Asset Entities is a publicly listed set of social media accounts and Discord servers that churn out get-rich-quick tips for Gen Z. It reported a net loss of $413,000 last year. But give Texas-based vice president Kyle Fairbanks just 21 49 seconds and he'll tell you how to (maybe) make $20,000 a month arbitraging AirBnbs up and down the East Coast. He has an extensive corpus. For a few wondrous hours on Monday it was the Nasdaq's best-performing stock.

The EU has taken a major step towards passing one of the world's first laws governing artificial intelligence after its main legislative branch approved the text of draft legislation that includes a blanket ban on police use of live facial recognition technology in public places. The European parliament approved rules aimed at setting a global standard for the technology, which encompasses everything from automated medical diagnoses to some types of drone, AI-generated videos known as deepfakes, and bots such as ChatGPT. MEPs will now thrash out details with EU countries before the draft rules – known as the AI act – become legislation. "AI raises a lot of questions socially, ethically, economically. But now is not the time to hit any'pause button'. On the contrary, it is about acting fast and taking responsibility," said Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market.

The European Union's flagship artificial intelligence regulation took a major step toward becoming law on Wednesday, after lawmakers voted to approve the text of the law that would ban real-time facial recognition, and place new transparency requirements on generative AI tools like ChatGPT. AI Act--will now progress to the final "trilogue" stage of the E.U.'s regulatory process. There, officials will attempt to reach a compromise between the draft of the law just approved by the E.U. Parliament, a different version preferred by the bloc's executive branch, and the desires of member states. That process will begin on Wednesday night and must be completed by January if the law is to come into force before E.U. elections next year.

A robot manipulating objects while, say, working in a kitchen, will benefit from understanding which items are composed of the same materials. With this knowledge, the robot would know to exert a similar amount of force whether it picks up a small pat of butter from a shadowy corner of the counter or an entire stick from inside the brightly lit fridge. Identifying objects in a scene that are composed of the same material, known as material selection, is an especially challenging problem for machines because a material's appearance can vary drastically based on the shape of the object or lighting conditions. Scientists at MIT and Adobe Research have taken a step toward solving this challenge. They developed a technique that can identify all pixels in an image representing a given material, which is shown in a pixel selected by the user. The method is accurate even when objects have varying shapes and sizes, and the machine-learning model they developed isn't tricked by shadows or lighting conditions that can make the same material appear different.

The United Nations secretary-general has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to spread disinformation and hate, as he backed a proposal for the creation of an international watchdog to monitor the technology. Speaking at the launch of a new policy on disinformation on Monday, Antonio Guterres said that while technological advancement has been used for some good, the risks posed by AI threatens democracy and human rights. Guterres said he backs a proposal by some artificial intelligence executives for the creation of a watchdog body similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Generative AI technology – which can perform natural language processing tasks such as answering questions, summarising text and even generating lines of code – has captivated the public since ChatGPT launched six months ago. AI has also become a focus of concern over its ability to create misinformation and deep fakes, which are AI-generated images and videos that mimic people.

The following are the report's key findings: Businesses buy into AI/ML, but struggle to scale across the organization. The vast majority (93%) of respondents have several experimental or in-use AI/ML projects, with larger companies likely to have greater deployment. A majority (82%) say ML investment will increase during the next 18 months, and closely tie AI and ML to revenue goals. Yet scaling is a major challenge, as is hiring skilled workers, finding appropriate use cases, and showing value. Deployment success requires a talent and skills strategy.

An automated robot gardener has shown its nurturing side by matching humans in trials of growing vegetables – and it did it with more efficient use of water. Simeon Adebola at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have developed an automated plot, called AlphaGarden, that contains a mix of plant types and tested whether it can perform as well as a team of six expert human horticulturalists, each with 10 years of gardening experience, on average. The robot and human-run plots both contained pairs of eight different common edible vegetables, such as kale, chard and radicchio.

Despite the wild success of ChatGPT and other large language models, the artificial neural networks (ANNs) that underpin these systems might be on the wrong track. For one, ANNs are "super power-hungry," said Cornelia Fermüller, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland. "And the other issue is [their] lack of transparency." Such systems are so complicated that no one truly understands what they're doing, or why they work so well. This, in turn, makes it almost impossible to get them to reason by analogy, which is what humans do--using symbols for objects, ideas, and the relationships between them.

For decades, Silicon Valley anticipated the moment when a new technology would come along and change everything. It would unite human and machine, probably for the better but possibly for the worse, and split history into before and after. It could happen in several ways. One possibility is that people would add a computer's processing power to their own innate intelligence, becoming supercharged versions of themselves. Or maybe computers would grow so complex that they could truly think, creating a global brain.

AI technology has been catapulted into popular discourse in recent months with the rise of natural language processing like ChatGPT. Computer vision, though, is even older. It is used in Roomba vacuums and surgical settings, according to Kris Hauser, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign whose research specializes in open-world robotics. But this is one of the first AI robots to be used in the consumer beauty space, Hauser said.