Are you sure that chatbot isn't alive? Listen to more stories on the Noa app. O ne of the persistent questions in our brave new world of generative AI: If a chatbot is conversant like a person, if it reasons and behaves like one, then is it possibly conscious like a person? Geoffrey Hinton, a recent Nobel Prize winner and one of the so-called godfathers of AI, told the journalist Andrew Marr earlier this year that AI has become so advanced and adept at reasoning that "we're now creating beings." Hinton links an AI's ability to "think" and act on behalf of a person to consciousness: The difference between the organic neurons in our head and the synthetic neural networks of a chatbot is effectively meaningless, he said: "They are alien intelligences."

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Microsoft 365 Premium combines the best of Microsoft Copilot with Microsoft 365. If you want your household to be on the cutting edge of AI, Microsoft has a deal for you: Microsoft 365 Premium, which combines the Family plan with Copilot Pro. At a new price of $19.99 per month, Microsoft 365 Premium sounds simple enough. Previously offered only to business users, it's now available to consumers as well.

ByteDance's AI Videos Are Scary Realistic. An image created with Bytedance's AI tool Seedream, via the platform Kapwing, of Minions playing basketball. This week, OpenAI released its latest AI video generation model, Sora 2, advertising it as a big leap forward for the space. As Sora hits the public, it will have to compete for market share in a crowded market, including with a major competitor that is rapidly gaining steam: the Chinese company ByteDance, which owns TikTok . In the past few months, ByteDance released Seedance, an AI video generator that many users are already calling the best in the world, and a new version of Seedream, an elite image model.

Unlocking AI's full potential requires operational excellence For successful AI adoption, leaders need to focus on structure rather than speed. Talk of AI is inescapable. A record 58% of S&P 500 companies mentioned AI in their second-quarter earnings calls, according to Goldman Sachs. But it's difficult to walk the talk. Just 5% of generative AI pilots are driving measurable profit-and-loss impact, according to a recent MIT study . That means 95% of generative AI pilots are realizing zero return, despite significant attention and investment.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Google's Gemini lets you chat with your smart home With help from the revamped Google Home app, Gemini for Home promises to be the eyes and ears of your household. "Hey Google, set bedroom lamp to 50 percent." Such stilted voice commands have been the stuff of smart home for years, but with Gemini for Home, Google is promising a smart home you can have an actual conversation with. That idea--of a smart home that understands the big picture and can act with context in mind--underpins Google's ambitious Gemini for Home plans, which it's rolling out today following months of slow buildup.

The Google Home app has seen a host of small improvements over the last few months to enhance stability and polish. However, Google says with this new update, you can expect to see 70 percent faster startup with the app and 80 percent fewer crashes. There are battery life and memory optimizations, and scrubbing through the camera is six times smoother. The Home app is designed to be used easily one-handed, and you can use more gestures, such as swiping down to enter a camera view or swiping up to back out. You now get preview images from the last event before the live view loads, the ability to swipe between timeline and events, double-tap to fast forward or rewind, and better notifications with a static thumbnail expandable to a large animated preview. Google says the merger of features and devices from the old Nest app is now complete, and folks should be able to transition seamlessly, though the legacy app won't be disappearing yet.

The Download: OpenAI's caste bias problem, and how AI videos are made Plus: Taiwan has pushed back against America's chip request OpenAI is huge in India. Its models are steeped in caste bias. Caste bias is rampant in OpenAI's products, including ChatGPT, according to an MIT Technology Review investigation. Though CEO Sam Altman boasted about India being its second-largest market during the launch of GPT-5 in August, we found that both this new model, which now powers ChatGPT, as well as Sora, OpenAI's text-to-video generator, exhibit caste bias. This risks entrenching discriminatory views in ways that are currently going unaddressed. Mitigating caste bias in AI models is more pressing than ever.

James Anderson says he had not seen signs of an investment bubble in AI until recently. James Anderson says he had not seen signs of an investment bubble in AI until recently. Leading UK tech investor warns of'disconcerting' signs of AI stock bubble Wed 1 Oct 2025 07.07 EDTFirst published on Wed 1 Oct 2025 06.22 EDT A leading British tech investor has described soaring valuations of artificial intelligence companies as "disconcerting", amid concerns of an AI stock market bubble. James Anderson was an early backer of Tesla, Amazon and China's Tencent and Alibaba, generating vast returns for Baillie Gifford's flagship fund. Now at the Italian investment company Lingotto, Anderson said he had not seen signs of an investment bubble until recently, when the ChatGPT developer, OpenAI, and its rival Anthropic announced hefty valuation increases.

When Dhiraj Singha began applying for postdoctoral sociology fellowships in Bengaluru, India, in March, he wanted to make sure the English in his application was pitch-perfect. So he turned to ChatGPT. He was surprised to see that in addition to smoothing out his language, it changed his identity--swapping out his surname for "Sharma," which is associated with privileged high-caste Indians. Though his application did not mention his last name, the chatbot apparently interpreted the "s" in his email address as Sharma rather than Singha, which signals someone from the caste-oppressed Dalits. "The experience [of AI] actually mirrored society," Singha says.

Training large language models (LLMs) to reason via reinforcement learning (RL) significantly improves their problem-solving capabilities. In agentic settings, existing methods like ReAct prompt LLMs to explicitly plan before every action; however, we demonstrate that always planning is computationally expensive and degrades performance on long-horizon tasks, while never planning further limits performance. To address this, we introduce a conceptual framework formalizing dynamic planning for LLM agents, enabling them to flexibly decide when to allocate test-time compute for planning. We propose a simple two-stage training pipeline: (1) supervised fine-tuning on diverse synthetic data to prime models for dynamic planning, and (2) RL to refine this capability in long-horizon environments. Experiments on the Crafter environment show that dynamic planning agents trained with this approach are more sample-efficient and consistently achieve more complex objectives. Additionally, we demonstrate that these agents can be effectively steered by human-written plans, surpassing their independent capabilities. To our knowledge, this work is the first to explore training LLM agents for dynamic test-time compute allocation in sequential decision-making tasks, paving the way for more efficient, adaptive, and controllable agentic systems.