UPenn Wharton School Associate Professor Ethan Mollick weighs in on the Biden White House's new guidelines for artificial intelligence in the workplace on'Fox News Live.' DRIVERLESS TAXIS ARRIVE: The future of urban transportation is here, and it's taking the form of sleek, autonomous vehicles traveling through city streets. Across the United States, self-driving car companies are racing to revolutionize how we move, promising safer roads, reduced traffic and a new era of mobility. But it's in San Francisco that this future is suddenly now a reality for thousands. 'SHADOWY ECOSYSTEM': The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday announced that it launched a probe of eight companies that offer "surveillance pricing" tools that use artificial intelligence and other technology to analyze consumer data to help set price targets for products and services. AI IN THE SKY: The U.S. Air Force has just unveiled a new aircraft that's turning heads and raising eyebrows across the globe.

The tech industry is currently embroiled in a heated debate over the future of AI: should powerful systems be open-source and freely accessible, or closed and tightly monitored for dangers? On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg fired a salvo into this ongoing battle, publishing not just a new series of powerful AI models, but also a manifesto forcefully advocating for the open-source approach. The document, which was widely praised by venture capitalists and tech leaders like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, serves as both a philosophical treatise and a rallying cry for proponents of open-source AI development. It arrives as intensifying global efforts to regulate AI have galvanized resistance from open-source advocates, who see some of those potential laws as threats to innovation and accessibility. At the heart of Meta's announcement on Tuesday was the release of its latest generation of Llama large language models, the company's answer to ChatGPT.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas speaks at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Artificial intelligence, we have been told, is all but guaranteed to change everything. Often, it is foretold as bringing a series of woes: "extinction," "doom,"; AI is at risk of "killing us all." US lawmakers have warned of potential "biological, chemical, cyber, or nuclear" perils associated with advanced AI models and a study commissioned by the State Department on "catastrophic risks," urged the federal government to intervene and enact safeguards against the weaponization and uncontrolled use of this rapidly evolving technology. Employees at some of the main AI labs have made their safety concerns public and experts in the field, including the so-called "godfathers of AI," have argued that "mitigating the risk of extinction from AI" should be a global priority. Advancements in AI capabilities have heightened fears of the possible elimination of certain jobs and the misuse of the technology to spread disinformation and interfere in elections.

You wake up on Election Day and unlock your phone to a shaky video of your state capitol. In other clips posted alongside it, gunshots ring out in the distance. You think to yourself: Maybe better to skip the polling booth today. Only later do you learn that the videos were AI forgeries. A friend calls you, distraught.

Over the last year, governments, academia, and industry have invested considerable resources into investigating the harms of advanced AI. But one massive factor seems to be continuously overlooked: right now, AI's primary tests and models are confined to English. Advanced AI could be used in many languages to cause harm, but focusing primarily on English may leave us with only part of the answer. It also ignores those most vulnerable to its harms. After the release of ChatGPT in November, 2022, AI developers expressed surprise at a capability displayed by the model: It could "speak" at least 80 languages, not just English.

As the world turned digital, people were quick to drop their Sunday papers and pick up their smartphones for news. Advertisers followed suit as digital platforms became more valuable real estate than print newspapers, leaving California news outlets desperate to find ways to stay profitable and relevant. News outlets must spend at least 70% of the received funds on their staff. A second bill being considered by California lawmakers, Senate Bill 1327, would charge Amazon, Meta and Google a "data extraction mitigation fee" for data they collect from users. The funds would go toward supporting local newsrooms.

Dr. Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and prolific author, has often been described as a cheerleader for science, reason, and humanism. He is often maligned by his critics as a defender of the status quo. Much of his research focuses on slow and steady incremental improvements that have defined rapid human development, both in the United States and globally, over the past century. His 2018 book, "Enlightenment Now" was famously cited by Bill Gates as "his new favorite book," and became a focal point for global policymakers. He is a fierce defender of liberalism, democracy, and market economies, and believes a variety of forces are conspiring against them: populism of both the right and left, religious fundamentalism, and political correctness, among others. He also has emerged as a champion of reasoned, civil debate on college campuses, pushing back against cancel culture, and what he views as a'political monoculture' in academia.

The U.S. Secret Service (USSS) should have "one set of standards," according to Republican Oklahoma Rep. Josh Brecheen. Brecheen introduced a bill on Tuesday called the Secret Service Readiness Act that aims to create "a uniform fitness standard for Secret Service special agents and uniformed division officers" after the assassination attempt that wounded former President Trump at his campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. "We believe that there ought to be one set of standards for Secret Service agents. There shouldn't be multiple different ways you can qualify based upon your sex or your political beliefs. If people who are being protected by [the] Secret Service – if they want the opportunity to let those who can't meet full historic standards on their details, let them handle it. Don't force it upon everybody else and potentially make them more vulnerable to an assassination attempt. There should be one set of standards."

Introduced as battery-powered sticks that emit nicotine-infused vapor, vape pens have transformed into increasingly sophisticated entertainment devices. And that, researchers say, is a potentially huge problem. Disposable vapes gained small illuminated displays last year, typically to show how much battery life remained. In about six months, though, the displays grew to the size of a flip phone screen and came equipped with retro games similar to Pac-Man and Tetris -- all on a product that costs less than 20. The speed at which vapes advanced to include an interactive display, as well as the devices' potential appeal to young people, is raising concerns about nicotine addiction among teenagers, say UC Riverside researchers Man Wong and Prue Talbot.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to perform well for many downstream tasks. Transfer learning can enable LLMs to acquire skills that were not targeted during pre-training. In financial contexts, LLMs can sometimes beat well-established benchmarks. This paper investigates how well LLMs perform in the task of forecasting corporate credit ratings. We show that while LLMs are very good at encoding textual information, traditional methods are still very competitive when it comes to encoding numeric and multimodal data. For our task, current LLMs perform worse than a more traditional XGBoost architecture that combines fundamental and macroeconomic data with high-density text-based embedding features.