According to Facebook-turned-Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, the company's metaverse of dead-eyed avatars has been all but abandoned by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- who, in an added blow, is instead said to be spending the bulk of his time chasing the investor-appeasing Silicon Valley squirrel that is generative AI. "We've been investing in artificial intelligence for over a decade, and have one of the leading research institutes in the world," Bosworth told Nikkei Asia in an interview on Wednesday. "We certainly have a large research organization, hundreds of people." "We just created a new team, the generative AI team, a couple of months ago; they are very busy," he added. That sound you just heard in the distance? A single, pixelated tear, hitting the deserted Horizon Worlds' floor.

Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. As the whole world knows, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing at breakneck speeds. Companies big and small are racing to implement the power of generative AI in new and useful ways. I am a firm believer in the value of AI to advance human productivity and solve human problems, but I am also quite concerned about the unexpected consequences. As I told the San Francisco Examiner last week, I signed the controversial AI "Pause Letter" along with thousands of other researchers to draw attention to the risks associated with large-scale generative AI and help the public understand that the risks are currently evolving faster than the efforts to contain them.

Talk of generative AI technology -- and how it will reshape art, work and life as we know it -- has upended Silicon Valley as of late. But the early leaders of that conversation have been smaller start-ups, whose tools -- like Midjourney's image generator and OpenAI's ChatGPT and DALL-E -- have become wildly popular. Their success has raised questions about whether the tech behemoths have fallen behind on innovation. While companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta scramble to catch up, they are also contending with concerns about safety, as users flock to cutting-edge technologies that can behave unpredictably.

Companies behind ChatGPT and competing technologies have launched a preemptive charm offensive, highlighting their attempts to build artificial intelligence responsibly and ethically, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Since Microsoft's investment in OpenAI -- which allows it to incorporate ChatGPT into its products -- the company's president, Brad Smith, has discussed artificial intelligence on trips to Washington. Executives from OpenAI, who have lobbied Washington for years, are meeting with lawmakers who are newly interested in artificial intelligence following the release of ChatGPT.

A United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement database WIRED obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the agency has been leaning on a certain type of administrative subpoena to collect data from elementary schools, abortion clinics, and other vulnerable populations. And new details about a recent supply chain attack against the VoIP software 3CX indicate that attackers--likely hackers working for the North Korean government--were targeting cryptocurrency companies in the broad assault. We also looked at this week's move by Italy's data regulator, Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali, to temporarily stop OpenAI from incorporating Italians' personal information into training data. In response, the company has currently stopped people in Italy from accessing its generative AI platform, ChatGPT. Meanwhile, we explored the dangerous missing security defense in the US agriculture sector and the nation's food supply chain, and we went deep on the saga of a small US gadget blog that found troubling flaws in foreign security cameras and took on the Chinese surveillance industry to get them fixed. In virtual private network news, the open source VPN Amnezia has been allowing users in Russia to stay one step ahead of the Kremlin's inveterate censorship and digital control.

The ongoing incursion of artificial intelligence into every app, service, and facet of your life continues. Microsoft's popular Android keyboard app SwiftKey lets you type by swiping across letters on the screen to generate words. Now, SwiftKey is getting a dose of chatbot to spice things up. Microsoft released its AI-enhanced Bing chatbot in February. Since then it has gone up against the other chatbot heavyweights, including Google's Bard and OpenAI's ChatGPT (which powers Bing Chat's backend).

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai faces one of his biggest tests as the leader of the search giant, as he balances the need to respond to the threat from chatbots such as ChatGPT--developed by the Microsoft Corp.-backed startup OpenAI--with investor pressure on the Alphabet Inc. company to cut costs. I think a lot of people are wondering, is Google moving fast enough to capture this moment in AI and is Google set up to do that?

Kering, the world's second-largest luxury goods group after LVMH, has launched an experimental site called KNXT, which is a cutting-edge fashion space for curating innovative content and testing new ideas. The site incorporates both artificial intelligence (AI) and NFT tech, and is aimed at providing a unique shopping experience to visitors. One of the exciting features of KNXT is the introduction of an AI-powered chatbot named '/madeline', which is powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT, and is the first of its kind. This personal shopper is capable of recommending products from a variety of the group's brands, including Gucci, Bottega Venetia, Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga, and more. We are thrilled to introduce you to /madeline, the first AI personal shopper leveraging @OpenAI's #ChatGPT.

This picture taken on Jan. 23 in Toulouse, southwestern France, shows screens displaying the logos of OpenAI and ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a conversational artificial intelligence software application developed by OpenAI. My close friend, who teaches at a primary school in Ho Chi Minh City, feels terribly worried about how adversely education and especially students will be affected by ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer, an artificial intelligence-based chatbot which was provided by US startup, OpenAI, last November. He told me that "My students naturally converse with ChatGPT, asking tough questions about all subjects, and ChatGPT solves all exercises I give them! I will be unemployed soon!"

GPT-4, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4, is an advanced AI model developed by OpenAI. As a proficient and versatile AI model, GPT-4 has the potential to revolutionize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content creation. The introduction of GPT-4 presents numerous opportunities for businesses to capitalize on its capabilities and achieve success. GPT-4 has undoubtedly ushered in a new era of AI, enabling businesses and individuals to harness its power for a wide range of applications. By embracing GPT-4 and its innovative features, businesses can stay ahead of the competition, enhance their online presence, and achieve unprecedented success in the digital world.