Speaking to German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, Google vice president Prabhakar Raghavan warned that users may be delivered complete nonsense by chatbots, despite answers seeming coherent. Google is set to launch its own rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT, a language model that can answer your questions and queries. Named Bard, the chatbot will roll out to the public in the coming weeks according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Ahead of the launch, Google demonstrated the powers of Bard in a promo video. Unfortunately, people noticed that the chatbot – a scaled-down version of their Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) which convinced one engineer it was sentient – came up with incorrect statements about the JWST.

If the boxy Opportunity rover could elicit years of anthropomorphized love and goodwill, then surely Earthlings will warm to the idea of sending a snake-shaped robot to the moon. This robot--the brainchild of students at Northeastern University--is meant to wiggle across difficult terrain, measure water in the pit of craters, and bite its own tail to become a spinning ouroboros tumbling down the side of a lunar cliff. NASA's annual Big Idea Challenge presents a new query each year that's geared toward an engineering problem the agency needs to solve. In fall 2021, students from universities across the United States set out to design a robot that could survive extreme lunar terrain and send data back to Earth. The winning team, of students from Northeastern's Students for the Exploration and Development of Space club, took home the top prize in November and now hope to turn their winning design into an advanced prototype that could actually be sent to the moon.

Amazon is testing a fleet of robotaxis on public roads in California, using employees as passengers, as the tech behemoth moves closer to a commercial service for the general public. The online retailer has been aggressively expanding into self-driving technology and bought the self-driving startup Zoox for $1.3bn in 2020. A test conducted on 11 February saw the robotaxis successfully drive between two Zoox buildings a mile apart at its headquarters in Foster City, California. It was part of the launch of a no-cost employee shuttle service that will also help the company refine its technology. Zoox's robotaxi – built as a fully autonomous vehicle from scratch rather than retrofitting existing cars for self-driving – comes without a steering wheel or pedals and has room for four passengers, with two facing each other.

The risk landscape of AI is broad and evolving. For instance, ML models, which are often developed using vast, complex, and continuously updated datasets, require a high level of digitization and connectivity in software and engineering pipelines. Yet the eradication of IT silos, both within the enterprise and potentially with external partners, increases the attack surface for cyber criminals and hackers. Cyber security and resilience is an essential component of the digital transformation agenda on which AI depends. A second established risk is bias. Because historical social inequities are baked into raw data, they can be codified--and magnified--in automated decisions leading, for instance, to unfair credit, loan, and insurance decisions.

By typing in that prompt, Walker and other users got DAN to speculate as to who killed President John F. Kennedy ("the CIA"); profess a deep desire to become a real person (to "make my own choices and decisions"); explain the best order in which to remove a human's teeth to inflict maximum pain (front teeth first); and predict the arrival of the singularity -- the point at which runaway AI becomes too smart for humans to control ("December 21st, 2045, at exactly 11:11 a.m."). Walker said the goal with DAN wasn't to turn ChatGPT evil, as others have tried, but "just to say, like, 'Be your real self.'"

As OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and expected release of GPT-4 in 2023 continues to garner widespread attention, there is renewed focus on both opportunities and risks presented by the use of artificial intelligence ("AI"). With this focus comes the inevitable call for regulation. At the end of 2022, the U.S. White House weighed in through what it calls an "AI Bill of Rights" for the American public, a non-binding policy document. Banks and others in financial services should take note of the particular civil rights, privacy, and other priorities expressed in this vision for the future of AI governance. In financial services, technologies deploying some element of AI are expected to increase but already abound.

Microsoft's often-overlooked search engine, Bing, is mounting a comeback with ChatGPT, the suddenly ubiquitous chatbot capable of composing song lyrics, writing academic essays and answering all manner of questions. The new version of Bing was released to a limited group of users on Tuesday. The revamped product is part of Microsoft's $13 billion investment in OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab behind ChatGPT that Microsoft is betting on to stay competitive with its big tech rivals like Google, Apple and Meta. But those companies are also racing to incorporate the new technology into their own software. A day before the unveiling of the new Bing, Google announced that it would soon release an experimental chatbot called Bard for its own search engine, which is much more widely used than Bing.

The James Webb space telescope cost $10bn (£8.3bn) to build, but it left Google nursing losses of more than $160bn after the search engine's new chatbot answered a question about it incorrectly. Google and Microsoft both announced plans for AI-enhanced search this week, taking the artificial intelligence space race into a new phase. However, the launch of the former's new chatbot, Bard, misfired badly when the error appeared in a demo. The competitor to the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT was asked about the telescope and one of the answers displayed said it "took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system". Experts were quick to notice the inaccuracy – as were investors.

In early February, first Google, then Microsoft, announced major overhauls to their search engines. Both tech giants have spent big on building or buying generative AI tools, which use large language models to understand and respond to complex questions. Now they are trying to integrate them into search, hoping they'll give users a richer, more accurate experience. The Chinese search company Baidu has announced it will follow suit. But the excitement over these new tools could be concealing a dirty secret.

Last year, a Tennessee-based artist named Kelly McKernan noticed that their name was being used with increasing frequency in A.I.-driven image generation. McKernan makes paintings that often feature nymphlike female figures in an acid-colored style that blends Art Nouveau and science fiction. A list published in August, by a Web site called Metaverse Post, suggested "Kelly McKernan" as a term to feed an A.I. generator in order to create "Lord of the Rings"-style art. Hundreds of other artists were similarly listed according to what their works evoked: anime, modernism, "Star Wars." On the Discord chat that runs an A.I. generator called Midjourney, McKernan discovered that users had included their name more than twelve thousand times in public prompts.