On the heels of ChatGPT's first anniversary, a new study on the use of the top 50 artificial intelligence tools available crowned OpenAI's chatbot as the most popular AI tool worldwide. ChatGPT accounted for 60% of traffic visits to the most popular tools between September 2022 and August 2023, an explosive time for the use of generative AI tools. During this time, the United States was considered the leader in the use of AI tools. Writerbuddy, the company behind the study, scraped data from various directories that list AI tools and studied the use of over 3,000 AI tools. It then narrowed down the top 50 most used tools to investigate how people use AI.

On Wednesday, Spotify unveiled its Spotify Wrapped for 2023, and as a result, most social media feeds were swamped with people showing off their top songs and artists of the year. Although those Spotify Wrapped results might have been enough to impress your social media followers, this faux AI model will take a lot more convincing. The digital publication The Pudding has a project called "How Bad Is Your Streaming Music?", a site that pretends to be a judgemental AI character that judges how bad your music taste is based on your Apple Music and Spotify streaming history. Also: Apple names the 14 best apps and games of 2023. Since it mimics the actions of a judgemental AI model, while looking at your music history, the website offers ruthless commentary, roasting many of your music choices and asking follow-up questions to better understand your music taste and ultimately deliver your final score.

The Game Awards got it wrong this year. One of the titles nominated for Best Independent Game, Dave the Diver, was produced by Nexon, one of the largest video game studios in South Korea. No matter how hard you squint, it is not indie. Dave the Diver is an excellent pixel-art game about deep-sea fishing and restaurant management, but it was commissioned and bankrolled by Nexon subsidiary Mintrocket, with billions of dollars and decades of experience at its back. When The Game Awards nominees were announced on November 13, fans were quick to point out the error, and the recurring debate over what "indie" means was reignited.

Google's new generative AI experiment lets you create music "inspired by" over 100 instruments worldwide. Instrument Playground starts by asking for a simple prompt containing a musical instrument's name, optionally preceded by an adjective like "upbeat," "strange" or "gloomy." It will then spit out a 20-second audio clip as a starting point to compose (often extremely offbeat or abstract) music that may or may not include the sound of the specific instrument you entered. Simon Doury, an Artist in Residence at Google Arts & Culture Lab, designed the experiment. It taps into Google's MusicLM, a text-to-AI tool it made available to the public in May.

Sam Altman has appeared to lead credence to the theory he was fired from OpenAI over his company's super powerful, secret new AI system he helped build. Multiple employees reportedly warned the company's board of directors that this project, named Q* (pronounced'Q star'), was becoming so advanced it could already pass math exams and perform critical thinking tasks. And they felt Altman was not taking their warnings seriously. In an interview this week, Altman did not deny the existence of the secret program that some employees said was responsible for his firing. Instead, he called the revelation of Q* an'unfortunate leak.' Altman was fired, then hired by OpenAI investor Microsoft, and then re-hired by OpenAI - which also gave the boot to most of the board that cut Altman loose - all over the course of just five days in November.

It is surprisingly easy to remove the safety measures intended to prevent AI chatbots from giving harmful responses that could aid would-be terrorists or mass shooters. The discovery seems to be prompting companies including OpenAI to develop strategies to solve the problem – but research suggests their efforts have been met with only limited success so far.

Microsoft's Windows 12 will launch in June of 2024, according to Taiwan media quoting the chairmen of Acer and contract manufacturer Quanta. The Commercial Times, Taiwan's largest financial paper, led its report about a recent medical conference by stating that Microsoft's Windows 12 will launch in June 2024. The paper was reporting on comments made by Barry Lam, the founder and chairman of PC contract manufacturer Quanta, and by Junsheng (Jason) Chen, the chairman and chief executive of Acer. The CT did not directly attribute the Windows date to either executive, though it said that Lam stated that Quanta would be the "first to invest in AI PCs," a new category of PCs that Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger announced in July. Though the definition differs slightly between companies, an AI PC is generally assumed to be a PC with a processor (such as Intel's Meteor Lake, AMD's Ryzen AI, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite CPU) with on-chip AI capabilities.

Kurt "The Cyberguy" Knutsson explains how facial recognition technology can help you find your perfect match. When it comes to dating, there are going to be barriers you and your partner will have to overcome together. For those in long-distance relationships, the physical space that separates the couple can be a big hurdle to overcome. Going on dates is not as easy when you are hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, but that does not mean it is impossible. Long-distance dates require a little extra creativity but can still be manageable and loads of fun.

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Researchers at the AI startup Hugging Face collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University and discovered that generating an image using artificial intelligence, whether it's to create stock images or realistic ID photos, has a carbon footprint equivalent to charging a smartphone. However, researchers discern that generating text, whether it be to create a conversation with a chatbot or clean up an essay, requires much less energy than generating photos. The researchers quantify that AI-generated text takes up as much energy as charging a smartphone to only 16 percent of a full charge. The study didn't just look into image and text generation by machine learning programs. The researchers examined a total of 13 tasks, ranging from summarization to text classification, and measured the amount of carbon dioxide produced per every 1000 grams.