AI Assistant in Adobe Acrobat, now in beta, is a new generative AI–powered conversational engine deeply integrated into Acrobat workflows, empowering everyone with the information inside their most important documents. As the creator of PDF, the world's most trusted digital document format, Adobe understands document challenges and opportunities well. Our continually evolving Acrobat PDF application, the gold standard for working with PDFs, is already used by more than half a billion customers to open around 400 billion documents each year. Starting immediately, customers will be able to use AI Assistant to work even more productively. All they need to do is open Acrobat on their desktop or the web and start working.

A coalition of 20 tech companies signed an agreement Friday to help prevent AI deepfakes in the critical 2024 elections taking place in more than 40 countries. OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon, Adobe and X are among the businesses joining the pact to prevent and combat AI-generated content that could influence voters. However, the agreement's vague language and lack of binding enforcement call into question whether it goes far enough. The list of companies signing the "Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections" includes those that create and distribute AI models, as well as social platforms where the deepfakes are most likely to pop up. The signees are Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Arm, ElevenLabs, Google, IBM, Inflection AI, LinkedIn, McAfee, Meta, Microsoft, Nota, OpenAI, Snap Inc., Stability AI, TikTok, Trend Micro, Truepic and X (formerly Twitter).

The groundbreaking artificial intelligence image-generating company Midjourney is considering banning people from using its software to make political images of Joe Biden and Donald Trump as part of an effort to avoid being used to distract from or misinform about the 2024 US presidential election. "I don't know how much I care about political speech for the next year for our platform," Midjourney's CEO, David Holz, said last week, adding that the company is close to "hammering" – or banning – political images, including those of the leading presidential candidates, "for the next 12 months". In a conversation with Midjourney users in a chatroom on Discord, as reported by Bloomberg, Holz went on to say: "I know it's fun to make Trump pictures – I make Trump pictures. Trump is aesthetically really interesting. However, probably better to just not, better to pull out a little bit during this election.

When OpenAI's ChatGPT opened a new era in tech, the industry's former AI champ, Google, responded by reorganizing its labs and launching a profusion of sometimes overlapping AI services. This included the Bard chatbot, workplace helper Duet AI, and a chatbot-style version of search. Now Google is consolidating many of its generative AI products under the banner of its latest AI model Gemini--and taking direct aim at OpenAI's subscription service ChatGPT Plus. Google announced today that Bard, its experimental chatbot hurriedly launched last March, is now called Gemini--taking the same name of the text, voice, and image capable AI model that started powering the Bard chatbot back in December. Gemini is also getting more prominent positioning among Google's services.

There are mornings when you can tell you're not feeling well just by looking in the mirror -- but a new AI'mirror' debuting this week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) promises to tell you a whole lot more. The product (effectively a 21.5-inch vertical tablet with a mounted camera) tracks over 100 health parameters by scanning blood flow under the surface of your face. The device promises to detect signs of everything from high blood pressure, to fever symptoms, to depression or mental health risk, to 10-year stroke risk, to'facial skin age.' But it can also warn you if it thinks you are about to die. One telemedicine expert praised the device as'ideal for clinics, elder care homes.'

Google has laid off hundreds of employees working on its hardware, voice assistance and engineering teams as part of cost-cutting measures. The cuts come as Google looks towards "responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead", the company said in a statement. "Some teams are continuing to make these kinds of organizational changes, which include some role eliminations globally," it said. Google earlier said it was eliminating a few hundred roles across engineering, hardware and the Assistant teams, though most of the impact hit the company's augmented reality hardware division. The cuts follow pledges by executives of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, to reduce costs.

Google has announced that it will eliminate at least 17 features from its Assistant product, following news that it had laid off "hundreds" of employees from the division. The company is cutting "underutilized features" to "focus on quality and reliability, it wrote in a blog post, even though a good number of people may still rely on those functions. "Beginning on January 26, when you ask for one of these features, you may get a notification that it won't be available after a certain date," wrote Google Assistant VP Duke Dukellis. The company didn't specify how removing certain commands will improve Assistant, nor did it describe any specific quality and reliability problems. It did say, though, that improvements in the past were aided by user feedback, so it may have been receiving complaints about Assistant's core usability of late.

Building agents with adaptive behavior in cooperative tasks stands as a paramount goal in the realm of multi-agent systems. Current approaches to developing cooperative agents rely primarily on learning-based methods, whose policy generalization depends heavily on the diversity of teammates they interact with during the training phase. Such reliance, however, constrains the agents' capacity for strategic adaptation when cooperating with unfamiliar teammates, which becomes a significant challenge in zero-shot coordination scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose ProAgent, a novel framework that harnesses large language models (LLMs) to create proactive agents capable of dynamically adapting their behavior to enhance cooperation with teammates. ProAgent can analyze the present state, and infer the intentions of teammates from observations. It then updates its beliefs in alignment with the teammates' subsequent actual behaviors. Moreover, ProAgent exhibits a high degree of modularity and interpretability, making it easily integrated into various of coordination scenarios. Experimental evaluations conducted within the Overcooked-AI environment unveil the remarkable performance superiority of ProAgent, outperforming five methods based on self-play and population-based training when cooperating with AI agents. Furthermore, in partnered with human proxy models, its performance exhibits an average improvement exceeding 10% compared to the current state-of-the-art method. For more information about our project, please visit~\url{https://pku-proagent.github.io}.

The annual CES convention in Las Vegas has a reputation for showcasing the wildest gear that the tech industry has to offer. Wandering the floor of the consumer electronics show can be overwhelming and entertaining, as small scrappy startups display their products alongside the established tech giants. But we've kept an eye on some of the coolest and strangest technology products on display at the show. WeHead's AI head is made up of several screens. I tried speaking with the WeHead device, but it kept calling me'bro.'

Google is expanding its smart home integration at CES 2024. The company said Tuesday that, in the future, LG TVs and some Google TV (and other Android TV) products will work as Google Home hubs. Considering Google's support for the Matter smart home standard, the move could make it easier for customers to set up and control their smart homes without buying a Nest device. "In the future, LG TVs and select Google TV and other Android TV OS devices will act as hubs for Google Home," Google Android VP Sameer Samat wrote in today's announcement blog post. "So if you have a Nest Hub, Nest Mini or compatible TV, it's easy to add Matter devices to your home network and locally control them with the Google Home app."