Elon Musk's Neuralink has shared a progress update about the first person to receive a brain chip that allows him to operate a computer and play video games with his mind. The company announced that it has been more than 100 days since Noland Arbaugh had the device implanted in his brain - and the 29-year-old is still doing. Arbaugh suffered a life-changing driving accident whilst working as a camp counselor in 2016, which left him with'absolutely no feeling' from the shoulders down. His life changed again on January 27 when he underwent a 30-minute procedure that used a'sewing machine-like' robot to remove a small chunk of his skull and stitch the chip into his brain. However, Neuralink revealed that some of the threads connected to the chip had retracted weeks after the surgery, resulting in a decrease in the number of effective nodes - but modified the algorithm to boost signal translations.

Profits at Microsoft beat Wall Street's expectations as its heavy bet on artificial intelligence continued to bear fruit in the second quarter. The technology giant has invested billions of dollars into AI in a bid to turbocharge its growth, particularly of its cloud computing services. Its cloud computing revenue surged by more than 20% in the latest quarter. Microsoft's AI tools "are orchestrating a new era of AI transformation, driving better business outcomes across every role and industry," said Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft. As the group races to integrate AI across its software and services, Nadella said its Azure cloud computing business saw the pace of deals worth 100m and 10m increase by double-digit percentages.

Nearly a year after adding generative AI-powered editing capabilities to Photoshop, Adobe is souping up its flagship product with even more AI. On Tuesday, the company announced that Photoshop is getting the ability to generate images with simple text prompts directly within the app. There are also new features to let the AI draw inspiration from reference images to create new ones and generate backgrounds more easily. The tools will make using Photoshop easier for both professionals as well as casual enthusiasts who may have found the app's learning curve to be steep, Adobe thinks. "A big, blank canvas can sometimes be the biggest barrier," Erin Boyce, Photoshop's senior marketing director, told Engadget in an interview. "This really speeds up time to creation.

AMD today launched its most recent generation of business processors for business PCs, the Ryzen Pro 8000 series, for both desktop and laptops. For now, AMD will be the only CPU vendor offering AI-powered NPUs in business desktop PCs. AMD's launch arrives on the heels of Intel's 14th-gen vPro platform, which also offers desktop and mobile parts. The difference is that Intel launched its vPro refresh based upon the "Raptor Lake Refresh" architecture, which lacks AI; AMD's Ryzen Pro 8000 series is relatively consistent across both its mobile and desktop offerings. However, not every new Ryzen Pro 8000 mobile or desktop chip includes AI support.

China's Baidu has announced that "Ernie Bot", its rival to ChatGPT, has racked up more than 200 million users, roughly double as many as in December. Baidu CEO Robin Li also said Ernie Bot's application programming interface (API) is being used 200 million times every day, meaning the chatbot was requested by its user to conduct tasks that many times a day. The number of enterprise clients for the chatbot reached 85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen on Tuesday. In February, he told analysts that Baidu was starting to generate revenue from Ernie and in the fourth quarter, the company had earned several hundred million yuan using AI to improve its advertising services and help other companies build their own models. Last March, Ernie Bot was the first locally developed ChatGPT-like chatbot to be announced in China but it only won approval for public release in August, becoming one of the first eight AI chatbots Beijing authorised.

Media streaming is the dominant application over wireless edge (access) networks. The increasing softwarization of such networks has led to efforts at intelligent control, wherein application-specific actions may be dynamically taken to enhance the user experience. The goal of this work is to develop and demonstrate learning-based policies for optimal decision making to determine which clients to dynamically prioritize in a video streaming setting. We formulate the policy design question as a constrained Markov decision problem (CMDP), and observe that by using a Lagrangian relaxation we can decompose it into single-client problems. Further, the optimal policy takes a threshold form in the video buffer length, which enables us to design an efficient constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) algorithm to learn it. Specifically, we show that a natural policy gradient (NPG) based algorithm that is derived using the structure of our problem converges to the globally optimal policy. We then develop a simulation environment for training, and a real-world intelligent controller attached to a WiFi access point for evaluation. We empirically show that the structured learning approach enables fast learning. Furthermore, such a structured policy can be easily deployed due to low computational complexity, leading to policy execution taking only about 15$\mu$s. Using YouTube streaming experiments in a resource constrained scenario, we demonstrate that the CRL approach can increase quality of experience (QOE) by over 30\%.

Picture the scene: Your date has gone well and you and your partner might sleep together. Like any safe adult, you assume there will be a conversation about STI status and the use of protection. Now imagine how you would feel if they asked to take a photo of your penis and upload it to a website you've never heard of. That's the future of intimacy, as imagined by Calmara, a new service launched by "men's health" startup HeHealth. Its press release suggests users take a picture of their partner's penis so it can be run through a deep learning model for visual signs of sexually-transmitted infections. And while the website suggests users should wear protection, a banner atop the HeHealth sites describes the app as "Your intimate bestie for unprotected sex."

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) is pleased to announce the creation of the Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA), a new initiative to strengthen the governance of our open-source robotics software projects and ensure the health of the Robot Operating System (ROS) Suite community for many years to come. The OSRA will use a mixed membership and meritocratic model, following other successful foundations for open-source projects, including The Linux Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation. The OSRA is extending an open invitation to all community stakeholders to participate in the technical oversight, direction, development, and support of the OSRF's open source projects – ROS, Gazebo, Open-RMF, and their infrastructure. Involvement across the robotics ecosystem is crucial to this initiative. The center of the OSRA will be the Technical Governance Committee (TGC), which will oversee the activities of various Project Management Committees, Technical Committees, Special Interest Groups, and Working Groups.

Microsoft has announced that it's holding an event on March 21 that will focus on its upcoming generative AI devices and features. The event entitled "Advancing the new era of work with Copilot" will start at 9AM Pacific/12PM Eastern time that date. Microsoft promises to unveil "the latest in scaling AI in your environment with Copilot, Windows and Surface," but it has shared no other details on what its announcements could be. As Windows Central had previously reported, the company is expected to launch the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 on March 21. They're apparently slated to be Microsoft's first AI PCs that will be equipped with the new Intel Core Ultra or Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors.

Apple released its new MacBook Air on Monday, touting the updated device as being twice as fast as previous generations. The'world's most popular laptop' starts at 1,099 and features the tech giant's new M3 chip released in 2023. The upgraded chip increases speeds up to 60 percent faster than its M1 predecessor and makes it 13 times quicker than the Intel-based MacBook Air, Apple has claimed. The 13- and 1,299 15-inch screen options are currently available for pre-order starting today and deliveries are set for Friday, March 8, the company announced. 'MacBook Air is our most popular and loved Mac, with more customers choosing it over any other laptop.