Waymo has operated a driverless service in suburban Arizona since the end of 2020. But that is very different from a congested city. "If you get disabled on a quiet suburban street, you are not in anyone's way," said Matt Wansley, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who specializes in emerging automotive technologies. The Waymo car that stopped in the middle of a San Francisco intersection last week entered a very complex and busy intersection "due to temporary road closures that precluded use of the intended route," Waymo said. When a car cannot navigate a situation on its own, remote technicians can send the car additional information that can help it get going again.

Armed with a belief in technology's generative potential, a growing faction of researchers and companies aims to solve the problem of bias in AI by creating artificial images of people of color. Proponents argue that AI-powered generators can rectify the diversity gaps in existing image databases by supplementing them with synthetic images. Some researchers are using machine learning architectures to map existing photos of people onto new races in order to "balance the ethnic distribution" of datasets. Others, like Generated Media and Qoves Lab, are using similar technologies to create entirely new portraits for their image banks, "building … faces of every race and ethnicity," as Qoves Lab puts it, to ensure a "truly fair facial dataset." As they see it, these tools will resolve data biases by cheaply and efficiently producing diverse images on command.

"That's a very manual intensive job, and one that's not well-liked by many," says Sally Miller, global digital transformation officer for DHL Supply Chain, the world's largest third-party logistics company. Facing a labor shortage and high turnover in these kinds of warehouse jobs, DHL Supply Chain turned to robot maker Boston Dynamics to come up with a solution. In development for several years, the first two Stretch robots have just been deployed at an apparel company, which DHL Supply Chain declined to name, and about six more will be sent to other warehouse sites over the next three or four months. Stretch is the first robot that Boston Dynamics has purpose-built for a specific set of applications, according to Kevin Blankespoor, the company's senior vice president and general manager of warehouse robotics. His is a title that lays bare the potential Boston Dynamics sees in logistics.

So far, newsrooms have pursued two very different approaches to integrating the buzziest new AI tool, ChatGPT, into their work. Tech news site CNET secretly started using ChatGPT to write entire articles, only for the experiment to go up in flames. It ultimately had to issue corrections amid accusations of plagiarism. Buzzfeed, on the other hand, has taken a more careful, measured approach. Its leaders want to use ChatGPT to generate quiz answers, guided by journalists who create the topics and questions.

Microsoft has announced a deepening of its partnership with the company behind the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT by announcing a multibillion dollar investment in the business. It said the deal with OpenAI would involve deploying the company's artificial intelligence models across Microsoft products, which include the Bing search engine and its office software such as Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot, has been a sensation since it launched in November, with users marvelling at its ability to perform a variety of tasks from writing recipes and sonnets to job applications. It is at the forefront of generative AI, or technology trained on vast amounts of text and images that can create content from a simple text prompt. It has also been described as "a gamechanger" that will challenge teachers in universities and schools amid concerns that pupils are already using the chatbot to write high-quality essays with minimal human input.

Microsoft on Monday said it had extended its partnership with OpenAI, the research lab and creator of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that has sparked widespread fears of cheating in schools and universities. In a company blog post tweeted by CEO Satya Nadella, the tech giant announced a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs" that would be "broadly shared with the world." OpenAI's ChatGPT became an internet sensation when it was released without warning in November, allowing users to experiment with its ability to write essays, articles and poems as well as computer code in just seconds. With teachers alarmed by its ability, ChatGPT is banned in universities and school districts - including in New York City and Washington DC - and has sparked nervous debates about the future of office work. California-based OpenAI is also the creator of DALL-E, a program that can swiftly draw up digital images and illustrations at a simple request.

On January 18, Time magazine published revelations that alarmed if not necessarily surprised many who work in Artificial Intelligence. The news concerned ChatGPT, an advanced AI chatbot that is both hailed as one of the most intelligent AI systems built to date and feared as a new frontier in potential plagiarism and the erosion of craft in writing. Many had wondered how ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, had improved upon earlier versions of this technology that would quickly descend into hate speech. The answer came in the Time magazine piece: dozens of Kenyan workers were paid less than $2 per hour to process an endless amount of violent and hateful content in order to make a system primarily marketed to Western users safer. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that our current paradigm of digitalisation has a labour problem. We have and are pivoting away from the ideal of an open internet built around communities of shared interests to one that is dominated by the commercial prerogatives of a handful of companies located in specific geographies.

Tel-Aviv-based AI21 Labs launched today Wordtune Spices, a writer-augmentation tool based on generative AI. Selecting from 12 different cues, writers can generate a range of textual options to add to and enhance sentences. Spices can also suggest statistics to strengthen an argument or sharpen a detail. AI21 says Spices is not intended to replace writers but to function as a writing assistant, suggesting additional complete sentences that improve and enhance the text that is being written. It could help refine and enrich the main message of the text, bolster and enrich arguments, and add creative expressions such as a joke or inspirational quote. The Israeli startup claims to have solved one of the major issues with popular applications based on Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT which do not give source credit.

This week, Terwiesch released a research paper in which he documented how ChatGPT performed on the final exam of a typical MBA core course, Operations Management. The A.I. chatbot, he wrote, "does an amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions including those that are based on case studies." It did have shortcomings, he noted, including being able to handle "more advanced process analysis questions." But ChatGPT, he determined, "would have received a B to B- grade on the exam." Elsewhere, it has also "performed well in the preparation of legal documents and some believe that the next generation of this technology might even be able to pass the bar exam," he noted.

The artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT that has taken the world by storm has made its formal debut in the scientific literature -- racking up at least four authorship credits on published papers and preprints. Journal editors, researchers and publishers are now debating the place of such AI tools in the published literature, and whether it's appropriate to cite the bot as an author. Publishers are racing to create policies for the chatbot, which was released as a free-to-use tool in November by tech company OpenAI in San Francisco, California. AI bot ChatGPT writes smart essays -- should professors worry? ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM), which generates convincing sentences by mimicking the statistical patterns of language in a huge database of text collated from the Internet. The bot is already disrupting sectors including academia: in particular, it is raising questions about the future of university essays and research production.