Alita: Battle Angel is an interesting and wild ride, jam-packed full of concepts around cybernetics, dystopian futures and cyberpunk themes. The film – in cinemas now – revolves around Alita (Rosa Salazar), a female cyborg (with original human brain) that is recovered by cybernetic doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) and brought into the world of the future (the film is set in 2563). Hundreds of years after a catastrophic war, called "The Fall", the population of Earth now resides in a wealthy sky city called Zalem and a sprawling junkyard called Iron City where the detritus from Zalem is dumped. We follow Alita's story as she makes friends and enemies, and discovers more about her past. Her character is great – she has many of the mannerisms of a teenage girl combined with a determination and overarching sense of what is right – "I do not stand by in the presence of evil."

SAN FRANCISCO: Visualise this: A debate competition in which your most formidable opponent is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system machine that argues! If you are dismissing it as a scene from a sci-fi movie, hold on: The first public debate competition between a human and a machine unfolded on Monday at the Yerba Buena Centre for Arts in San Francisco when IBM's Project Debater - an AI technology-based computer that resembled a tall speaker -- faced off with 2016 World Debating Championship grand finalist Harish Natarajan on the topic "We should subsidise preschools". Project Debater, which has been developed over the last eight years by IBM researchers across the globe, including India, has been designed to participate in live debates with human debaters. The AI technology, which sources information from different sources including newspaper reports, is expected to lead to unbiased debates that are backed by data and studies. While IBM's Project Debater argued for the topic, Natarajan countered it.

OpenAI, a company backed by Elon Musk, has decided not to release an AI system that can generate news stories and fiction on the grounds that it could be dangerous in the wrong hands. OpenAI is a non-profit company that aims to finding a way to safely bring about artificial general intelligence. Normally it releases its research to the public, but its latest AI model, known as GPT-2, is reportedly so convincing that it has too much potential for misuse, generating huge volumes of misleading news stories. GPT-2 takes a sample of text (a few words of several paragraphs) and predicts the following sentences in a similar style, with surprisingly plausible results. The system was trained using a dataset of roughly 10 million news articles sourced by trawling Reddit – several times the size of those used by previous state-of-the-art systems. The sheer volume of data gave the system a much better understanding of written language, and means it's more general purpose than other systems.

The use of fake news stories for political disinformation has become a major concern for governments around the world in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded Russia used false news reports, spread through social media, to try to sway voters. Writing these stories still needed someone to sit behind a keyboard. Now OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research group in San Francisco, has unveiled a machine learning algorithm that can generate coherent text, including fake news articles, after being given just a small sample to build on. The algorithm can be tuned to imitate the writing style of the sample text.

OpenAI, a non-profit research company investigating "the path to safe artificial intelligence," has developed a machine learning system called Generative Pre-trained Transformer-2 (GPT-2), capable of generating text based on brief writing prompts. The result comes so close to mimicking human writing that it could potentially be used for "deepfake" content. Built based on 40 gigabytes of text retrieved from sources on the Internet (including "all outbound links from Reddit, a social media platform, which received at least 3 karma"), GPT-2 generates plausible "news" stories and other text that match the style and content of a brief text prompt. The performance of the system was so disconcerting, now the researchers are only releasing a reduced version of GPT-2 based on a much smaller text corpus. Due to concerns about large language models being used to generate deceptive, biased, or abusive language at scale, we are only releasing a much smaller version of GPT-2 along with sampling code.

The AI icon Andrew Ng is quoted as saying, "Artificial intelligence is the new electricity."

Anyone who's watched "Bridget Jones's Diary" knows one of her New Year's resolutions is "Not go out every night but stay in and read books and listen to classical music." The reality, however, is substantially different. What people actually do in their leisure time often doesn't match with what they say they'll do. Economists have termed this phenomenon "hyperbolic discounting." In a famous study titled "Paying Not to Go to the Gym," a couple of economists found that, when people were offered the choice between a pay-per-visit contract and a monthly fee, they were more likely to choose the monthly fee and actually ended up paying more per visit.

"It's very visible that technological sectors are now prioritising the implementation of AI in their everyday workforce." "We can see that the companies listed in the research are already using different types of AI-technology to improve the way they engage with their users and customers." Google's translation service, for example, uses AI tools such as machine learning and natural language processes to provide real-time translations, he explained.