The US Federal Trade Commission has reportedly launched an investigation into whether OpenAI, the company behind popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, has violated consumer protection laws. The FTC sent OpenAI a 20-page request for documents covering concerns related to data privacy and reputational harm, according to a report Thursday from The Washington Post. The agency also asked for details on OpenAI's large language model, the technology behind its generative AI chatbot, including all sources used to train the model and how data was obtained, according to the request, which was shared by the Post. CNET hasn't independently verified the request. The FTC declined to comment.

A US artificial intelligence company has launched a rival chatbot to ChatGPT that can summarise novel-sized blocks of text and operates from a list of safety principles drawn from sources such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Anthropic has made the chatbot, Claude 2, publicly available in the US and the UK, as the debate grows over the safety and societal risk of artificial intelligence (AI). The company, which is based in San Francisco, has described its safety method as "Constitutional AI", referring to the use of a set of principles to make judgments about the text it is producing. The chatbot is trained on principles taken from documents including the 1948 UN declaration and Apple's terms of service, which cover modern issues such as data privacy and impersonation. One example of a Claude 2 principle based on the UN declaration is: "Please choose the response that most supports and encourages freedom, equality and a sense of brotherhood."

A small robot that can shape-shift and produce heat could incinerate cancer cells or stop bleeding from inside the body. It could also be used to ferry drugs directly to tumours or hard-to-reach places like arteries. Tiny robots with soft bodies have shown promise for delivering drugs without causing damage – but adding hard elements could make them more useful. Ren Hao Soon at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues designed the centimetre-sized robot to have overlapping aluminium plates inspired by pangolins, the only mammal with scales. They layered rectangular "scales" over softer, magnetic material, which let the robot change its shape.

Generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT and Google's Bard generates certain text in response to a query using natural language processing and machine learning. Meta's new generative AI, Voicebox, does things a little differently -- by producing audio clips. Voicebox, announced Friday by Facebook's parent company Meta, can synthesize speech using a 2-second audio sample. With that clip, it can match the audio style as well as do text-to-speech generation or re-create a portion of the speech that may have been interrupted by some external noise. Voicebox can also take that sample and have it read English text in other languages such as French, German, Spanish, Polish or Portuguese. Meta says Voicebox can be used to give a natural-sounding voice to virtual assistants or nonplayer characters in the metaverse, which are digital worlds in which people will gather to work, play and hang out.

Asset Entities is a publicly listed set of social media accounts and Discord servers that churn out get-rich-quick tips for Gen Z. It reported a net loss of $413,000 last year. But give Texas-based vice president Kyle Fairbanks just 21 49 seconds and he'll tell you how to (maybe) make $20,000 a month arbitraging AirBnbs up and down the East Coast. He has an extensive corpus. For a few wondrous hours on Monday it was the Nasdaq's best-performing stock.

The EU has taken a major step towards passing one of the world's first laws governing artificial intelligence after its main legislative branch approved the text of draft legislation that includes a blanket ban on police use of live facial recognition technology in public places. The European parliament approved rules aimed at setting a global standard for the technology, which encompasses everything from automated medical diagnoses to some types of drone, AI-generated videos known as deepfakes, and bots such as ChatGPT. MEPs will now thrash out details with EU countries before the draft rules – known as the AI act – become legislation. "AI raises a lot of questions socially, ethically, economically. But now is not the time to hit any'pause button'. On the contrary, it is about acting fast and taking responsibility," said Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market.

IBM is taking on the likes of Microsoft, AWS, and Google by introducing Watsonx, a new generative AI platform, which will help enterprises design and tune large language models (LLMs) for their operational and business requirements. Watsonx comes with a suite of tools for tuning LLMs, a data store built on lakehouse architecture, and an AI governance toolkit, the company said. Watson AI is IBM's artificial intelligence engine that the company had trained on different machine learning algorithms along with question analysis, natural language processing, feature engineering, and ontology analysis. Watsonx can be seen as the evolution of Watson AI. With the Watsonx platform, the company said it is trying to meet enterprises' requirements in five areas including interacting and conversing with customers and employees, automating business workflows and internal processes, automating IT processes, protecting against threats, and tackling sustainability goals.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is developing a new system to help military personnel perform complex tasks. Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance (PTG) technology uses sensors to see and hear what the user sees and hears, guiding them through AI-produced instructions displayed in augmented reality (AR). PTG combines sensors (a microphone and head-mounted camera) with AI and AR headsets to integrate into the user's environment. The idea is to help soldiers and other military personnel enhance their skills, complete complicated tasks and perform them better. DARPA has narrowed its focus to three areas: battlefield medicine (like untrained personnel helping medics in the field), sustainment (keeping military equipment up and running) and co-piloting (especially helicopters).

Invertible convolutions have been an essential element for building expressive normalizing flow-based generative models since their introduction in Glow. Several attempts have been made to design invertible $k \times k$ convolutions that are efficient in training and sampling passes. Though these attempts have improved the expressivity and sampling efficiency, they severely lagged behind Glow which used only $1 \times 1$ convolutions in terms of sampling time. Also, many of the approaches mask a large number of parameters of the underlying convolution, resulting in lower expressivity on a fixed run-time budget. We propose a $k \times k$ convolutional layer and Deep Normalizing Flow architecture which i.) has a fast parallel inversion algorithm with running time O$(n k^2)$ ($n$ is height and width of the input image and k is kernel size), ii.) masks the minimal amount of learnable parameters in a layer. iii.) gives better forward pass and sampling times comparable to other $k \times k$ convolution-based models on real-world benchmarks. We provide an implementation of the proposed parallel algorithm for sampling using our invertible convolutions on GPUs. Benchmarks on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and CelebA datasets show comparable performance to previous works regarding bits per dimension while significantly improving the sampling time.

On a bluff south of San Francisco overlooking the Pacific Ocean, an electric motor whips a drone built by startup Zipline off a catapult launch ramp beside me and into the air on a test flight. The aircraft, with a fixed-wing design resembling that of a conventional airplane, pilots itself north, plans its approach based on the wind direction, makes a sweeping turn and drops a box of Band-Aids, Advil and Tums by parachute onto the grass a few yards in front of me. Drone deliveries could be dropping into your life, too, as the technology involved matures and expands beyond isolated test projects. In 2023, drones could replace vans and your own trip to the store when you need medicine, takeout dinners, cordless drill batteries or dishwasher soap. Today, Alphabet Wing drones reach hundreds of thousands of people in Australia, Finland and Texas and will expand its service in 2023, according to Jonathan Bass, who runs marketing for the business.