Meta boasted Friday that it has produced'the most versatile AI for speech generation' in existence. But it added that the company would not be making their AI model public, due to grave concerns over the advanced tech's'potential risks of misuse.' In recent months, scammers have become adept at employing AI-generated speech to perpetrate eerie and shocking crimes, including an April attempt at faking the kidnapping of a teenage girl in Arizona, terrorizing the young girl's distraught mother with realistic AI-generated pleas. But Meta proposed a variety of more optimistic use cases in their press release, stating that Voicebox could be used to help the visually impaired hear messages from their friends and loved ones, or to allow non-native speakers to play translations of their own words, in their own voice, but in a foreign tongue. Meta called their new Voicebox generative AI model'the most versatile AI for speech generation' in existence.

At some point last week, after watching my 100th video game trailer as part of the loosely connected series of livestreamed showcases that have replaced E3, I started to lose the will. "Wholesome" indie games featuring frogs, gritty action games, low poly PS1-era nostalgia platformers and samey mega-franchises all started to bleed into each other. Am I even capable of getting excited about video game announcements any more? Of course, the E3 press conferences of yore were ultimately adverts, too, but they were at least adverts for video games, without commercials for delivery apps or fast food shoehorned in. And if a game was shown during a Nintendo, Xbox or PlayStation presentation, it was because they thought it might encourage people to buy their console, not because the developer paid a fee to have their trailer held up in front of monetisable eyeballs.

China should play a key role in shaping the artificial intelligence guardrails needed to ensure the safety of transformative new systems, OpenAI Inc.'s Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said. "With the emergence of the increasingly powerful AI systems, the stakes for global cooperation have never been higher," Altman, whose company kick-started an AI frenzy in China with last year's launch of ChatGPT, told a Beijing conference via video link on Saturday. In both China and Silicon Valley, talent and investments are flowing into AI, a strategic area that will help define the deepening tech rivalry between the world's two largest economies. Advances in the emerging technology have also highlighted tensions in how governments are seeking to regulate the sector, one that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said requires greater state oversight to mitigate national security risks. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software.

Elon Musk's SpaceX recently launched the biggest and most powerful rocket into flight, even though it did make it into orbit. But the world's richest man isn't content on expanding his sci-fi inspired technology into just the cosmos. Neuralink, the tech startup co-founded by Musk, also wants to embark on a fantastic voyage into the brain. Two weeks ago, the company announced it had gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin trials to implant brain chips into humans. We don't know when trials will begin, but there's plenty of buzz around Neuralink's development of a brain-computer interface.

We are now entering what used to be the most exciting month for gamers (and for games journalists): June, the month of E3, where we would find out what gaming's biggest names had in store for the winter and beyond. It's all rather more diffuse now, since Covid did a number on the yearly gaming events rhythm and E3's big return was cancelled (as Keith Stuart wrote about in this very newsletter), so I've pulled together everything to look out for from the summer's gaming announcements in one place. Before we get into it, though: it is difficult to get tremendously excited about hour-long sequences of trailers, isn't it? Immediately after the live E3 press conferences of yore, games journalists would be running into side-rooms to interview executives and developers, often playing the games that had just been shown, and reporting back to readers and viewers with something more than mere marketing information. We could do a good job.

Apple users who are tired of that "ducking" autocorrect issue can now rejoice! The tech company announced Monday at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference that iOS 17 will ensure that autocorrected words are temporarily underlined so users know what has been changed and can quickly change the word back to what they originally meant to type. "Autocorrect is powered by on-device machine learning and over the years, we've continued to advance these models," said Craig Federighi, the company's software chief. "The keyboard now leverages a transformer language model, which is state of the art for word prediction, making autocorrect more accurate than ever." The autocorrect feature has been the subject of tweets, memes and other social media posts for years, often annoying already irritated people trying to drop a popular expletive by changing the word to "ducking."

To say that Apple's WWDC 2023 keynote was packed would be an understatement. The company introduced the Vision Pro, its first foray into mixed reality headsets, as well as a 15-inch MacBook Air. There was also an updated Mac Studio and Mac Pro, both of which use the equally new M2 Ultra chip. As you'd expect Apple announced significant upgrades to all its software platforms. It's safe to say the Vision Pro was Apple's marquee device at WWDC.

Daiwa Securities Group employees are widely using an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot in Japan as the nation's second-largest brokerage follows global banks in exploring the potential of rapidly evolving technologies. Chief Executive Officer Seiji Nakata said the Tokyo-based firm started an experiment in April that gave around 9,000 workers in Japan the go-ahead to "freely use" ChatGPT. Daiwa has also been strengthening the recruitment of science graduates to develop high-tech experts in house, he said in an interview. The move comes as an AI revolution unfolds on Wall Street in response to widening interest in the technology and its likely business impact. Deutsche Bank is using it to scan wealthy client portfolios, while JPMorgan Chase & Co. is advertising for more AI roles than any of its rivals.

During the 2020 pandemic, members of the reddit & discord r/robotics community rallied to organize an online showcase for members of our community. What was originally envisioned as a small, intimate afternoon video call turned out to be a two day event of participants from across the world. All times are recorded in Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), UTC-4. Check out the full program in our website for more details.

TikTok could soon have a new way for users to discover content. The company is in the "early stages" of testing an AI-powered chatbot, called Tako, which will be able to recommend videos and respond to queries about what users are watching. The bot, which was first reported by TechCrunch, is currently being tested in the Philippines, TikTok said in a statement. "Tako is powered by a third-party chat assistant and is designed to help make it easier to discover entertaining and inspiring content on TikTok," the company said. Despite being in an early phase of testing, TikTok is apparently featuring Tako fairly prominently in the app. A shortcut to the assistant sits in the main right-hand menu alongside shortcuts for bookmarks, and likes, according to TechCrunch, which got a peek at the feature.