the industry-wide hurdle as an opportunity to expand their operations or launch hostile takeover attempts, others are embracing more diversified revenue through innovations like AI compute and chip manufacturing to get ahead. Bitcoin mining firms sized each other up at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville late last week, as a post- halving stretch continues to put pressure on firms' established business models. At the annual conference, a corner was crammed with firms that make money through fleets of power-hungry machines, which constantly crunch complex calculations in a race to verify Bitcoin transactions.  In April, the reward for that endeavor was slashed in half during the halving , a quadrennial event that slows the pace of Bitcoin’s gradually expanding supply.

[AI] technology can help companies quickly identify top-performing employees —and workers being marginalized —simply by feeding it internal emails and texts and prompting it to find out who goes to whom with important questions and problems and who provides answers and resolutions , said Kon Leong, CEO of Milpitas data-management company ZL Technologies.   Generative AI, Leong said, is extremely powerful in making sense of chaos.  “It’s just getting up off its knees at the moment,” Leong said. “By the time it’s walking and running, I think we’ll be floored by its implications.” UC Berkeley lecturer and venture capitalist Shomit Ghose noted that generative AI was used to develop a drug, now in human trials, to treat a lung disease that can lead to cancer.  The technology is also starting to turbo-charge weather forecasting. Ghose believes too much investment is going into the AI technologies underlying generators like ChatGPT, and too little into other types of generative ...

A manipulated video that mimics the voice of Vice President Kamala Harris saying things she did not say is raising concerns about the power of artificial intelligence to mislead with Election Day about three months away. The video gained attention after tech billionaire Elon Musk shared it on his social media platform X on Friday evening without explicitly noting it was originally released as parody. The video uses many of the same visuals as a real ad that Harris, the likely Democratic president nominee, released last week launching her campaign. But the video swaps out the voice-over audio with another voice that convincingly impersonates Harris.

"This is the latest reality for those searching high and low on the internet for work : not only are plenty of companies tricking you into applying, but so are the people who used to pose as Nigerian princes or strangely-incompetent tech support workers.  "According to the FTC, there were more than five times as many fake job and 'business opportunity' scams in 2023 as there were in 2018, costing victims nearly half a billion dollars in total.  "Technology is expanding the variety of possible con jobs with every passing year; today, with the rapid advancement and proliferation of AI-fueled deepfakes, not even video calls can provide reliable confirmation of who exactly is on the other end .  "This is the singularity of the online job market, the point at which AI growth has become so exponential that humans can’t compete. It is a war against and between the machines, not in the streets and skies but on our desks and in our pockets. And it may kill off the v...

In 2019, the Legislature passed a measure to make Washington’s utilities carbon-neutral by 2030.  At the same time, in the name of bringing jobs to rural areas, lawmakers encouraged the explosive growth of the data center industry through a massive tax break.   Artificial intelligence [AI], which requires extraordinary computing power, is accelerating the need to build data centers across the world, and experts say the industry’s global energy consumption as of just two years ago could double by 2026. Remarkably, Washington in recent years has gotten a smaller share of its electricity from renewable sources than it did two decades ago, according to the most recent state data. That’s despite the fact the state produces a quarter of the nation’s hydropower. “Our existing hydro system is pretty much tapped out,” said Randall Hardy, an energy consultant and former administrator of Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that owns Washington’s largest dam. “ So you’ve g...

"AI-powered services involve considerably more computer power —and so electricity —than standard online activity, prompting a series of warnings about the technology's environmental impact," the BBC recently reported .  A recent study from scientists at Cornell University finds that generative AI systems like ChatGPT use up to 33 times more energy than computers running task-specific software, and each AI-powered internet query consumes about ten times more energy than a standard search. The global AI sector is expected to be responsible for 3.5 percent of global electricity consumption by 2030.  In the United States, data centers alone could consume 9 percent of electricity generation by 2030, double their current levels. Already, this development is making major waves for Big Tech — earlier this month Google revealed that its carbon emissions have skyrocketed by 48 percent over the last five years .  Not only does the United States need far more renewable growth to keep...

Investors filed a lawsuit this year, accusing the company [Evolv] of hyping up its technology’s effectiveness, while knowing its products were ineffective at detecting weapons, like knives and certain types of firearms . The suit also accuses Evolv of manipulating test results to make it appear its tech was more effective. The company [Evolv] is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] and the Federal Trade Commission [FTC] for marketing practices.

"First, we report previously undescribed features of codas that are sensitive to the conversational context in which they occur, and systematically controlled and imitated across whales . We call these rubato and ornamentation.  "Second, we show that codas form a combinatorial coding system in which rubato and ornamentation combine with two context-independent features we call rhythm and tempo to produce a large inventory of distinguishable codas.  " Sperm whale vocalisations are more expressive and structured than previously believed, and built from a repertoire comprising nearly an order of magnitude more distinguishable codas .  "These results show context-sensitive and combinatorial vocalisation can appear in organisms with divergent evolutionary lineage and vocal apparatus." 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops and tests tech for the U.S. government, companies and the broader public, has re-released a testbed designed to measure how malicious attacks —particularly attacks that “poison” AI model training data —might degrade the performance of an AI system. Called Dioptra (after the classical astronomical and surveying instrument), the modular, open source web-based tool, first released in 2022, seeks to help companies training AI models —and the people using these models —assess, analyze and track AI risks.  Dioptra can be used to benchmark and research models, NIST says, as well as to provide a common platform for exposing models to simulated threats in a “red-teaming” environment. “Testing the effects of adversarial attacks on machine learning models is one of the goals of Dioptra,” NIST wrote in a press release.

"As Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine , points out, the original luddites did not immediately turn to rebellion. They sought dialogue and compromise first .  "The new luddites, too, seek dialogue and compromise. Most realise AI is here to stay; they demand not a reversal, but an altogether more reasonable and fair approach to its adoption.  "And it’s easy to see how they might be more successful than their 19th-century counterparts. The apocryphal Ned Ludd did not have social media. Downtrodden workers used to be easier to ignore. The internet is the greatest tool for organising in history . "Anger at AI companies is leading to some unlikely alliances. When the Recording Industry Association of America recently sued two AI music-generation companies for 'copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale,' musicians and fans took to the internet to voice their support. 'Amazing. AI companies have me rooting for the damn record labels,...

Major video game makers —like Activision, Warner Bros and Walt Disney —are facing a strike by Hollywood performers over the use of artificial intelligence (AI). It follows a year and half of talks over a new a contract between the companies and a union representing more than 2,500 video game performers. The two sides say they have agreed on several key issues, such as wages and job safety, but protections related to the use of AI technology remain a major hurdle . The industrial action was called by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists ( Sag-Aftra ), which last year paralysed Hollywood with a strike by film and television actors.

The topic of AI infiltration is nothing new nowadays and has been discussed over and over again in the past year .  However, WIRED managed to find some interesting information about how the technology is used at Activision and what artists had to deal with after Microsoft laid off 1,900 from the studio and the Xbox department.  One of the artists, under the pseudonym of Noah, shared that in spring 2023, Activision's then-CTO Michael Vance sent a message praising artificial intelligence and saying it held "a ton of promise." Later, the studio approved the use of Midjourney and Stable Diffusion for concept art. According to the artist, the company assured its staff that generative AI would not replace them and would not be used for final game assets, but soon, it sold an AI-generated cosmetic for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 . "I felt that we were throwing away our humanity ," Noah said. Activision, in turn, threw away a sizable chunk of its employees. 

The Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan bill to provide recourse to victims of porn deepfakes —or sexually-explicit, non-consensual images created with artificial intelligence .  The legislation, called the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act —passed in Congress’ upper chamber on Tuesday.  The legislation has been led by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in the House. The legislation would amend the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to allow people to sue those who produce, distribute, or receive the deepfake pornography, if they “knew or recklessly disregarded” the fact that the victim did not consent to those images.

[Sam] Altman wants the public to "think creatively" about new models in "developing and deploying AI."   He previously suggested creating a multinational body like the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] to oversee the ground-breaking [AI] technology and mitigate any existential risks. "We face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in: Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the technology's benefits and opens access to it, or an authoritarian one, in which nations or movements that don't share our values use AI to cement and expand their power?" Altman wrote in an op-ed published Thursday by The Washington Post . Altman, who is best known for his work in pushing artificial intelligence into the mainstream as the face of ChatGPT, said the U.S. is currently ahead in AI development but the "leadership is far from guaranteed." 

The pair [Kevin Pimbblet & Adejumoke Owolabi, Uni of Hull] found CAS wasn't as useful for detecting deepfakes. Concentration works best with a single point of light, but reflections often appear as patches of light scattered across an eyeball. Asymmetry suffers from a similar problem — those patches make the reflection asymmetrical and Pimbblet said it was hard to get this measure "right".  Using the Gini coefficient worked a lot better. This is a way to measure inequality across a spectrum of values. It can be used to calculate a range of results related to inequality, such as the distribution of wealth, life expectancy or, perhaps most commonly, income. In this case, Gini was applied to pixel inequality. "Gini takes the whole pixel distribution, is able to see if the pixel values are similarly distributed between left and right, and is a robust non-parametric approach to take here," Pimbblet said. 

Google DeepMind says it has trained two specialized AI systems to solve complex math problems involving advanced reasoning .  The systems—called AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2—worked together to successfully solve four out of six problems from this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), a prestigious competition for high school students. They won the equivalent of a silver medal at the event. It’s the first time any AI system has ever achieved such a high success rate on these kinds of problems.   “This is great progress in the field of machine learning and AI,” says Pushmeet Kohli, vice president of research at Google DeepMind, who worked on the project. “No such system has been developed until now which could solve problems at this success rate with this level of generality.” 

"Growth has slowed in the industrialized world, and it's not a new phenomenon. This is one of these paradoxes which needs to be repeated more and more .  "The tech age has also coincided with a slowdown of aggregate growth and every indicator of aggregate growth. So we are growing much less today than we did in the 70s or 60s. Productivity is growing less.  "And I think this is also related to the fact that we're not getting enough out of the new technologies and the new ideas and the new scientific discoveries that we are making.  "And part of the reason why there is so much hunger for AI hype is that many people, including policymakers, are wishfully thinking, 'Well, this could be a solution to our productivity slowdown. So perhaps in the next decade, we can have a much faster productivity growth thanks to generative AI or thanks to AI' ."

Ireland’s energy-hungry datacentres consumed more electricity last year than all of its urban homes combined, according to official figures . The country’s growing fleet of datacentres used 21% of its electricity, an increase of a fifth on 2022, according to the Central Statistics Office. It was the first year that datacentres supporting the Irish tech hub surpassed the electricity used by homes in its towns and cities, which consumed 18% of the grid’s total power last year. Experts have raised concerns that the sudden surge in power demand driven by datacentres could derail climate targets in Ireland and across Europe. 

"Preference signals for AI are the idea that an agent (creator, rightsholder, entity of some kind) is able to signal their preference with regards to how their work is used to train AI models .  "Last year, we [Creative Commons] started thinking more about this concept, as did many in the responsible tech ecosystem. But to date the dialog is still fairly binary, offering only all-or-nothing choices, with no imagination for how creators or communities might want their work to be used .  "Our starting point is to identify what types of preference signals might be useful. How do these vary or overlap in the cultural heritage, journalism, research, and education sectors? How do needs vary by region?  "We’ll also explore exactly how we might structure a preference signal framework so it’s useful and respected, asking, too: does it have to be legally enforceable, or is the power of social norms enough?"

New global study, in partnership with The Upwork Research Institute, interviewed 2,500 global C-suite executives, full-time employees and freelancers.  Results show that the optimistic expectations about AI's impact are not aligning with the reality faced by many employees .  The study identifies a disconnect between the high expectations of managers and the actual experiences of employees using AI. Despite 96% of C-suite executives expecting AI to boost productivity, the study reveals that, 77% of employees using AI say it has added to their workload and created challenges in achieving the expected productivity gains. Not only is AI increasing the workloads of full-time employees, it’s hampering productivity and contributing to employee burnout.   

Bing is now testing its new generative search experience that combines the Bing search results and its language models to use AI to generate a different breed of search results, including an AI-generated search results pages . “I’m excited to share an early look at Bing’s new generative search experience. It combines the power of LLMs and SLMs with Bing’s search results to generate a more delightful and efficient UX layout. This is another meaningful step forward in our evolution of AI-powered search,” Jordi Ribas, CVP, Head of Engineering and Product for Copilot and Bing, wrote. “It understands the search query, reviews millions of sources of information, dynamically matches content, and generates search results in a new AI-generated layout to fulfill the intent of the user’s query more effectively,” Microsoft added.

Justine Bateman has been warning about the corrosive realities of generative AI for the creative community long before most people started paying any attention to the rise of the machines.  Now the Violet director is putting her SOS on the big screen with a no AI-allowed film festival . Set to debut in LA in 2025, the CREDO 23 Film Festival promises to “a filmmaker-first, no-AI event” that is “real, and raw.” “With studios, streamers, and now film festivals, embracing generative AI, it was time for the CREDO 23 Film Festival,” Bateman told Deadline today of the inspiration and timeliness of the new fest. “It creates a tunnel for human artists through the theft-based, job-replacing AI destruction. The festival honors the incredible human artists who make films, and will financially grant recourses to human filmmakers to continue to do so.” 

The Federal Trade Commission is launching an investigation into so-called "surveillance pricing," seeking more information about how artificial intelligence is used to change pricing rapidly based on data about customer behavior and characteristics . The FTC says the practice allows companies to charge different customers, different prices. The agency is serving eight companies with a mandatory request for information —all companies it says that advertise their AI and other tech tools along with a trove of customer information to target prices to individual customers.

One botanist who studies how sagebrush send distress signals to each other has found that individual plants appear to have different risk tolerance — A metric of personality, the very notion of which in an organism without a brain-based mind challenges our central assumptions about consciousness .  Other research on a family of flowering desert shrubs found that female plants heed signals from both male and female plants, but males only heed other males —intimations of preference and judgment, also features of personality and consciousness.  [Zoë] Schlanger [ The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth ] synthesizes some of the most provocative findings: "Plants could be said to have dialects, and are alert to their contexts enough to know when to deploy them. More than that, they have a clear sense of who is who; who is family, and who is not. They are in touch with their surroundings, and with the fluctuating statu...

"The main proposal —that Council of Stakeholders —which takes up about 25% of the main text of the paper, is not mentioned in ChatGPT’s summary at all .  "Instead, that concrete suggestion becomes a few empty sentences.  "And that was true for a few other essential elements of the paper.  "In other words: the summary makes a good first impression, though not very concrete in terms of proposals, but reading the summary alone, you will not be aware that the paper actually has a a set of very concrete proposals and options, most of which is missing in ChatGPT’s summary ."

The former AllHere employee [Chris Whiteley] said he knew of no data breach that had exposed the personal information of students, their families or staff. The potential danger was real, he said, but only theoretical, as far as he knew. Whiteley also contends that the chatbot has an important design flaw, which he called the “overuse” of information.   When a student signs in with a password and asks a question, for example, the chatbot pulls in all available personal and private information in the L.A. Unified [School District] system about the student and that student’s family . This happens even in response to a simple “ Hello .” Any overuse of information represents an unnecessary, enhanced security risk for the release of private data, according to Whiteley and experts interviewed by The [Los Angeles] Times .

Nvidia is working on a version of its new flagship AI chips for the China market that would be compatible with current U.S. export controls, four sources familiar with the matter said . The AI chip giant in March unveiled its " Blackwell " chip series, which is due to be mass-produced later in the year.  The new processors combine two squares of silicon the size of the company's previous offering.  Within the series, the B200 is 30 times speedier than its predecessor at some tasks like serving up answers from chatbots .

Artificial intelligence-powered agents will be able to work together and solve tasks in a so-called "multi-agent AI" system by 2025, according to technology services giant Capgemini . Such a system would entail a collection of agents that work together to solve tasks in a distributed and collaborative way, according to Capgemini. Pascal Brier, the company's chief innovation officer, told CNBC in an interview that the firm is already "seeing companies that are discussing those agent technologies." He added that applications using multiple autonomous agents "is really what we should expect next year."

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has committed 100 million Singapore dollars ($74.36 million) to beef up its finance sector’s quantum computing and artificial intelligence capabilities. The latest injection of funds by the MAS —the central bank and financial regulatory authority of Singapore —is aimed at helping local financial institutions establish quantum computing infrastructure and speed up AI development and adoption.  MAS confirmed that the first AI pilot project is dedicated to scam and fraud detection use cases. The regulator will involve banks, technology solution providers and public agencies in the AI pilot.

The results are in for Sam Altman's much-anticipated basic-income study, one of the largest of its kind. The experiment gave low-income participants $1,000 a month for three years, no strings attached. Researchers, however, said they found no "direct evidence of improved access to healthcare or improvements to physical and mental health" among those who received $1,000 payments. "We do see significant reductions in stress, mental distress, and food insecurity during the first year, but those effects fade out by the second and third years of the program," the report said, noting that $1,000 a month could only do so much. " Cash alone cannot address challenges such as chronic health conditions, lack of childcare, or the high cost of housing ." Earlier this year, Altman also floated another kind of basic-income plan, which he called a "universal basic compute." In this scenario, Altman said, people would get a " slice " of the computat...

UBI would provide a vital safety net. “Under capitalism, you need money to survive. It’s that simple,” says Dr Neil Howard, an international development social protection researcher at the University of Bath.  He and his team have helped to develop basic income pilots around the world and, like Thomas Paine, he believes that a redistribution of the privatised resources of all human beings is inherently just.  Howard likens the large language models of AI that rely on the aggregated collection of human knowledge to the enclosure of the commons, which began in the 1600s and privatised most of England’s common land .  “The common wealth of the world and of humanity, should, by rights, belong to all of us,” says Howard. “It has been appropriated by the few – and that leads the many to either have to struggle to survive or simply not effectively do so. So there’s justice underpinning the claim of UBI.” Contrary to expectations, he says, “It wouldn’t necessarily lead to people ...

"James Cameron certainly sees the benefits of AI, once saying, ' As you go down levels of magnitude you see more and more patterns, and you realise that greater pattern, the grand pattern, is made up of all these kinds of fractal details that need to be there. And this is where I think AI can be helpful because it can fill in some of the some of those detail levels and allow us as artists to stay at a higher level' .   "But that right there is a perfect demonstration of just how AI can be misused when it comes to transfers, as relying on it for these minute details can easily serve as a shortcut that gets out of hand.  "And that’s how you end up with the horrendous transfers of great films like True Lies and Aliens , giving us pause on getting too excited for The Terminator ."

UK-based AI chip designer Graphcore was, for a time, considered a potential rival to Nvidia and AMD, but fell on hard times after failing to capitalize on the AI boom .  Back in February 2024, we wrote Graphcore desperately needed to raise significant funds by May if it was to survive, and that a number of potential buyers were circling the troubled firm. These included Arm, Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank (which has a majority share in Arm), and OpenAI. SoftBank was always the most likely suitor, and it has now been confirmed as the new owner of Graphcore having splashed out somewhere between $400 and $500 million for company . The exact price hasn’t been confirmed. “Society is embracing the opportunities offered by foundation models, generative AI applications and new approaches to scientific discovery”, said Vikas J. Parekh, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “Next generation semi-conductors and compute systems are essential in the AGI journey, we’re pleased t...

The company that made the avatar of Sun’s mother is called Silicon Intelligence, where Sun [Kai] is also an executive working on voice simulation .  The Nanjing-based company is among a boom in technology startups in China and around the world that create AI chatbots using a person’s likeness and voice. The idea to digitally clone people who have died is not new but until recent years had been relegated to the realm of science fiction .  Now, increasingly powerful chatbots like Baidu’s Ernie or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which have been trained on huge amounts of language data, and serious investment in computing power have enabled private companies to offer affordable digital “clones” of real people.

Inside your skull, your brain hums along with its own unique pattern of activity, a neural fingerprint that’s yours and yours alone. A heavy dose of psilocybin temporarily wipes the prints clean . The psychedelic drug psilocybin dramatically changes how collections of nerve cells work in the brain, eliminating normal communication between brain regions, a new brain scanning study published July 17 in Nature shows.  These brain images, taken before, during and after a high dose of psilocybin, expand the understanding of the drug’s effects, which is being studied for its promise in treating mental health disorders such as depression. The brain scanning protocol researchers used was intense . “We had a small number of people, just seven participants in the whole study, but an enormous amount of data on each one,” says Joshua Siegel, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Each person underwent about 18 functional MRI brain scans, o...

Longtime Mississippi real estate agent Bill Anton said he has been using Forewarn for more than two years and it “can certainly be a red flag if you start seeing a lot of financial problems on someone.” But Forewarn has proven to lag when it comes to updating vital financial information, he said, even as he hailed the app for its safety benefits. Anton has found a lot of bankruptcies are “cleared up and not currently on their [prospects] record anymore, although they're showing up on the Forewarn app.” The company’s terms and conditions explicitly say that Forewarn does not guarantee its data’s “accuracy, currentness, completeness, timeliness, or quality… The services are provided ‘AS IS’.” Forewarn's parent company red violet  [ data broker ] has been sued for allegedly supplying inaccurate data in the recent past. The data broker [ red violet ] also owns IDI , a cloud native company which calls itself an “industry-leading identity intelligence platform,” according to its web...

Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis —which owns Routledge —had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft —a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year . The agreement with Microsoft was included in a trading update by the publisher’s parent company in May this year. However, academics published by the group [Taylor & Francis] claim they  Have not been told about the AI deal,  Were not given the opportunity to opt out and  Are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company [Microsoft].  Dr Ruth Alison Clemens, a lecturer in modern English literature whose work has been published by Taylor & Francis and Routledge, claimed authors hadn’t been contacted about the AI deal. Clemens told The Bookseller : "I only found out about this via word of mouth in the past few days. I was shocked that they had not publici...

A British fashion and lifestyle magazine found itself in the middle of a social media storm after introducing an AI with an Arabic name and appearance as their newest “ editor ” this week . SheerLuxe shared pictures of Reem , who they said was an “ AI enhanced team member ” on their Instagram page in a post that included a “ selfie ” of the AI with the editor-in-chief, an outfit of the day snapshot complete tagged brand names, Reem ’s “ lunch ,”  and a peek at the contents of “ her ” purse and desk setup. The online publication came under fierce criticism from its audience, who questioned the ethics of “ hiring ” an AI staff member in a period when journalists and other media professionals face threats to their livelihoods due to the technology.

"Machine learning methods hold the promise to reduce the costs and the failure rates of conventional drug discovery pipelines .  "This issue is especially pressing for neurodegenerative diseases, where the development of disease-modifying drugs has been particularly challenging.  "To address this problem, we describe here a machine learning approach to identify small molecule inhibitors of α-synuclein aggregation, a process implicated in Parkinson’s disease and other synucleinopathies. Because the proliferation of α-synuclein aggregates takes place through autocatalytic secondary nucleation, we aim to identify compounds that bind the catalytic sites on the surface of the aggregates.  "To achieve this goal, we use structure-based machine learning in an iterative manner to first identify and then progressively optimize secondary nucleation inhibitors. Our results demonstrate that this approach leads to the facile identification of compounds two orders of magnitude mor...

With rising global temperatures posing a threat to agriculture, some wineries are turning to artificial intelligence to better prepare for unpredictable weather patterns .  “AI is helping us be more resilient,” says Will Drayton, director of sustainability and science at Treasury Wine Estates. “So it doesn’t stop climate change, but helps us to be more resilient in the face of climate change.” The Beringer and Matua winemaker is using AI today to help model “what if” scenarios to more nimbly plan for huge swings in temperature that drastically impact yield during the harvest season. AI can also help predict fermentation conditions and improve irrigation methods .

The World Health Organization is one of the companies dipping its toes into the AI waters .  The organization's chatbot, Sarah , pulls information from the WHO's site and its trusted partners, making the answers less prone to factual errors. When asked how to limit the risk of a heart attack, Sarah gave information about managing stress, sleeping well and focusing on a healthy lifestyle.  Continued advancements in design and oversight might continue to improve such bots.  But if you're turning to an AI chatbot for health advice today, note the warning that comes with Google's version: " Info quality may vary ." 

Many data centers rely on water-intensive cooling systems that consume millions of gallons of potable (drinking) water annually .  A single data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of drinking water per day, enough to supply thousands of households or farms. The increasing use and training of AI models has further exacerbated the water consumption challenges faced by data centers . Machine learning, particularly deep learning models, requires significant computational power, which generates a lot of heat. As a result, data centers housing these machine learning servers need even more cooling to maintain optimal performance and prevent overheating.  Graphics processing units, which are commonly used to accelerate machine learning workloads, are known for their high energy consumption and heat generation.

“AI allows you to iterate very quickly and test many ideas in a short period of time, which should potentially expand our creative horizons,” Sergei Belousov, lead AI/ML research engineer at ARTA, an AI image generator, told PYMNTS .  Yet he cautions, “If everyone uses the same AI tools, you can ultimately experience a decline in creativity and individuality because creative pieces will depend on the characteristics of AI you utilize.” This homogenization effect is already being observed. “AI is already impacting creative industries, and while it is saving time and money for brands, the output tends to be homogeneous,” Sabrina H. Williams, data and communication program director at the University of South Carolina, told PYMNTS .  She points to the advertising industry, where AI-generated campaigns risk blending into a sea of algorithmic sameness .

A Reuters survey released recently laid bare a nuanced picture of Japanese corporate acceptance and social attitudes toward technology. The survey, conducted by Nikkei Research, anonymously polled 506 companies from 3-12 July, with around half responding .  It provides a broad view of how corporate Japan is striking a balance between incorporating AI and tightening cybersecurity amid changing social attitudes toward work. The survey revealed a striking divide in AI adoption across Japanese businesses.  While nearly a quarter of companies have already integrated AI into their operations, a significant portion —over 40% —have yet to make any immediate plans to leverage this cutting-edge technology.  Specifically, 24% of respondents reported having introduced AI in their businesses, with an additional 35% planning to do so in the future. However, the remaining 41% indicated no intention to adopt AI, illustrating the varying degrees of technological embrace within corporate...

"Does the assumption of a weak form of computational functionalism, according to which the right form of neural computation is sufficient for consciousness, entail that a digital computational simulation of such neural computations is conscious?  "Or must this computational simulation be implemented in the right way, in order to replicate consciousness? "From the perspective of Karl Friston’s free energy principle, self-organising systems (such as living organisms) share a set of properties that could be realised in artificial systems, but are not instantiated by computers with a classical (von Neumann) architecture.  "I argue that at least one of these properties, viz . a certain kind of causal flow , can be used to draw a distinction between systems that merely simulate, and those that actually replicate consciousness."

"So in my lab, we’ve been trying to study how to teach common sense in a more effective way, perhaps by mimicking how when children grow up, they do ask a lot of why-this, why-that questions : The kind of questions that adults wouldn’t ask to each other. It may be obvious to adults, but children while growing up are provided with a lot of such declarative descriptions of common sense. "It’s reasonable to suspect that humans don’t necessarily try to predict which word comes next, but we rather try to focus on making sense of the world. So we tend to abstract away immediately.  "You and I, by the way, are not able to remember the discussions, the interactions, the conversation we just had verbatim. We just cannot, because our brain is trained to abstract immediately. But we do remember the gist of our conversation so far, such that if you ask me the same question again, I’ll be surprised. So there’s something about the way that humans learn. "And also humans learn wi...

MIT economics Professor Daron Acemoglu, a contributor to the Goldman analysis and co-author of the best-seller Why Nations Fail , thinks that the hype obscures the reality of what is really a quite limited technology. “It was always a pipe dream to reach anything resembling complex human cognition on the basis of predicting words,” he says.   Far fewer jobs are exposed to automation, he thinks —just 4.6pc of tasks can be reliably automated. Over a decade, Acemoglu envisages a mere 0.53pc improvement in total factor productivity. So instead of a “fourth industrial revolution,” generative AI’s impact more closely resembles that of the Excel macro . Useful but not exactly epoch-defining. “There is pretty much nothing that humans do as a meaningful occupation that generative AI can now do,” Acemoglu warns. And he suspects the vast social cost of fraud enabled by AI will bury any advantage in the public’s mind . 

Only artists in Europe had been given the option to opt out . “We couldn’t find [the forms] because they weren’t available,” [María] Luque told Rest of World . Artists in Spanish-speaking Latin America —where AI regulation and privacy laws are outdated or nonexistent —are worried about the future of their work as Meta ramps up the training of its large language models by mining publicly shared content across its platforms.   While the company gave its users in the EU and the U.K. the opportunity to protect their content —and has since paused its AI rollout there —most Meta users in Latin America will have no say in how the platforms use their content. Rest of World spoke with nine Latin American artists, several of whom had been unaware of Meta’s plans to use their content for AI-related purposes until June, when the company announced it had “sent more than two billion in-app notifications and emails to people in Europe to explain what we’re doing.” “Instead of adopting broader pr...

As the AI landscape continues to evolve, the release of Mistral-NeMo marks an important milestone in the journey towards more accessible, efficient, and powerful AI tools for businesses.   It remains to be seen how this will impact the broader AI ecosystem, but one thing is clear: the race to bring AI capabilities closer to end-users is heating up, and Nvidia and Mistral AI have just made a bold move in that direction. “We believe that this model represents a significant step towards making AI more accessible and practical for businesses of all sizes ,” he [Bryan Catanzaro] said. “It’s not just about the power of the model, but about putting that power directly into the hands of the people who can use it to drive innovation and efficiency in their day-to-day operations.”

Given the significant cost savings offered by GPT-4o mini and high performance benchmarks on a number of tasks and tests, the question naturally arises: Why would a developer pay more money to use the full GPT-4o model when the mini one is now available? OpenAI believes that for the most computationally-intensive, complex, and demanding applications, the full GPT-4o is still the way to go, and justifies its higher price in comparison. “Let’s assume I’m building medical applications that I’d like to summarize and propose some diagnosis for patients,” [Olivier] Godement gave as one example. “ I’m basically going to optimize for intelligence. I want to make sure they get the most intelligent model out of the box . Similarly, if you’re building a software engineering assistant and working on a pretty complex codebase, you will still be see (sic) better results with GPT-4o. If intelligence differentiates your product, I recommend you stick with GPT-4o and you’ll get the best results.”...

The volume of sexually explicit images of children being generated by predators using artificial intelligence is overwhelming law enforcement’s capabilities to identify and rescue real-life victims, child safety experts warn . Prosecutors and child safety groups working to combat crimes against children say AI-generated images have become so lifelike that in some cases it is difficult to determine whether real children have been subjected to real harms for their production.  A single AI model can generate tens of thousands of new images in a short amount of time, and this content has begun to flood both the dark web and seep into the mainstream internet. “We are starting to see reports of images that are of a real child but have been AI-generated, but that child was not sexually abused. But now their face is on a child that was abused,” said Kristina Korobov, senior attorney at the Zero Abuse Project, a Minnesota-based child safety non-profit. “Sometimes, we recognize the bedding ...

Meta will withhold its next multimodal AI model — and future ones — from customers in the European Union because of what it says is a lack of clarity from regulators there, Axios has learned . The move sets up a showdown between Meta and EU regulators and highlights a growing willingness among U.S. tech giants to withhold products from European customers. "We will release a multimodal Llama model over the coming months, but not in the EU due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment," Meta said in a statement to Axios .

Anthropic launched its Claude Android app on Tuesday to bring its AI chatbot to more users .  This is Anthropic’s latest effort to convince users to ditch ChatGPT by making Claude available in more places. The Claude Android app will work just like the iOS version released in May, including free access to Anthropic’s best AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, alongside upgraded plans through Anthropic’s Pro and Team subscriptions.  Users will be able to sync their conversations with Claude across devices, and upload photos or files to the app for real-time image analysis.  The Claude Android app also includes real-time language translation, which Anthropic hopes to be a convincing reason for people to open the app. Additionally, the app allows enterprise customers to access their Claude accounts on mobile.

Google on Wednesday rolled out a series of GenAI-powered developer tools, including a coder-focused translation tool that one IDC analyst described as “an absolutely amazing and remarkable project.”   Language translation is nothing new, but the particular challenges of translating coding phrases into multiple languages while allowing the GenAI engine to understand the nuances of intent and accurately conveying them in multiple languages is quite difficult, said Arnal Dayaratna, the IDC vice president for software development. Among the various tools introduced by Google Wednesday were:  An expansion of Project Vanni, Google’s work with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) “to capture the diversity of India’s spoken languages”;  IndicGenBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate generation capabilities of LLMs on Indic languages; and  CALM, a Composition of Language Models framework that Google said should help coders “to combine your specialized languag...

When college students Ugyen Dendup and Jamphel Yigzin Samdrup launched their startup last year, they had yet to learn that they would spend most of their time servicing some of the most prestigious institutions in Bhutan. Dendup and Samdrup are the founders of NoMindBhutan, the country’s first artificial intelligence startup that makes and deploys chatbots .  The company’s eight clients include the Bhutan National Bank, the country’s flag carrier Drukair – Royal Bhutan Airlines, the Bhutan National Digital Identity (NDI) program, the National Land Commission, and the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Employment. In a country that has only fifteen homegrown tech startups, according to data from startup analytics firm Tracxn, this is a feat —and one that is paving the way for others. But given Bhutan’s closed physical and digital economy, NoMindBhutan’s journey is not easy.  Startup and tech industry experts believe that for Bhutan to truly benefit from AI, the entire ecosyste...

Fei-Fei Li, the renowned computer scientist known as the “godmother of AI,” has created a startup dubbed World Labs .  In just four months, its already valued at more than $1 billion, the Financial Times reported. World Labs hopes to use human-like processing of visual data to make AI capable of advanced reasoning, Reuters reported in May. The research to make it human-like, much like what ChatGPT is trying to do with generative AI, is still ongoing. Li is best known for her contributions to computer vision, a branch of AI dedicated to helping machines interpret and comprehend visual information. She also spearheaded the development of ImageNet, an extensive visual database used for visual object recognition research. Li headed AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018 and currently advises the White House task force on AI.

   :                      :  "You got to swim with the fish that brought you."      —Mass Strandings              :            :            :                 :

"As Republicans gather for their national convention, I turn my attention to their stance on two transformative technologies: artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency . "Republicans support AI development rooted in free speech.  "They plan to repeal Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, which they view as hindering innovation and imposing left-wing ideas on the technology’s development.  "This position reflects a desire to reduce government regulation in AI development, potentially accelerating innovation but also raising concerns about ethical considerations and safety measures ."