AI poses a grave threat to journalism, experts warned Congress at a hearing on Wednesday. Media executives and academic experts testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law about how AI is contributing to the big tech-fueled decline of journalism. They also talked about intellectual property issues arising from AI models being trained on the work of journalists, and raised alarms about the increasing dangers of AI-powered misinformation. "The rise of big tech has been directly responsible for the decline in local news," said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and chair of the subcommittee. "First, Meta, Google and OpenAI are using the hard work of newspapers and authors to train their AI models without compensation or credit. Adding insult to injury, those models are then used to compete with newspapers and broadcasters, cannibalizing readership and revenue from the journalistic institutions that generate the content in the first place."

Over the past few months, many have attempted to translate the uncanniness of Gov. Ron DeSantis' smile into words. After the Republican debates, it's been called "painfully weird" and said to look "like it's on his face upside down." It resembles "a Disney World animatronic" or "an A.I. trying to learn human emotions." It even inspired The Daily Show to put out a public service announcement about "Frownington's Disease," a made-up condition that causes a person's smile to resemble a wince one would make upon "sitting on his own testicles." As nice as it is that one expression has inspired such rich verbiage and creativity--Ron DeSantis, unlikely muse!--you might find yourself longing for a more technical explanation.

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld gives his take on Democrats' fears about former President Trump winning the 2024 election on'Gutfeld!' Former President Obama is becoming increasingly anxious about the closeness of the 2024 presidential election and fears former President Trump could take back the White House, according to a report. Former Attorney General Eric Holder, one of Obama's closest confidants, told USA Today that if Trump were to win the Republican nomination and beat President Biden this November, there could be "incalculable damage" brought upon the country. Holder confirmed Obama "absolutely" holds the same views when asked by the publication. "I think that's what motivates him. I think that's what will continue to motivate him," Holder responded.

Microsoft has been quietly debating the future of its advanced AI lab in China, sources say. The lab was opened in 1998 and has become one of the most important artificial intelligence hubs in the world, leading to advancements in the company's speech, image and facial recognition software. Microsoft Research Lab Asia (MSRA) opened at a time of optimism about China as an emerging democracy but as tensions between the US and the communist state have intensified, internal pressure has mounted to shut or scale it down. That pressure has only intensified in recent months, after the Biden administration banned US investments in Chinese tech ventures that might aid the rival superpower's'military, intelligence, surveillance, or cyber-enabled capabilities.' But, the tech giant's founder Bill Gates continues to defend the lab and has pushed to keep it open, alongside Microsoft's research leaders and its current president.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy on Tuesday announced a series of new measures he wants the newly expanded Democrat-led Legislature to adopt, including allowing 16-year-olds to vote in school board elections, reducing medical debt, expanding affordable housing and launching an artificial intelligence "moonshot." Murphy delivered his sixth state of the state address before a joint legislative session in the ornate Assembly chamber where Democrats picked up six seats in the November election. Murphy also reiterated calls he's made since his reelection in 2021 to further ease property taxes and expand free pre-K, among the measures that he says make the state "stronger and fairer."

The Israeli military has seemingly walked back its justification for targeting a vehicle in Gaza last week, killing two Al Jazeera journalists, United States broadcaster NBC reported. Hamza Dahdouh, the eldest son of Al Jazeera's Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh, was killed in an Israeli missile strike on Sunday in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. Journalist Mustafa Thuraya was also killed in the attack, while a third passenger, journalist Hazem Rajab, was seriously injured. At the time of the attack, the Israeli army said it was targeting a "terrorist" in the vehicle. It confirmed in a statement that a military aircraft "identified and struck a terrorist who operated an aircraft that posed a threat to (Israeli) troops," adding that "we are aware of the reports that during the strike, two other suspects who were in the same vehicle as the terrorist were also hit".

In the decades to come, 2023 may be remembered as the year of generative AI hype, where ChatGPT became arguably the fastest-spreading new technology in human history and expectations of AI-powered riches became commonplace. The year 2024 will be the time for recalibrating expectations. Of course, generative AI is an impressive technology, and it provides tremendous opportunities for improving productivity in a number of tasks. But because the hype has gone so far ahead of reality, the setbacks of the technology in 2024 will be more memorable. More and more evidence will emerge that generative AI and large language models provide false information and are prone to hallucination--where an AI simply makes stuff up, and gets it wrong.

A renowned astrophysicist is calling foul on reports of alien sightings in Earth's atmosphere, arguing that biological creatures would be unable to survive a journey to our planet. "It would take about a billion years to cross from one side of the Milky Way galaxy to the other," Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist, said during an appearance on GB News this week. "Given that, I don't think any spacecraft that would arrive to us from another star would carry biological creatures." Loeb's comments come amid increased reports of UFO sightings in recent years, with videos and pictures of supposed alien craft going viral across the internet. It also comes after NASA created a new position aimed at overseeing research on UFOs after a 2022 study by the agency determined that such sightings were unlikely to be caused by extraterrestrial life.

This paper fundamentally reformulates economic and financial theory to include electronic currencies. The valuation of the electronic currencies will be based on macroeconomic theory and the fundamental equation of monetary policy, not the microeconomic theory of discounted cash flows. The view of electronic currency as a transactional equity associated with tangible assets of a sub-economy will be developed, in contrast to the view of stock as an equity associated mostly with intangible assets of a sub-economy. The view will be developed of the electronic currency management firm as an entity responsible for coordinated monetary (electronic currency supply and value stabilization) and fiscal (investment and operational) policies of a substantial (for liquidity of the electronic currency) sub-economy. The risk model used in the valuations and the decision-making will not be the ubiquitous, yet inappropriate, exponential risk model that leads to discount rates, but will be multi time scale models that capture the true risk. The decision-making will be approached from the perspective of true systems control based on a system response function given by the multi scale risk model and system controllers that utilize the Deep Reinforcement Learning, Generative Pretrained Transformers, and other methods of Artificial Intelligence (DRL/GPT/AI). Finally, the sub-economy will be viewed as a nonlinear complex physical system with both stable equilibriums that are associated with short-term exploitation, and unstable equilibriums that need to be stabilized with active nonlinear control based on the multi scale system response functions and DRL/GPT/AI.

Since the advent of personal computing devices, intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) have been one of the key technologies that researchers and engineers have focused on, aiming to help users efficiently obtain information and execute tasks, and provide users with more intelligent, convenient, and rich interaction experiences. With the development of smartphones and IoT, computing and sensing devices have become ubiquitous, greatly expanding the boundaries of IPAs. However, due to the lack of capabilities such as user intent understanding, task planning, tool using, and personal data management etc., existing IPAs still have limited practicality and scalability. Recently, the emergence of foundation models, represented by large language models (LLMs), brings new opportunities for the development of IPAs. With the powerful semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities, LLM can enable intelligent agents to solve complex problems autonomously. In this paper, we focus on Personal LLM Agents, which are LLM-based agents that are deeply integrated with personal data and personal devices and used for personal assistance. We envision that Personal LLM Agents will become a major software paradigm for end-users in the upcoming era. To realize this vision, we take the first step to discuss several important questions about Personal LLM Agents, including their architecture, capability, efficiency and security. We start by summarizing the key components and design choices in the architecture of Personal LLM Agents, followed by an in-depth analysis of the opinions collected from domain experts. Next, we discuss several key challenges to achieve intelligent, efficient and secure Personal LLM Agents, followed by a comprehensive survey of representative solutions to address these challenges.