Bloomberg reported yesterday that Apple has been working on its own AI-powered chatbot, internally known as "Apple GPT." While the company hasn't revealed concrete plans for public release, its engineers have reportedly been actively using the chatbot, which uses a large language model (LLM) framework named "Ajax." Running on Google Cloud and built with Google JAX, Ajax serves to unify machine learning development.

Earlier this month, several prominent outlets carried news that artificial intelligence will not pose a danger to humanity. A bunch of humanoid robot heads connected to simple chatbots. The news stories sprang from a panel at a United Nations conference in Geneva called AI for Good, where several humanoids appeared alongside their creators. Reporters were invited to ask questions to the robots, which included Sophia, a machine made by Hanson Robotics that has gained notoriety for appearing on talk shows and even, bizarrely, gaining legal status as a person in Saudi Arabia. The questions included whether AI would destroy humanity or steal jobs.

Just four years ago, the movement to ban police departments from using face recognition in the US was riding high. By the end of 2020, around 18 cities had enacted restrictive laws, and lawmakers proposed a pause on the federal government's use of it. In the years since, that effort has slowed to a halt. Some local bans have even been partially repealed, and today, few seriously believe that a federal ban could pass in the foreseeable future. Right now in the US, facial recognition regulations are trapped in political gridlock.

However, in Massachusetts there is hope for those who want to restrict police access to face recognition. The state's lawmakers are currently thrashing out a bipartisan state bill that seeks to limit police use of the technology. Although it's not a full ban, it would mean that only state police could use it, not all law enforcement agencies. The bill, which could come to a vote imminently, may represent an unsatisfying compromise, both to police who want more freedom to use the technology and to activists who want it completely banned. But it represents a vital test of the prevailing mood around police use of these controversial tools. That's because when it comes to regulating face recognition, few states are as important as Massachusetts.

Artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to carry out intelligent tasks typically performed by humans. It involves the use of computers to reproduce or undertake such actions, often at a higher speed and accuracy than previously achieved. AI typically combines computer science with data to solve problems or make predictions. Its processes involve algorithms, which are a series of rules written into computer code. Historically, AI has been used to carry out complex mathematical tasks, or to play strategy games such as chess, often beating human competitors.

Apple has created its own generative artificial intelligence tools to compete with ChatGPT, according to a Bloomberg report Wednesday. Apple built its own framework that can create large language models, called "Ajax," as well as a chatbot service that internal engineers are calling Apple GPT, according to Bloomberg citing unnamed sources. It's part of the iPhone giant's bid to compete in the AI space, the report said. Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Large language models are what power generative artificial intelligence chatbots, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

A robot made of Lego can quickly perform an important step for creating machines made of DNA. "This started as a final project in an undergraduate lab course," says Rizal Hariadi at Arizona State University, who tasked his class with building tools using "frugal science". The robot that one group of students built has proved particularly useful and resembles a single arm topped with a holder for cylindrical tubes. It performs a procedure to mix the liquid contents of the tubes, first tilting the tubes from vertical to horizontal, then rapidly spinning them around. This creates a single liquid with a density that uniformly decreases from the bottom to the top.

Scientists from UNSW and Botanic Gardens of Sydney have trained AI to unlock data from millions of plant specimens kept in herbaria around the world, to study and combat the impacts of climate change on flora. "Herbarium collections are amazing time capsules of plant specimens," says lead author on the study, Associate Professor Will Cornwell. "Each year over 8000 specimens are added to the National Herbarium of New South Wales alone, so it's not possible to go through things manually anymore." Using a new machine learning algorithm to process over 3000 leaf samples, the team discovered that contrary to frequently observed interspecies patterns, leaf size doesn't increase in warmer climates within a single species. Published in the American Journal of Botany, this research not only reveals that factors other than climate have a strong effect on leaf size within a plant species, but demonstrates how AI can be used to transform static specimen collections and to quickly and effectively document climate change effects.

Large Language Models - the platforms which power chatbots like ChatGPT - are basically joining dots in enormous datasets of text, and guessing the next word in a sequence, he said. He added that the existential threat warnings issued by some AI experts relate to systems which don't yet exist.

Russia has launched air attacks on targets in southern and eastern Ukraine using drones and possibly ballistic missiles, Ukraine's air force said. The southern port of Odesa and the Mykolaiv, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions were all under threat of Russian drone attacks, the air force said on the Telegram messaging app in the early hours of Tuesday morning. Russia may also be using ballistic weaponry to attack the regions of Poltava, Cherkasy, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Kirovohrad, the air force added. Oleh Kiper, the head of the Odesa region's military administration, said air defence systems there were engaged in repelling a Russian drone attack. "Several waves of attacks are likely," Kiper said on Telegram.