MICHAEL WOOLDRIDGE: AI is not about trying to create life, right? But it's kind of, very much feels like that. I mean, if we ever achieved the ultimate dream of AI, which I call the "Hollywood dream of AI," the kind of thing that we see in Hollywood movies, then we will have created machines that are conscious, potentially, in the same way that human beings are. So it's very like that kind of dream of creating life- and that, in itself, is a very old dream. It goes back to the ancient Greeks: The Greeks had myths about the blacksmiths to the gods who could create life from metal creatures.

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The UK needs to support the creation of a British version of ChatGPT, MPs were told on Wednesday, or the country would further lose the ability to determine its own fate. Speaking to the Commons science and technology committee, Adrian Joseph, BT's chief data and artificial intelligence officer, said the government needed to have a national investment in "large language models", the AI that underpins services such as ChatGPT, Bing Chat and Google's Bard. Without such technology, the nation would struggle to compete internationally in future, he said. "We think there's a risk that we in the UK, lose out to the the large tech companies, and possibly China, and get left behind … in areas of cybersecurity, of healthcare, and so on. It is a massive arms race that has been around for some time, but the heat has certainly been turned up most recently."

Get Simon Calder's Travel email Fast, intelligent, cheap: ChatGPT – the AI chatbot system capable of spewing out facts like a caffeinated Stephen Fry – is the hot new thing on the block that's here to claim everything you hold dear. Or so it seems to a slew of journalists who have begun questioning their credentials now big tech is here to do what they do best – except faster and for less money. In recent months, we've seen the loquacious creation firing out answers to life's big questions, writing haikus, job applications and even producing a university paper in 20 minutes and bagging a 2:2 grade in the process. With its seemingly infinite ability to regurgitate facts about everything from Jan Morris to Mauritian cuisine, some journalists have begun to worry that their jobs might be at risk. Lisa Gibbs, the director of news partnerships at the Associated Press, noted in a December Google News Initiative talk that while "robots are not the journalists of the future – they are a journalist's assistant, a very good one", she added that her organisation could "find news faster and break news faster" with the aid of AI. Elsewhere, Reuters has used an in-house AI programme called Lynx Insight since 2018 and The Washington Post has produced machine-written snippets of copy using its in-house robot report, Heliograf.

This was a joint briefing with The Alan Turing Institute. ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI that generates human-like text through deep learning. These language models are trained on a massive corpus of text from the internet and can respond to a wide range of questions and prompts with remarkable fluency and accuracy, making them a popular tool with a variety of applications, with ChatGPT amassing over 100 million users since its launch in November 2022. However, the use of large language models also raises important questions about the limitations and ethical considerations of relying on AI-generated text. There are limitations to the information they can provide and the accuracy of their answers.

The latest work by computer scientists Bob Coecke and Stefano Gogioso, 'Quantum in Pictures', aims to make the quantum world more accessible and inclusive. So, whether you're a high school student or a science enthusiast, the authors are confident that anyone mastering the tools in the book will gain an understanding equivalent to that of a quantum mechanics graduate at university. But what if a complete novice in quantum computing, i.e., this reviewer, could gain a genuine understanding of the field by simply reading this book? Let's test this out, shall we? Full disclosure from the get-go, I have absolutely no prior knowledge or expertise in quantum computing, therefore Coecke and Gogioso's latest research and book is not only worthy of a review but also a lesson for someone who barely scraped a C in GSCE Maths – a learning curve, if you will. For context, 'Quantum in Pictures' is the brainchild of Quantinuum's chief scientist Professor Bob Coecke and Dr Stefano Gogioso of Oxford University. The book introduces a formalism for quantum mechanics based on using'ZX-calculus' (or'ZX'), to describe quantum processes.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here. Aidan Gomez, cofounder and CEO of Cohere AI, admits that the company, which offers developers and businesses access to natural language processing (NLP) powered by large language models (LLMs), is "crazy under the radar." Given the quality of the company's foundation models, which many say are competitive with the best from Google, OpenAI and others, that shouldn't be the case, he told VentureBeat. But Cohere, he emphasizes, has been "squarely focused on the enterprise and how we can add value there." In any case, the Toronto-based Cohere, founded in 2019 by Gomez, Ivan Zhang and Nick Frosst, may not remain unnoticed for long.

Google and Microsoft are going head to head over the future of search by embracing the technology behind artificial intelligence chatbots. Google announced on Monday that it is testing Bard, a rival to the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, which has swiftly become a sensation, and will roll it out to the public in the coming weeks. And on Tuesday, Microsoft announced it is increasing its focus on artificial intelligence, boosting funding for new tools and integrating the technology underpinning ChatGPT into products including its Bing search engine and Edge browser, with the goal of making search more conversational. ChatGPT, developed by San Francisco company OpenAI, has reached 100 million users since its public launch in November, becoming by some estimates the fasting growing consumer app of all time. Here are some questions about Google and Microsoft's AI plans and their likely impact.

OpenAI is ready to start capitalizing on ChatGPT's buzz. On Wednesday, the firm announced it will offer a pilot $20-a-month subscription version of the chatbot called ChatGPT Plus, which gives priority access to users during peak time and faster responses. The free version remains available but is so popular that it is often at capacity or slow to give responses. In a clear push for commercialization, OpenAI also said it will roll out an API waitlist, different paid tiers, and business plans. OpenAI, it seems, believes enterprises will be willing to pay for its chatbot's capabilities.

It's sensible not to take everything ChatGPT told you at face value, not least because the software admitted itself that you shouldn't take everything it says as gospel. Oxford University's Mike Wooldridge, who spoke to us when this story was breaking, is with us now to provide the human touch, and hopefully help us understand how all this is possible… Mike - What's happened is that people have realised that scale matters in artificial intelligence. And what scale means for these systems is three things. Firstly, it means how big are your neural networks? Literally the larger your neural networks are, the more elements that they have. The amount of training data that you use to train your system - modern artificial intelligence absolutely relies on training data so that matters.