ChatGPT may be as good as or better than students at assessments in around a quarter of university courses. However, this generally only applies to questions with a clear answer that require memory recall, rather than critical analysis. Yasir Zaki and his team at New York University Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates contacted colleagues in other departments asking them to provide assessment questions from courses taught at the university, including computer science, psychology, political science and business. These colleagues also provided real student answers to the questions. The questions were then run through the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, which supplied its own responses.

While gridworlds represent rather simplistic modules, they are quite powerful in demonstrating scalable behavior. Simply, an agent that fails to behave safely in such simple environments is also unlikely to behave safely in the real world.26 A parametric MDP can model the composition of these three modules into a single socio-technical system. The UAV can land and take off from anywhere in the region. It will lose connection and land-in-place with probability p1 (opaque UAV in Figure 2) and remain grounded until it reestablishes connection with probability p2.

After an initial period of enthusiasm, attitudes toward generative AI (embodied as GPT) have soured. A flurry of polls revealed the shift in mood. One showed 70% of respondents had little or no trust that GPT can provide accurate information. Respondents see great dangers to society from misinformation that cannot be detected, and they fear that when GPT is put into search engine interfaces, reliable fact checking will be impossible. Another poll showed 70% wanted to see some kind of regulation or ban on commercial rollout to allow time to head off the dangers.

Last winter, the unveiling of OpenAI's alarmingly sophisticated chatbot sent educators into a tailspin. Generative AI, it was feared, would enable rampant cheating and plagiarism, and even make high school English obsolete. Universities debated updating plagiarism policies. Some school districts outright banned ChatGPT from their networks. Now, a new school year presents new challenges--and, for some, new opportunities.

In August 1983, exactly 40 years ago, a Chinese engineer named Wang Yongmin developed the first popular way to input Chinese characters into a computer: Wubi. He did it by breaking down a Chinese character into different strokes and assigning several strokes to each letter on the QWERTY keyboard. For example, the Chinese character for dog, 犬, has several shapes in it: 犬, 一, 丿, and丶.These shapes were matched with the keys D, G, T, and Y, respectively. So when a user typed "DGTY," a Wubi input software would match that to the character 犬. Wubi was able to match every Chinese character with a keystroke combination using at maximum four QWERTY keys.

Computational models have been a major time saver when it comes to predicting which protein molecules could make effective drugs, but many of those methods themselves take a lot of time and computing power. Now researchers at MIT and Tufts have devised an alternative approach based on an algorithm known as a large language model, which can figure out which words (or, in this case, amino acids) are most likely to appear together. The model can match target proteins and potential drug molecules without the computationally intensive step of calculating each protein's 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. The resulting system can screen more than 100 million drug-protein pairs in a single day. The researchers tested their model by screening a library of about 4,700 candidate drug molecules for their ability to bind to a set of 51 enzymes.

Given enough data, one can feel like it's possible to keep dead loved ones alive. With ChatGPT and other powerful large language models, it is feasible to create a more convincing chatbot of a dead person. But doing so, especially in the face of scarce resources and inevitable decay, ignores the massive amounts of labor that go into keeping the dead alive online. Someone always has to do the hard work of maintaining automated systems, as demonstrated by the overworked and underpaid annotators and content moderators behind generative AI, and this is also true where replicas of the dead are concerned. From managing a digital estate after gathering passwords and account information, to navigating a slowly-decaying inherited smart home, digital death care practices require significant upkeep.

Prompts that can encourage chatbots like ChatGPT to ignore pre-coded rules have been shared online for more than 100 days without being patched, potentially enabling people to use the bots for criminal activity. Artificial intelligence-based chatbots are given a set of rules by their developers to prevent misuse of the tools, such as being asked to write scam emails for hackers.

ChatGPT may well revolutionize web search, streamline office chores, and remake education, but the smooth-talking chatbot has also found work as a social media crypto huckster. Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington discovered a botnet powered by ChatGPT operating on X--the social network formerly known as Twitter--in May of this year. The botnet, which the researchers dub Fox8 because of its connection to cryptocurrency websites bearing some variation of the same name, consisted of 1,140 accounts. Many of them seemed to use ChatGPT to craft social media posts and to reply to each other's posts. The auto-generated content was apparently designed to lure unsuspecting humans into clicking links through to the crypto-hyping sites.

The World Robot Conference 2023 has opened in China, aimed at promoting scientific and technological progress. The event is a forum for participants to network and seek resources for further innovation. There's also the opportunity for ice-cream served by a robot