With Prime Big Deal Days being a little more than one week away, Amazon has kicked things off early by discounting most of its Echo smart speakers. You can get up to 69 percent off Echo devices and bundles right now, and that goes for any Amazon shopping -- not just Prime members. Of note is the Echo Dot for $23, a record low that matches its July Prime Day price, and the Echo Dot bundled with a Kasa Smart Plug Mini for just about $1 more. Considering the Echo Dot is one of our favorite smart speakers and the Kasa accessory earned a spot on our list of best smart plugs, that bundle is an affordable way to get your smart home started. As part of a big Echo speaker sale, this bundle that includes the Echo Dot and a Kasa smart plug is 67 percent off. The Echo Dot was not one of the many Amazon devices to receive an upgrade last month during Amazon's hardware event, which means you're getting the latest model of the speaker in this sale.

With its most recent update, Google Bard can now sort through your trove of Google Docs, rediscover ancient Gmail messages, and search through every video on YouTube. Before experimenting too much with the new extensions available for Google's chatbot, it's worth going over the steps you can take to protect your privacy (and the ones you can't). Google Bard launched in March of this year, one month after OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. You're likely familiar with how chatbots are designed to mimic human conversation, but Google's latest features are designed to give Bard more practical applications and uses. But when every conversation you have with Bard is tracked, logged, and used again to train the AI, how can you trust it with your data?

Publishing a book is a big occasion for any writer, and Rory Cellan-Jones is no exception. "Like any author, I obsessively check Amazon," he said. The former BBC technology correspondent wrote a memoir untangling the truth about his family history. What had popped up on the Amazon website was a biography of Cellan-Jones, with a naively designed cover by someone he had never heard of. "I thought: 'This is strange – who's writing a biography of me?'" Cellan-Jones told the Observer.

Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan has said the agency is watching closely for signs of anticompetitive behavior. In March, the FTC opened an inquiry into cloud computing providers, asking whether AI products are dependent on the cloud provider they're built on. Regulators elsewhere are watching, too. The offices of Nvidia, which makes the computer chips and software necessary to train large language models, were raided Wednesday by French competition authorities, according to the Wall Street Journal.

OpenAI recently announced an upgrade to ChatGPT (Apple, Android) that adds two features: AI voice options to hear the chatbot responding to your prompts, and image analysis capabilities. The image function is similar to what's already available for free with Google's Bard chatbot. Even after hours of testing the limits and capabilities of ChatGPT, OpenAI's chatbot still manages to surprise and scare me at the same time. Yes, I was quite impressed with the web browsing beta offered through ChatGPT Plus, but I remained anxious about the tool's ramifications for people who write for money online, among many other concerns. The new image feature arriving for OpenAI's subscribers left me with similarly mixed feelings.

ChatGPT took the world by storm when it hit the market, allowing people in all sorts of roles to soar through work. While interest has slowed down a bit, the utility certainly hasn't. But if you want to get the most out of ChatGPT, you need to know how to properly use it. That's where The Complete ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Training Bundle and it's reduced in price now through 9/30. This bundle includes four courses, including one for absolute beginners.

Dianne Feinstein's office announced Friday morning that she has died at the age of 90, after more than 30 years representing California in the Senate. As her colleagues share memories of her, some huge, high-stakes questions are looming--namely, who will take her seat, and what will become of her spot on the powerful Judiciary Committee. Jim Newell walks us through what seems likely to happen, and what still remains unknown. Plus: The Waves reflects on the senator's legacy of fighting gun violence and conflict with her left-wing constituents. Unless Congress passes a bill to fund the government by Oct. 1, we're cruising for a government shutdown.

Microsoft's Bing Chat AI chatbot has gained much popularity because it is free, connected to the internet, powered by GPT-4, and multimodal, boasting features the accessible version of ChatGPT doesn't have. However, a new report shows that its responses may contain malware. In March, a month after releasing its chatbot, Microsoft started experimenting with ads in its Bing Chat responses. The ads were placed within the chat experience in both the footnotes and by hovering over the response. Also: Can generative AI solve computer science's greatest unsolved problem?

Google has been trying to leverage its undisputed lead in the search engine space to develop AI models that have as much success, including a generative AI-supported Search (SGE) and its Google Bard AI chatbot. Now, Google is adding new features that will optimize processes for early testers of SGE and web publisher controls regarding Google Bard. When Google announced SGE at Google I/O, it also unveiled Search Labs, a platform through which users can access the early-stage SGE, test it, and provide feedback to Google on how it can improve the experience. Since the launch of Search Labs, Google shares that younger SGE users, those between ages 18 and 24, have been finding it particularly useful and provided the most helpful feedback. As of Thursday, Google is expanding access to SGE to an even younger audience -- users between the ages of 13 and 17 in the US.

The rise of "generative" artificial intelligence is all about scaling, the idea of adding more resources to a computer program to get better results. As OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has remarked, "I had a very strong belief that bigger is better" when he founded the company that would create ChatGPT. That idea of bigger and bigger compute has led to a race to develop the most powerful chips for AI, including not only new GPUs from Nvidia, but also Intel's Habana Labs, which has shown impressive results in benchmark tests; and Advanced Micro Devices, and startups such as Cerebras Systems. Also: Can generative AI solve computer science's greatest unsolved problem? That rush to develop chips has created a very practical problem: How are developers supposed to develop for an expanding universe of kinds of chips that have unique capabilities, and unique programming environments?