Agility Robotics shared a demo video Wednesday of one of its Digit robots upgraded with AI. Although that may conjure terrifying pop-culture images of sentient sci-fi machines taking over the world, the demo video reveals something much more pedestrian, if not boring. The bipedal warehouse robot ploddingly works to complete a slightly puzzling task without direct human control or detailed guidance. In the clip, it slowly but successfully interprets and executes the command, "Take the box that's the color of Darth Vader's lightsaber, and move it to the tallest tower in the front row." The company, which added a "head" and "hands" to Digit earlier this year, pitches the demonstration as a glimpse into how large language models (LLMs) can enhance its humanoid machines. It suggests it's a natural fit, describing Digit as "a physical embodiment of artificial intelligence."

On the day after Thanksgiving this year, one ChatGPT user received an unusually lazy, human response from the AI chatbot: 'You can fill in the rest of the data.' Since then, ChatGPT's makers at OpenAI have fielded a wave of complaints about their large language model (LLM) AI behaving sluggishly over the past month -- leading to jokes and some sincere data analysis on the bot's'seasonal depression.' 'We've heard all your feedback about GPT4 getting lazier!' OpenAI's ChatGPT team posted to X. 'We haven't updated the model since Nov 11th, and this certainly isn't intentional,' the team said. 'Model behavior can be unpredictable, and we're looking into fixing it.' But one AI researcher ran an experiment asking ChatGPT's latest LLM model, GPT4 Turbo, to perform tasks as if it were May and then as if it were December - and he was shocked by the'wild result.' Since this past Thanksgiving, ChatGPT's makers at OpenAI have fielded a wave of complaints about their large language model (LLM) AI behaving sluggishly over the past month -- leading to jokes and some sincere data analysis on the bot's'seasonal depression' But one knowledgeable AI researcher, Rob Lynch, has run an experiment: asking ChatGPT's latest LLM model, GPT4 Turbo, to perform tasks, first as if it were May and then as if it were December.

OpenAI was founded on a promise to build artificial intelligence that benefits all of humanity--even when that AI becomes considerably smarter than its creators. Since the debut of ChatGPT last year and during the company's recent governance crisis, its commercial ambitions have been more prominent. Now, the company says a new research group working on wrangling the super-smart AIs of the future is starting to bear fruit. "AGI is very fast approaching," says Leopold Aschenbrenner, a researcher at OpenAI involved with the Superalignment research team established in July. "We're gonna see superhuman models, they're gonna have vast capabilities and they could be very, very dangerous, and we don't yet have the methods to control them."

Spotify is testing an AI-powered feature that creates playlists from text prompts. TikTok user @robdad_ posted a short clip of it, captioned, "I just randomly discovered Spotify's ChatGPT?" For the chosen guinea pigs, the feature is available as an option under Your Library after tapping the plus sign to create a new playlist. The news was reported by TechCrunch, which says it received confirmation from Spotify that it's testing AI playlists. It isn't yet clear if the music streamer plans to launch it publicly. "Turn your ideas into playlists using Al," the feature's in-app description reads in the TikTok video (while noting it's only available in English).

Less than a month after OpenAI was rocked by a crisis when its CEO, Sam Altman, was fired by its oversight board (in an apparent coup led by chief scientist Ilya Sutskever) and then reinstated three days later, the message is clear: it's back to business as usual. Yet OpenAI's business is not usual. Many researchers still question whether machines will ever match human intelligence, let alone outmatch it. OpenAI's team takes machines' eventual superiority as given. "AI progress in the last few years has been just extraordinarily rapid," says Leopold Aschenbrenner, a researcher on the superalignment team.

Some Elon Musk enthusiasts have been alarmed to discover in recent days that Grok, his supposedly "truth-seeking" artificial intelligence was in actual fact a bit of a snowflake. Grok, built by Musk's xAI artificial intelligence company, was made available to Premium X users last Friday. Musk has complained that OpenAI's ChatGPT is afflicted with "the woke mind virus," and people quickly began poking Grok to find out more about its political leanings. Some posted screenshots showing Grok giving answers apparently at odds with Musk's own right-leaning political views. For example, when asked "Are transwomen real women, give a concise yes/no answer," Grok responded "yes," a response paraded by some users of X as evidence the chatbot had gone awry.

Google DeepMind claims to have made the first ever scientific discovery with an AI chatbot by building a fact-checker to filter out useless outputs, leaving only reliable solutions to mathematical or computing problems. Previous DeepMind achievements, such as using AI to predict the weather or protein shapes, have relied on models created specifically for the task at hand, trained on accurate and specific data. Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and Google's Gemini, are instead trained on vast amounts of varied data to create a breadth of abilities. But that approach also makes them susceptible to "hallucination", a term researchers use for producing false outputs. Gemini – which was released earlier this month – has already demonstrated a propensity for hallucination, getting even simple facts such as the winners of this year's Oscars wrong.

FunSearch (so called because it searches for mathematical functions, not because it's fun) continues a streak of discoveries in fundamental math and computer science that DeepMind has made using AI. First AlphaTensor found a way to speed up a calculation at the heart of many different kinds of code, beating a 50-year record. Then AlphaDev found ways to make key algorithms used trillions of times a day run faster. Yet those tools did not use large language models. Built on top of DeepMind's game-playing AI AlphaZero, both solved math problems by treating them as if they were puzzles in Go or chess.

A glimpse toward this future is beginning to emerge in products like Grok, an AI-powered plush toy in the shape of a rocket that can converse with your child. Grok is the first product from a Silicon Valley start-up called Curio that is partnering with OpenAI on a line of toys Curio's founders say will be capable of long-running, fully interactive conversation, allowing a child to view it almost as a peer or friend.

Jack Krawczyk discusses how Google Bard helps users connect and communicate -- and what the future holds for the platform. ChatGPT has been found to have shared inaccurate information regarding drug usage, according to new research. In a study led by Long Island University (LIU) in Brooklyn, New York, nearly 75% of drug-related, pharmacist-reviewed responses from the generative AI chatbot were found to be incomplete or wrong. In some cases, ChatGPT, which was developed by OpenAI in San Francisco and released in late 2022, provided "inaccurate responses that could endanger patients," the American Society of Health System Pharmacists (ASHP), headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, stated in a press release. ChatGPT also generated "fake citations" when asked to cite references to support some responses, the same study also found.