Cruise, General Motors' self-driving development subsidiary, will lay off almost a quarter of its workforce--about 900 employees--the company announced Thursday. The cuts are part of a broader restructuring to focus the robotaxi unit on a narrower path to commercialization. Instead of expanding its commercial robotaxi service to multiple US cities, the company will relaunch its currently paused service in just one. Cruise wants to "enhance our safety standards and processes before we scale," company co-president and CTO Mo ElShenawy wrote in a letter to employees announcing the layoffs today. A company blog post said that 24 percent of full-time Cruise employees will be let go, with a focus on field and commercial operations, and corporate staffing, though some engineers are also affected.

There is a tension at the heart of ChatGPT that may soon snap. Does the technology expand our world or constrain it? Which is to say, do AI-powered chatbots open new doors to learning and discovery, or do they instead risk siloing off information and leaving us stuck with unreliable access to truth? Earlier today, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a partnership with the media conglomerate Axel Springer that seems to get us closer to an answer. Under the arrangement, ChatGPT will gain the capacity to present its users with "summaries of selected global news content" published by the news organizations in Axel Springer's portfolio, which includes Politico and Business Insider.

Google DeepMind has announced its much-anticipated family of artificial intelligence chatbots, Gemini, which will compete with OpenAI's GPT series. According to Google, Gemini Ultra, its largest and most capable new model, outperforms OpenAI's most capable model, GPT-4, at a number of text-based, image-based, coding, and reasoning tasks. Gemini Ultra will be available through a new AI chat feature called Bard Advanced from early next year, the company said. It is currently being refined and is undergoing "trust and safety checks, including red-teaming by trusted external parties," according to the announcement. Google DeepMind also announced the launch of Gemini Pro, which is now available to the public through Google's Bard chat interface, and the smaller Gemini Nano, which will run on Google's Pixel 8 Pro smartphone.

The ChatGPT developer's new board of directors and its briefly fired but now-restored CEO, Sam Altman, said last week that they're trying to fix the unusual corporate structure that allowed four board members to trigger a near-death experience for the company. The startup was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, but it develops AI inside a capped-profit subsidiary answerable to the nonprofit's board, which is charged with ensuring that the technology is "broadly beneficial" to humanity. To stabilize this unusual structure, OpenAI could take pointers from longer-lived companies with a similar arrangement--including introducing a second board to help balance its founding mission with its for-profit pursuit of returns for investors. OpenAI deferred comment for this story to new board chair Bret Taylor. The veteran tech executive told WIRED in a statement that the board is focused on overseeing an independent review of the recent crisis and enhancing governance.

US Senators John Kennedy (R-LA) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) introduced a bipartisan bill Wednesday to end involuntary facial recognition screening at airports. The Traveler Privacy Protection Act would block the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) from continuing or expanding its facial recognition tech program. It would also require the government agency to explicitly receive congressional permission to renew it, and it would have to dispose of all biometric data within three months. Senator Merkley described the TSA's biometric collection practices as the first steps toward an Orwellian nightmare. "The TSA program is a precursor to a full-blown national surveillance state," Merkley wrote in a news release.

GM is massively slashing spending on its self-driving vehicle subsidiary Cruise after a string of debilitating setbacks, according to a conference call by company executives transcribed by TechCrunch . GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra said that operations would resume in some capacity, but that any plans for Cruise moving forward would be more "deliberate." To that end, the cuts will amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in the next year. This is expected to result in widespread layoffs at the San Francisco-based company that currently employees nearly 4,000 people. Earlier this month, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt told staffers at an all-hands meeting that he'd have information regarding layoffs in the coming weeks, but he resigned shortly thereafter along with co-founder Dan Kan.

General Motors (GM) will slash spending in its self-driving car unit Cruise, after an accident last month seriously injured a pedestrian and prompted regulators to retract its operating permit for driverless cars in San Francisco. The company announced today that it will "substantially lower" its spending on Cruise next year, according to Mary Barra, GM's CEO. "We expect the pace of Cruise's expansion to be more deliberate when operations resume," she said in a letter to shareholders. Until the accident, Cruise had been operating driverless taxis in three US cities, San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin, with plans to expand. In October, the company said it would no longer operate its vehicles without safety drivers behind the wheel.

Princess Diana's biographer Andrew Morton, author of "The Queen: Her Story," weighs in on the future for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The New York Times and more wrote critical reviews of a new book on the royal family, including a chapter on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, which one review described as a "press release cooked up by ChatGPT." The book, by Omid Scobie, is titled "Endgame," and picks up on the royal family after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. A review, written by Eva Wolchover for the New York Times, said the book did Harry and Meghan "no favors." "Whether or not Scobie actively collaborated with Meghan and Harry for this book, he does them no favors. Their chapter reads like a press release cooked up by ChatGPT, and does little to shed light on them as humans," the Times review read.

The study deployed four AI-detection tools to uncover possible evidence of hastily crafted, insincere apologies penned by an AI chatbot: ChatGPTZero, Undetectable.ai, The team collected apologies from posts and videos and transcribed the content, which was scanned through the four systems and then analyzed for the likelihood of AI generation. Overall percentages were then calculated, finding averages of each percentage found on different AI detector tools for that celebrity. Viral TikTok sensation Tiffany Gomas, whose unhinged reaction to another airline passenger spanned the internet, scored a combined 72 percent likelihood that AI-generated her video-taped Instagram apology. The transcribed text of the content was found to be 99 percent likely AI on Sapling and 45 percent likely AI on ChatGPTZero.

A judge has found "reasonable evidence" that Elon Musk and other executives at Tesla knew that the company's self-driving technology was defective but still allowed the cars to be driven in an unsafe manner anyway, according to a recent ruling issued in Florida. Palm Beach county circuit court judge Reid Scott said he'd found evidence that Tesla "engaged in a marketing strategy that painted the products as autonomous" and that Musk's public statements about the technology "had a significant effect on the belief about the capabilities of the products". The ruling, reported by Reuters on Wednesday, clears the way for a lawsuit over a fatal crash in 2019 north of Miami involving a Tesla Model 3. The vehicle crashed into an 18-wheeler truck that had turned on to the road into the path of driver Stephen Banner, shearing off the Tesla's roof and killing Banner. The lawsuit, brought by Banner's wife, accuses the company of intentional misconduct and gross negligence, which could expose Tesla to punitive damages. The ruling comes after Tesla won two product liability lawsuits in California earlier this year focused on alleged defects in its Autopilot system.