OpenAI on Wednesday launched its GPT Store, a marketplace where paid ChatGPT users can buy and sell specialized chatbot agents based on the company's language models. The company, whose wildly popular product ChatGPT helped kickstart the boom in AI, already offers customized bots through its paid ChatGPT Plus service. The new store will allow users to offer and monetize a broader range of tools. Through the new models, chatbot agents could be developed with their own personalities or themes, including models for salary negotiating, creating lesson plans and developing recipes. The store has been compared with Apple's App store, fostering new development in the AI space from a wider range of users. Meta offers chatbots with differing personalities in a similar offering.

CES attendees in the mood for a drink were served by a robot, which tailored beverages based on the patron's emotions. Doosan Robotics introduced its Mixmaster Moodie, which uses rubber artificial muscles to serve patrons a cocktail based on visual and audio cues. Those attending CES were invited to visit Moodie's booth, where they stood in front of an AI-powered screen that read their facial expression to create a drink based on their mood. Doosan booth visitors were told if they were one of seven emotions, including happy, sad, angry, annoyed, afraid, surprised, and neutral. Moodie diagnoses a person's mood using a Logitech webcam to identify their feelings based on their photo.

OpenAI has rolled out its store for custom GPTs and a new ChatGPT subscription tier for smaller teams. The GPT Store allows developers and users to share and profit from their custom versions of the viral chatbot. The GPT Store allows OpenAI to turn ChatGPT's white-hot prominence in the tech world into a tollkeeper's business model, taking a cut of revenue like in Apple's App Store. Anyone can build and share GPTs -- you don't need coding experience -- but creators must make a Builder Profile that shares their real name or points users to a verified website. OpenAI says a revenue program for GPT creators is coming soon in Q1. "As a first step, US builders will be paid based on user engagement with their GPTs," the company wrote, promising to provide more info as the program's launch approaches.

Earlier this week, Volkswagen announced plans to augment its in-car voice assistant IDA with ChatGPT. I'll admit that I initially didn't quite understand the point, but I got a chance here at CES 2024 in Las Vegas to hear about the vision for this integration from Cerence, the company that already powers the back-end of VW's voice assistant. As usual, it's a bit of a rough demo, because it's hard to exactly see how ChatGPT will help you out when you're on the road when you're instead sitting in a stationary car inside of a convention center. But conceptually, the idea behind bringing ChatGPT into a car is all about avoiding a "dead end" when you as IDA something, Cerence told us. Drivers don't need to do anything different -- you just say "Hello IDA" or press the voice assistant button on the driver's wheel and start talking. And if there's something that IDA doesn't know, it'll check with ChatGPT.

LG Display came to CES 2024 with something to prove. Its showroom in Las Vegas had transparent OLEDs, a 480Hz gaming monitor and the company's most advanced OLED panels yet, featuring its META technology 2.0. While it sounds like promotional fluff (and there is some of that), LG Display is trying to address arguably OLED's biggest weakness in the face of ever-improving LEDs, MicroLEDs and the rest. Using advanced microlens arrays (now called MLA) and new algorithms, LG Display says it's made an OLED 42 percent brighter than the displays that came before it. At CES 2024, I took a closer look at the prototype panels, headed to TVs later this year.

OpenAI is an unconventional company in many ways, but last November it borrowed a page from the standard tech industry playbook: It held a developer conference where CEO Sam Altman urged software makers to build on top of ChatGPT. The company said it would soon launch a marketplace where developers and non-techies alike could create custom functions for the chatbot and make money by sharing them with the world. The reaction to that news was mixed, with some hailing the birth of a new platform and others turning a laundry app demoed onstage into a meme. But whether meme-worthy or momentous, OpenAI's app store is part of a broader strategy to maintain its edge in the competitive AI landscape. Like Apple and Google's YouTube have done so well, OpenAI now wants to incentivize developers and creators to supply fresh content for its platform, so that it can keep offering new experiences that draw in users.

The competition to build the iPhone of artificial intelligence is heating up. On Tuesday, the technology startup Rabbit unveiled its contender: a small, orange, walkie-talkie style device that, according to the company, can use "AI agents" to carry out tasks on behalf of the user. In a pre-recorded keynote address shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Rabbit's founder Jesse Lyu asks the device to plan him a vacation to London; the keynote shows the device designing him an itinerary and booking his trip. He orders a pizza, books an Uber, and teaches the device how to generate an image using Midjourney. The gadget, called the Rabbit r1, is just the latest in an increasingly active new hardware category: portable AI-first devices that can interact with users in natural language, eschewing screens and app-based operating systems.

Although AI is by no means a new technology there have been massive and rapid investments in it and large language models. However, the high-performance computing that powers these rapidly growing AI tools -- and enables record automation and operational efficiency -- also consumes a staggering amount of energy. With the proliferation of AI comes the responsibility to deploy that AI responsibly and with an eye to sustainability during hardware and software R&D as well as within data centers. "Enterprises need to be very aware of the energy consumption of their digital technologies, how big it is, and how their decisions are affecting it," says corporate vice president and general manager of data center platform engineering and architecture at Intel, Zane Ball. One of the key drivers of a more sustainable AI is modularity, says Ball. Modularity breaks down subsystems of a server into standard building blocks, defining interfaces between those blocks so they can work together.

Urtopia has tried to separate its e-bike's from the pack with copious use of technology and this year the company has outdone itself. It just showed off its flagship Fusion model for the first time in full at CES 2024 (after teasing it earlier this year) and it's fully integrated with none other than ChatGPT, the buzzy AI assistant. The Fusion follows the company's previous tech-infused Chord and original Urtopia models. Urtopia calls the Fusion "the world's first dual battery, dual motor ebike by design visionary Hartmut Esslinger," a very specific claim. It's built with carbon fiber to reduce weight and uses a Shimano CUES derailleur on the regular model and Enviolo stepless shifter on the premium CVT version. The dual 540Wh battery allows for 120km of range (75 miles), but the 360Wh battery extender brings that up to 200km (124 miles) -- enough to traverse Paris from north to south about 20 times.

When AI researcher Melanie Mitchell published Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans in 2019, she set out to clarify AI's impact. A few years later, ChatGPT set off a new AI boom--with a side effect that caught her off guard. An AI-generated imitation of her book appeared on Amazon, in an apparent scheme to profit off her work. It looks like another example of the ecommerce giant's ongoing problem with a glut of low-quality AI-generated ebooks. Mitchell learned that searching Amazon for her book surfaced not only her own tome but also another ebook with the same title, published last September.