In 2019, Mr. Nadella made Microsoft's first of several investments in OpenAI, the start-up that would build the A.I.-powered ChatGPT chatbot. In the end of the summer of 2022, he was impressed by a preview of OpenAI's underlying technology, known as GPT-4, and soon began prodding Microsoft to add generative A.I. to its products at what he called a "frantic pace." He started with adding a chatbot to the Bing search engine, but then began pushing A.I. into the Windows operating system and productive applications like Excel and Outlook, and offering OpenAI's systems to customers of Azure, Microsoft's flagship cloud computing product. The revenue has only just started to show up in Microsoft's financial results. Generative A.I. accounted for about three percentage points of growth to Azure in the three months that ended in September, and the 30-a-month offering inside Microsoft's productivity software began a general release only in November. This isn't the first time that Microsoft has pulled ahead of Apple in recent years.

The Environmental Protection Agency has scrapped a plan to phase out mammal testing for studying chemical toxicity, Science reports. In 2019, the regulatory agency vowed to completely phase out animal testing for toxicology studies by 2035 in favor of non-animal "test subjects" programmed into computer models. The call to challenge the status quo was controversial from the start -- it not only was going to impact thousands of studies and experiments, but many scientists argued that computer models were nowhere near ready to replace animals as test subjects. In a letter written by a group of public health officials, the experts urged the EPA's head Michael Regan to reconsider the ban because computational models, in their opinion, were "not yet developed to the point" where they could be relied on for risk assessments. In order for the new ban to have taken effect, the EPA said there needed to be "scientific confidence" that non-animal models could soundly replace critters like mice and rabbits in labs.

The US government has reportedly approved AI-based memory loss prediction software for the first time. Darmiyan, a San Francisco-based brain imaging analytics company, says the FDA has granted De Novo approval for its product BrainSee. The software platform assigns "an objective score that predicts the likelihood of progression from aMCI to Alzheimer's dementia within 5 years," according to the medical company. Fierce Biotech first reported the announcement. Darmiyan says BrainSee can predict memory loss progression using clinical brain MRIs and cognitive tests, which are already standard for patients worried about early signs of decline.

House Speaker Mike Johnson met with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday to discuss what kind of role Congress has to play in legislating on artificial intelligence. "It was a very good meeting," Johnson told reporters afterward. "We talked about where we are with regard to the approach of Congress to AI." He said they had a "very thoughtful discussion" about how the Senate and House can forge a bipartisan path forward. House Speaker Mike Johnson, left, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

More than 100 deepfake video advertisements impersonating Rishi Sunak were paid to be promoted on Facebook in the last month alone, according to research that has raised alarm about the risk AI poses before the general election. The adverts may have reached as many as 400,000 people – despite appearing to break several of Facebook's policies – and mark the first time that the prime minister's image has been doctored in a systematic way en masse. More than 12,929 was spent on 143 adverts, originating from 23 countries including the US, Turkey, Malaysia and the Philippines. They include one with faked footage of a BBC newsreader, Sarah Campbell, appearing to read out breaking news that falsely claims a scandal has erupted around Sunak secretly earning "colossal sums from a project that was initially intended for ordinary citizens". It carries the untrue claim that Elon Musk has launched an application capable of "collecting" stock market transactions and follows with a faked clip of Sunak saying the government had decided to test the application rather than risking the money of ordinary people.

In 2024, we will see courts and regulators around the world demonstrate that tech exceptionalism, when it comes to the applicability of legal rules, is magical thinking. The tide has already started to turn on the assumption that law and regulation cannot keep up with technological innovation. But, in 2024, the sea change will come: not through new rules, but by old rules being applied aggressively to new problems. In the United States, in the absence of federal privacy legislation, regulators have already started to repurpose laws and rules they do have at their disposal to address some of the most egregious examples of Big Tech playing fast and loose with our rights and personal data. In 2023, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continued to expand the regulatory heft of consumer protection regulations.

HMNC Brain Health CMO Dr. Hans Eriksson and biomarkers associate director Dr. Daniel Gehrlach explain the development of the'precision psychiatry' diagnostic tool. Technology is changing faster than ever, and so is the way we take care of ourselves. Imagine having a smart device that can check your health at home in less than a minute or an AI solution that can help you stop snoring, sleep better or feel more relaxed. Well, these are just some of the incredible products that we saw at CES 2024, the world's biggest tech show. From leggings that stimulate your muscles to robots that massage your back, here are 10 health devices that stole the show this year.

If your first thought, as we ushered in the New Year, was not of fresh starts and resolutions but of the crises looming in 2024 and beyond, the best antidote, culturally speaking, might be to lean into catastrophe. Metrograph has catered to the pessimists among us by curating a series entitled "The Future Looks Bright from Afar" (through Feb. 4), which promises a suite of sci-fi films marked by "grim prognostications" about mankind's trajectory. As it happens, the great new crowd-pleaser of the moment is also a disaster story, albeit one set firmly in the past. "Godzilla Minus One" follows a kamikaze pilot who shirks his duty in the final days of the Second World War--a decision that puts him in the path of the eponymous monster and, years later, leaves him uniquely motivated to stop its rampage through postwar Tokyo. Elevated by emotional and historical specificity as well as set pieces that belie its modest fifteen-million-dollar budget, Takashi Yamazaki's contribution to the Godzilla canon is simultaneously a study in survivor's guilt and a "Jaws"-style blockbuster, complete with the revelation that our protagonists are going to need a bigger boat.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. An Indiana woman has been sentenced to three years in federal prison after she used a dating app to scam a 96-year-old man out of nearly 80,000, a U.S. attorney announced Wednesday. Brittany Rakia Shawnai Lasley, 34, of Anderson, created a social media account containing fake profile information on the dating site "Plenty of Fish" and used the account to perpetrate an online romance with the man, who was a windower, according to U.S. Attorney Zachary Cunha. Over time, Lasley persuaded the 96-year-old to send her money, gift cards, credit cards and even to hand over sensitive banking information.

Unreliable predictions can occur when using artificial intelligence (AI) systems with negative consequences for downstream applications, particularly when employed for decision-making. Conformal prediction provides a model-agnostic framework for uncertainty quantification that can be applied to any dataset, irrespective of its distribution, post hoc. In contrast to other pixel-level uncertainty quantification methods, conformal prediction operates without requiring access to the underlying model and training dataset, concurrently offering statistically valid and informative prediction regions, all while maintaining computational efficiency. In response to the increased need to report uncertainty alongside point predictions, we bring attention to the promise of conformal prediction within the domain of Earth Observation (EO) applications. To accomplish this, we assess the current state of uncertainty quantification in the EO domain and found that only 20% of the reviewed Google Earth Engine (GEE) datasets incorporated a degree of uncertainty information, with unreliable methods prevalent. Next, we introduce modules that seamlessly integrate into existing GEE predictive modelling workflows and demonstrate the application of these tools for datasets spanning local to global scales, including the Dynamic World and Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) datasets. These case studies encompass regression and classification tasks, featuring both traditional and deep learning-based workflows. Subsequently, we discuss the opportunities arising from the use of conformal prediction in EO. We anticipate that the increased availability of easy-to-use implementations of conformal predictors, such as those provided here, will drive wider adoption of rigorous uncertainty quantification in EO, thereby enhancing the reliability of uses such as operational monitoring and decision making.