The world's first comprehensive laws to regulate artificial intelligence have been agreed in a landmark deal after a marathon 37-hour negotiation between the European Parliament and EU member states. The agreement was described as "historic" by Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner responsible for a suite of laws in Europe that will also govern social media and search engines, covering giants such as X, TikTok and Google. Breton said 100 people had been in a room for almost three days to seal the deal. He said it was "worth the few hours of sleep" to make the "historic" deal. Carme Artigas, Spain's secretary of state for AI, who facilitated the negotiations, said France and Germany supported the text, amid reports that tech companies in those countries were fighting for a lighter touch approach to foster innovation among small companies.

The European Union reached a hard-fought deal on what is poised to become the most comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence in the Western world. Thierry Breton, the bloc's internal market chief, said the deal strikes a balance between fostering innovation and protecting the rights of people and companies. "We spent a lot of time on finding the right balance between making the most of AI potential to support law enforcement while protecting our citizens' fundamental rights," he said early Saturday in a statement. "We do not want any mass surveillance in Europe."

After years of inaction in the U.S. Congress, E.U. tech laws have had wide-ranging implications for Silicon Valley companies. Europe's digital privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, has prompted some companies, such as Microsoft, to overhaul how they handle users' data even beyond Europe's borders. Meta, Google and other companies have faced fines under the law, and Google had to delay the launch of its generative AI chatbot Bard in the region due to a review under the law. However, there are concerns that the law created costly compliance measures that have hampered small businesses, and that lengthy investigations and relatively small fines have blunted its efficacy among the world's largest companies.

Competition among portable consoles is the fiercest it's ever been. This duo of OLED devices can unlock tons of gaming potential, thanks to their friendly design and extensive libraries of games, but do you really need to own both? So, with that in mind, here's how the Switch OLED and Steam Deck OLED compare to one another. Our first category is the easiest to decide. Nintendo is always going to win on price -- and that's no different here.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and the large language models (LLMs) that underpin them, have been alarming anti-AI advocates, particularly as ChatGPT -- and its ilk -- skyrocketed in popularity this year. A new study conducted by the UK Department of Education implies that the fearful cries of "Ah, AI is coming after our jobs!" According to the lead investigators, up to 30% of jobs can be automated with AI. As AI usage becomes more prevalent, the study discovered that the most affected jobs are in finance, law, business, management roles, and clerical work. Below, take a look at the specific jobs that are in jeopardy.

The Washington Post reports that after a marathon 72-hour debate European Union legislators Friday have reached a historic deal on a broad-ranging AI safety development bill, the most expansive and far-reaching of its kind to date. Details of the deal itself were not immediately available. The proposed regulations would dictate the ways in which future machine learning models can be developed and distributed within the trade bloc, impacting its use in applications ranging from education to employment to healthcare. AI development would be split among four categories, depending on how much societal risk each potentially poses -- minimal, limited, high, and banned. Banned uses would include anything that circumvents the user's will, targets protected groups or provides real-time biometric tracking (like facial recognition).

The European Union today agreed on the details of the AI Act, a far-reaching set of rules for the people building and using artificial intelligence. It's a milestone law that, lawmakers hope, will create a blueprint for the rest of the world. After months of debate about how to regulate companies like OpenAI, lawmakers from the EU's three branches of government--the Parliament, Council and Commission--spent more than 36 hours in total--thrashing out the new legislation between Wednesday afternoon and Friday evening. Lawmakers were under pressure to strike a deal before the EU election campaign starts in the new year. "The EU AI Act is a global first," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on X. "[It is] a unique legal framework for the development of AI you can trust.

Confidential documents presented at a recent internal Google summit detail the tech giant's plan to create an artificial intelligence (AI) designed to become its users' 'Life Story Teller.' But to do it, the AI will require unprecedented access to each user's personal data. It's unclear where this experimental AI, currently dubbed'Project Ellmann,' will reside among Google's apps and services, but the team behind it works for Google Photos -- and their presentation suggested a tailored AI chatbot. 'We can't answer tough questions or tell good stories without a bird's-eye view of your life,' read one portion of the presentation, made by a Google product manager. Confidential documents presented at a recent internal Google summit detail the tech giant's plan to create an AI designed to become their users' 'Life Story Teller.' Building off the company's ChatGPT rival Gemini, it new project will scrape reams of a user's personal data Building off the company's ChatGPT rival Gemini, Project Ellmann will use'large language models' (LLMs) to synthesize personal information from context said to include biographies of users and their loved ones, as well as stored photo'moments.' But the new developments may spark alarm from those outraged by Google's secret collection of millions of individual's sensitive medical records, code-named Project Nightingale in 2019 -- or anyone who eagerly collects digital privacy tips.

Connected devices linked to the Internet of Things (IoT) -- in association with 5G network technology -- are now everywhere. But just wait until next-generation applications, such as artificial intelligence (AI), start running within these edge devices. Meanwhile, the low latency and higher data speeds of 5G and IoT will add a new real-time dimension to AI. Consider an extended reality (XR) headset that not only provides a 3D view of the inside of an aircraft engine, but which also has on-board intelligence to point you to problem areas or to information on anomalies in that engine, which are immediately and automatically recognized and adjusted. Chipmakers are already developing powerful yet energy-efficient processors -- or "systems on a chip" -- that can deliver AI processing within a small footprint device.

Generative AI may have dominated most of the headlines in tech during 2023, but there were plenty of other stories, trends, and products worth calling out. At least one of them -- Apple Vision Pro and the resurgence of AR and VR -- caused nearly AI-level buzz when it dropped in June. ZDNET's editors and writers are shining the spotlight on the most important developments in tech during 2023, and are happy to help you connect the dots on where things are headed in 2024. Of course, no one could hide the fact that ChatGPT -- and the Generative AI that powers it -- was the biggest story of the year. In fact, there's an excellent chance that it could be the biggest story of the decade.