Being stuck in traffic is a familiar problem for many Californians, but state officials want to harness the power of artificial intelligence to discover new solutions. The California Department of Transportation, teaming up with other state agencies, is asking technology companies by Jan. 25 to propose generative AI tools that could help California reduce traffic and make roads safer, especially for pedestrians, cyclists and scooter riders. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can quickly produce text, images and other content, but the technology can also help workers brainstorm ideas. The request shows how California is trying to tap into AI to improve government services at a time when lawmakers seek to safeguard against the technology's potential risks. California politicians set the stage for more AI regulation in 2024, but they'll also face challenges as they try to place more guardrails around AI's impact on jobs, safety and discrimination.

This one went smoothly -- no claims of rampant rigging, no significant taint of skulduggery -- due in large part to the defeat of deepfakes, democracy's newest enemy. Is such a future possible? So far, neither government nor the tech industry has agreed on effective guardrails against deepfakes. But this FAQ (from five years in the future) shows that the events of 2024 may well force the issue -- and that a solution is possible. Why did it take so long to find an effective way to fight deepfakes?

As a fourth-year ophthalmology resident at Emory University School of Medicine, Dr. Riley Lyons' biggest responsibilities include triage: When a patient comes in with an eye-related complaint, Lyons must make an immediate assessment of its urgency. He often finds patients have already turned to "Dr. Online, Lyons said, they are likely to find that "any number of terrible things could be going on based on the symptoms that they're experiencing." So, when two of Lyons' fellow ophthalmologists at Emory came to him and suggested evaluating the accuracy of the AI chatbot ChatGPT in diagnosing eye-related complaints, he jumped at the chance. In June, Lyons and his colleagues reported in medRxiv, an online publisher of preliminary health science studies, that ChatGPT compared quite well to human doctors who reviewed the same symptoms -- and performed vastly better than the symptom checker on the popular health website WebMD. And despite the much-publicized "hallucination" problem known to ...

Apple unveiled a smarter Siri personal assistant on Monday that's picked up some features already offered by Google, but emphasized that it's improving Siri without compromising the company's commitment to user privacy. An update to the iPhone and iPad operating system coming this fall will deliver a Siri that's able to search through more apps than ever and offer users' information based on what it thinks they might want to know. That includes automatically adding event invitations to the Calendar app, telling iPhone holders who might be calling based on an unknown number matching one in an email and launching the Music app when someone plugs in headphones in the morning because that's become their routine. Apple made the announcement to kick off its weeklong Worldwide Developers Conference, a gathering for appmakers to learn about Apple products. "We think these kind of intelligence features make a huge difference in iOS 9," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, told an audience of media and software developers at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The newest version of Microsoft Windows arrives July 29. Microsoft announced the launch date for Windows 10 on Monday. Upgrading to the major new edition of its operating system will be free for most consumers with a Windows 8 or Windows 7 machine. Microsoft didn't announce a price for those ineligible for a free upgrade. Nor did it say when the smartphone version would be available. Windows 10 represents Microsoft's first attempt to build an operating system that looks and feels the same regardless of the size of the screen or the type of device being used.