ChatGPT developer OpenAI has signed a deal to bring news content from the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, the Times and the Sunday Times to the artificial intelligence platform, the companies said on Wednesday. Neither party disclosed a dollar figure for the deal. The deal will give OpenAI access to current and archived content from all of News Corp's publications. The deal comes weeks after the AI heavyweight signed a deal with the Financial Times to license its content for the development of AI models. Other publications, including the New York Times, have taken a different tack: suing OpenAI and Microsoft, the startup's key backer, over the use of its content to train generative AI and large-language model systems.

Microsoft said Wednesday that it is transforming Copilot into an app on Windows, and migrating the icon back to literally front and center on your PC. Microsoft made reference to the change in its keynote addresses at Build, its developer conference in Seattle. But a blog post on Wednesday outlined Microsoft's motivations for doing so, and what it plans to do with the Copilot Windows app. Currently, Copilot "lives" as an icon down in the lower-right-hand corner of the screen, with a small "Pre" banner attached to it as a preview. Microsoft appears to be ditching the "preview" designation and, in Microsoft's words, "evolving" Copilot into a full-fledged shipping product. "By changing Copilot in Windows, we're addressing one of the top pieces of feedback we have received from commercial organizations, which is to provide a more flexible, app-like experience," Harjit Dhaliwal, a senior product marketing manager for Windows Commercial at Microsoft, said in a blog post.

On May 13th, during a live event, the artificial-intelligence company OpenAI unveiled the next generation of its technology, GPT-4o, the successor to GPT-3. When OpenAI first released its product to the public in late 2022, as the text-based tool ChatGPT, it nearly single-handedly ushered in the A.I. era. The latest version is far more powerful still. The "o" in the name stands for "omni"; the model can communicate seamlessly across various forms of media at once, including text, audio, and video, receiving prompts in one medium and responding in another. It can maintain a memory of everything you tell it.

'IN DISBELIEF': Scarlett Johansson is "angered and in disbelief" by tech company OpenAI over its ChatGPT app's voice, Sky, noting it uses a voice very similar to hers. NVIDIA'S RISE: Wall Street is eagerly awaiting the latest earnings report Wednesday from Nvidia, which has experienced rapid growth amid the boom in artificial intelligence technology. ELECTRIC RUNNING ROBOT: Standing as tall as an average human and powered by a symphony of sensors and processors, Tiangong has the ability to jog at a steady pace, navigate complex terrain and perform tasks with precision. Tiangong represents a future where robots could possibly become our companions, helpers and perhaps even our friends. GOOGLE'S BIG REVEALS: Google's flagship developer conference called I/O just wrapped up with interesting leaps in how the Big Tech giant is planning to change the world.

Microsoft introduced a new series of products, named Copilot PCs, that are designed to be integrated with artificial intelligence technology in mind. The company has reportedly struggled with the laptop market in recent months, with sales of the flagship surface pro laptops declining significantly in 2023. But the new AI device features have raised privacy concerns. In particular, one feature that Microsoft refers to as "Recall" allows the device to take snapshots of a person's screen every few seconds. These screenshots are encrypted and then stored locally on the individual's device. Microsoft said that this feature was designed to "solve one of the most frustrating problems we encounter daily--finding something we know we have seen before on our PC."

AI projects like OpenAI's ChatGPT get part of their savvy from some of the lowest-paid workers in the tech industry--contractors often in poor countries paid small sums to correct chatbots and label images. On Wednesday, 97 African workers who do AI training work or online content moderation for companies like Meta and OpenAI published an open letter to President Biden, demanding that US tech companies stop "systemically abusing and exploiting African workers." Most of the letter's signatories are from Kenya, a hub for tech outsourcing, whose president, William Ruto, is visiting the US this week. The workers allege that the practices of companies like Meta, OpenAI, and data provider Scale AI "amount to modern day slavery." The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity--to the criminal underworld. Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far more efficiently and internationally than ever before. Over the past year, cybercriminals have mostly stopped developing their own AI models. Instead, they are opting for tricks with existing tools that work reliably. That's because criminals want an easy life and quick gains.

In a product demo last week, OpenAI showcased a synthetic but expressive voice for ChatGPT called "Sky" that reminded many viewers of the flirty AI girlfriend Samantha played by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 film Her. One of those viewers was Johansson herself, who promptly hired legal counsel and sent letters to OpenAI demanding an explanation, according to a statement released later. In response, the company on Sunday halted use of Sky and published a blog post insisting that it "is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice." Johansson's statement, released Monday, said she was "shocked, angered, and in disbelief" by OpenAI's demo using a voice she called "so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference." Johansson revealed that she had turned down a request last year from the company's CEO, Sam Altman, to voice ChatGPT and that he had reached out again two days before last week's demo in an attempt to change her mind.

Add to that another thing OpenAI fumbled with GPT-4o: the data it used to train its tokenizer--a tool that helps the model parse and process text more efficiently--is polluted by Chinese spam websites. As a result, the model's Chinese token library is full of phrases related to pornography and gambling. This could worsen some problems that are common with AI models: hallucinations, poor performance, and misuse. I wrote about it on Friday after several researchers and AI industry insiders flagged the problem. They took a look at GPT-4o's public token library, which has been significantly updated with the new model to improve support of non-English languages, and saw that more than 90 of the 100 longest Chinese tokens in the model are from spam websites.

Sixteen companies at the forefront of developing artificial intelligence (AI) pledged on Tuesday at a global meeting to develop the technology safely at a time when regulators are scrambling to keep up with rapid innovation and emerging risks. The companies included U.S. leaders Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, as well as firms from China, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates. They were backed by a broader declaration from the Group of Seven (G7) major economies, the EU, Singapore, Australia and South Korea at a virtual meeting hosted by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol.