Sébastien Bubeck, a machine learning researcher at Microsoft, woke up one night last September thinking about artificial intelligence--and unicorns. Bubeck had recently gotten early access to GPT-4, a powerful text generation algorithm from OpenAI and an upgrade to the machine learning model at the heart of the wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT. Bubeck was part of a team working to integrate the new AI system into Microsoft's Bing search engine. But he and his colleagues kept marveling at how different GPT-4 seemed from anything they'd seen before. GPT-4, like its predecessors, had been fed massive amounts of text and code and trained to use the statistical patterns in that corpus to predict the words that should be generated in reply to a piece of text input.

The Tesla and Twitter CEO, who was an early donor to chatbot ChatGPT creator OpenAI, expressed deep concern over the direction of the field in a Fox News interview on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," which caters to a conservative audience. Musk said large-language models were being trained to be "politically correct," or untruthful, though the interview didn't include detailed examples of what he was claiming.

Google is working on search changes to counter artificial intelligence (AI) rivals that pose a threat to the company's search engine, The New York Times reported. The Times reported that Samsung was considering using Microsoft's Bing instead of Google as its default search engine on its devices. This news comes after Microsoft announced plans to incorporate AI tools into its Bing search engine following Google's announcement of its own plans to launch AI-powered features in its search tools. The Times reviewed internal messages from Google employees, who reportedly responded with "panic" to the threat of Samsung pulling the Google engine. According to internal documents reviews by The Times, Google is updated its existing search engine with more features in a project called Magi.

The stunning capabilities of ChatGPT, the chatbot from startup OpenAI, has triggered a surge of new interest and investment in artificial intelligence. But late last week, OpenAI's CEO warned that the research strategy that birthed the bot is played out. It's unclear exactly where future advances will come from. OpenAI has delivered a series of impressive advances in AI that works with language in recent years by taking existing machine-learning algorithms and scaling them up to previously unimagined size. GPT-4, the latest of those projects, was likely trained using trillions of words of text and many thousands of powerful computer chips.

At first glance, building a large language model (LLM) like GPT-4 into your code might seem simple. The API is a single REST call, taking in text and returning a response based on the input. But in practice things get much more complicated than that. The API is perhaps better thought of as a domain boundary, where you're delivering prompts that define the format the model uses to deliver its output. But that's a critical point: LLMs can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be.

Just a few years ago, the promise seemed limitless: Automate cars and bring an end to traffic accidents, the biggest killer in the United States. Automate construction, with robot dozers, excavators, and other heavy machinery, and US housing and infrastructure shortfalls could be solved. Built Robotics began testing autonomous excavators in 2017 with the goal of training machines to do more on construction sites. At the time, CEO Noah Ready-Campbell predicted that fully autonomous equipment would become commonplace on construction sites before fully autonomous cars hit public roads. But after nearly seven years of digging trenches with autonomous excavators, Built Robotics last month announced plans to shift its focus from general construction projects to installation of solar farms.

Summary: Artificial intelligence can detect signs of mild cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease, even when no symptoms are apparent, by analyzing a person's speech. The technology could be used as a simple screening method to identify early signs of cognitive impairment. New technologies that can capture subtle changes in a patient's voice may help physicians diagnose cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease before symptoms begin to show, according to a UT Southwestern Medical Center researcher who led a study published in the Alzheimer's Association publication Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring. "Our focus was on identifying subtle language and audio changes that are present in the very early stages of Alzheimer's disease but not easily recognizable by family members or an individual's primary care physician," said Ihab Hajjar, M.D., Professor of Neurology at UT Southwestern's Peter O'Donnell Jr. Brain Institute. Researchers used advanced machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) tools to assess speech patterns in 206 people – 114 who met the criteria for mild cognitive decline and 92 who were unimpaired.

Our old friend Spot the robot dog is joining the Big Apple's police force. New York City mayor Eric Adams announced that the New York Police Department will be acquiring some new semi-autonomous robotic canines in the coming weeks. The move comes almost exactly two years after the NYPD halted its first go at using a camera-carrying robot dog for surveillance, after a massive public outcry; citizens felt it was a dystopian overreach of police power. Now Adams, a former NYPD captain, is moving the program forward again. The NYPD says it will acquire two of Boston Dynamic's controversial Spot bots. While the robot dogs have autonomous capabilities, the NYPD says these units won't be patrolling the streets by themselves just yet.

Given the rising interest in generative AI tools like text-based ChatGPT and image-based Midjourney, AI-powered apps are growing in numbers and popularity in both app stores. A report by analytics firm Apptopia suggests that 158 AI Chatbot apps -- with the description having keywords like "AI Chat" or "AI Chatbot" -- hit the app stores in the first quarter of this year. The data suggests that multiple apps like Nova AI, Genie AI and Chat with Ask AI have broken into top charts in app stores -- a lot of these apps are similarly named, so it's easy to get confused between them. At the time of writing, Chat with Ask AI is on the top 10 free apps list on iOS in multiple countries. Apptopia mentions in the report that developers are trying to convert AI chatbot tech, which is easily available on a web browser, into a native mobile experience and charging money for it.

Amazon may still be king of the cloud, but in recent months it's had to watch its two closest rivals, Microsoft and Google, steal the spotlight with brilliant but error-prone chatbots that use cutting-edge "generative" artificial intelligence models. Today, Amazon announced it's joining the generative AI race. Not by launching its own chatbot, but by making two new AI language models available through its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services, which customers will be able to use to build their own bots. The past few months have seen the tech industry foaming at the mouth over the potential of generative AI--algorithms that learn to produce text, code, imagery, and more. The boom has been inspired by the remarkable success of OpenAI's text-generating bot, ChatGPT, as well as the success of AI-image generators.