Waste-sorting robots that have been learning their job while wandering through Google offices can now effectively sort items in bins into recycling, compost and rubbish. One way of teaching machines to perform tasks is by reinforcement learning, in which a robot is told what a successful outcome looks like and is left to figure out how to achieve it by trial and error and a system of feedback, gradually building up an optimal model of what to do.

Developing the AI systems behind tools such as ChatGPT and the image generator Dall-E costs hundreds of millions of dollars--and it's about to get more expensive. OpenAI, Google, and other companies building large-scale AI projects have traditionally paid nothing for much of their training data, scraping it from the web. But Stack Overflow, a popular internet forum for computer programming help, plans to begin charging large AI developers as soon as the middle of this year for access to the 50 million questions and answers on its service, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says. The site has more than 20 million registered users. Stack Overflow's decision to seek compensation from companies tapping its data, part of a broader generative AI strategy, has not been previously reported. It follows an announcement by Reddit this week that it will begin charging some AI developers to access its own content starting in June.

Snapchat is releasing its GPT-powered AI chatbot to every user for free, the company announced at its annual developer conference, as it tries to chart a distinctive path between the titans of Instagram and TikTok. That means expanding access to its AI chatbot, doubling down on the distinction between public and private posts, and paying successful creators a share of the revenue their viral content generates. First released for paying members of the social network's Snapchat subscription service, "My AI" shows up as another chat contact in the social network's app. Similar to ChatGPT, users can ask it factual questions, request creative content, and have back-and-forth conversations with the service. "It really deepens our ability to serve our mission of helping people express themselves, learn about the world, live in the moment and have fun together," said Snap's vice president of product, Jack Brody. Users will also be able to add My AI to group chats, turning to the virtual assistant for any queries that come up in the course of conversation.

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.