Vacuuming is one of those daily tasks that never really goes away. But as technology has advanced, new vacuums can handle cleaning your floors for you -- and with so many robot vacuum deals out there, you don't have to spend an arm and a leg to cross vacuuming off your to-do list. Right now at eBay, you can take an extra 20% off (up to $100) new and refurbished iRobot devices and accessories when you use promo code IROBOT20 at checkout. There's no minimum order requirements and you can use the promo code up to two times now through May 14. There are a ton of options available that can save you a little time and effort when tidying up, including the Roomba S9 Plus robot vacuum with a self-emptying base, which earned a spot on our list of the best robot vacuums for 2023.

IBM is taking on the likes of Microsoft, AWS, and Google by introducing Watsonx, a new generative AI platform, which will help enterprises design and tune large language models (LLMs) for their operational and business requirements. Watsonx comes with a suite of tools for tuning LLMs, a data store built on lakehouse architecture, and an AI governance toolkit, the company said. Watson AI is IBM's artificial intelligence engine that the company had trained on different machine learning algorithms along with question analysis, natural language processing, feature engineering, and ontology analysis. Watsonx can be seen as the evolution of Watson AI. With the Watsonx platform, the company said it is trying to meet enterprises' requirements in five areas including interacting and conversing with customers and employees, automating business workflows and internal processes, automating IT processes, protecting against threats, and tackling sustainability goals.

IBM is taking on the likes of Microsoft, AWS, and Google by introducing Watsonx, a new generative AI platform, which will help enterprises design and tune large language models (LLMs) for their operational and business requirements. Watsonx comes with a suite of tools for tuning LLMs, a data store built on lakehouse architecture, and an AI governance toolkit, the company said. Watson AI is IBM's artificial intelligence engine that the company had trained on different machine learning algorithms along with question analysis, natural language processing, feature engineering, and ontology analysis. Watsonx can be seen as the evolution of Watson AI. With the Watsonx platform, the company said it is trying to meet enterprises' requirements in five areas including interacting and conversing with customers and employees, automating business workflows and internal processes, automating IT processes, protecting against threats, and tackling sustainability goals.

Swarms of small robots rolling around on the ceiling can reconfigure rooms by moving hanging curtains or lights around – or store and then drop small objects such as keys and balls to humans below. "When you look up at the ceiling, it is unutilised space for these robotics technologies," says Ken Nakagaki. Nakagaki and his colleagues at the University of Chicago modified Toio consumer robots from Sony and attached magnets to them.

The breathtaking development of artificial intelligence has dazzled users by composing music, creating images and writing essays, while also raising fears about its implications. Even European Union officials working on groundbreaking rules to govern the emerging technology were caught off guard by AI's rapid rise. The 27-nation bloc proposed the Western world's first AI rules two years ago, focusing on reining in risky but narrowly focused applications. General purpose AI systems like chatbots were barely mentioned. Lawmakers working on the AI Act considered whether to include them but weren't sure how, or even if it was necessary.

Dan Nechita has spent the past year shuttling back and forth between Brussels and Strasbourg. As the head of cabinet (essentially chief of staff) for one of the two rapporteurs leading negotiations over the EU's proposed new AI law, he's helped hammer out compromises between those who want the technology to be tightly regulated and those who believe innovation needs more space to evolve. The discussions have, Nechita says, been "long and tedious." First there were debates about how to define AI--what it was that Europe was even regulating. "That was a very, very, very long discussion," Nechita says.

Large language models, or LLMs, are a type of neural network that learns to write and converse with users; they back all of the chatbots that have swooped onto the scene in recent months. They learn to "speak" by hovering up massive amounts of text, often websites scraped from the internet, and finding statistical relationships between words. When these systems pattern match, it can lead to feats of creativity: A chatbot can create song lyrics closely matching Jay-Z's style because it's absorbed the patterns of his entire discography. But LLMs don't have awareness of the meanings behind words.

Five hours is enough time to watch a Mets game. It is enough time to listen to the Spice Girls' "Spice" album (40 minutes), Paul Simon's "Paul Simon" album (42 minutes) and Gustav Mahler's third symphony (his longest). It is enough time to roast a chicken, text your friends that you've roasted a chicken and prepare for an impromptu dinner party. Or you could spend it checking your email. Five hours is about how long many workers spend on email each day.

Disposable plastics are everywhere: Food containers, coffee cups, plastic bags. Some of these plastics, called compostable plastics, can be engineered to biodegrade under controlled conditions. However, they often look identical to conventional plastics, get recycled incorrectly and, as a result, contaminate plastic waste streams and reduce recycling efficiency. Similarly, recyclable plastics are often mistaken for compostable ones, resulting in polluted compost. Researchers at University College London (UCL) have published a paper in Frontiers in Sustainability in which they used machine learning to automatically sort different types of compostable and biodegradable plastics and differentiate them from conventional plastics.

Despite the eye-catching claim that large AI language models like ChatGPT have achieved theory of mind, some experts find their abilities lackluster.