Mark Zuckerberg's keynote presentation at the Meta Connect event this week started late. The delay was on-brand for the company's decade-long project to make virtual reality mainstream. Back in 2014, a demo of the then-primitive Oculus VR headset hit Zuckerberg like a lightning bolt, and within weeks he owned the company. He started talking about how a digital version of reality was going to be the next computing paradigm in about, oh, five or 10 years. For a time there was a lot of excitement about an impending Metaverse, but the buzz is now barely audible.

Meta is to launch artificial intelligence chatbots embodied by celebrities including Snoop Dogg, Kendall Jenner and Naomi Osaka. Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement at the company's annual Connect conference, where he spoke about new AI products at Facebook's parent company. The chatbots will feature unique interests and allow users to receive personalised advice, with the intention that they will be more interactive and fun to use. Meta will launch more than 28 of these AIs in beta, with some played by celebrities. Snoop Dogg will be "Dungeon Master", who will assist users to play adventure games, the former basketball player Dwyane Wade will be an AI called "Victor" designed to help users work out, Osaka will be anime-obsessed "Tamika", and Jenner will be "Billie", a "big sis" referred to as a "ride-or-die companion".

TikTok recently announced that its users in the European Union will soon be able to switch off its infamously engaging content-selection algorithm. The EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) is driving this change as part of the region's broader effort to regulate AI and digital services in accordance with human rights and values. TikTok's algorithm learns from users' interactions--how long they watch, what they like, when they share a video--to create a highly tailored and immersive experience that can shape their mental states, preferences, and behaviors without their full awareness or consent. An opt-out feature is a great step toward protecting cognitive liberty, the fundamental right to self-determination over our brains and mental experiences. Rather than being confined to algorithmically curated For You pages and live feeds, users will be able to see trending videos in their region and language, or a "Following and Friends" feed that lists the creators they follow in chronological order.

Asset Entities is a publicly listed set of social media accounts and Discord servers that churn out get-rich-quick tips for Gen Z. It reported a net loss of $413,000 last year. But give Texas-based vice president Kyle Fairbanks just 21 49 seconds and he'll tell you how to (maybe) make $20,000 a month arbitraging AirBnbs up and down the East Coast. He has an extensive corpus. For a few wondrous hours on Monday it was the Nasdaq's best-performing stock.

"Ducking" had become such a recognizable error caused by the iPhone's autocorrect function that The Wall Street Journal conducted an interview with the feature's creator, Ken Kocienda, at a duck farm. That system drew upon both a "static dictionary" of common words and proper nouns as well as a "dynamic dictionary" of words that each user typed often, Mr. Kocienda said. But it also did not correct close misspellings of curse words, he said, with the goal of preventing users from accidentally inserting vulgarity into their messages. The update will allow iMessage corrections to better consider a word's context in a sentence, said Yulan He, a professor of natural language processing at King's College London whose given name is usually changed by iMessage to "Tulane." Previously, autocorrect matched the spelling of each word, in isolation, against the words in its dictionaries. "Now, when they replace a word, they would ensure the replaced word will still maintain the original meaning of the sentence," Professor He said.

Snapchat is releasing its GPT-powered AI chatbot to every user for free, the company announced at its annual developer conference, as it tries to chart a distinctive path between the titans of Instagram and TikTok. That means expanding access to its AI chatbot, doubling down on the distinction between public and private posts, and paying successful creators a share of the revenue their viral content generates. First released for paying members of the social network's Snapchat subscription service, "My AI" shows up as another chat contact in the social network's app. Similar to ChatGPT, users can ask it factual questions, request creative content, and have back-and-forth conversations with the service. "It really deepens our ability to serve our mission of helping people express themselves, learn about the world, live in the moment and have fun together," said Snap's vice president of product, Jack Brody. Users will also be able to add My AI to group chats, turning to the virtual assistant for any queries that come up in the course of conversation.

With the public release of ChatGPT and Microsoft's $10-billion investment into OpenAI, artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly gaining mainstream acceptance. For enterprise networking professionals, this means there is a very real possibility that AI traffic will affect their networks in major ways, both positive and negative. As AI becomes a core feature in mission-critical software, how should network teams and networking professionals adjust to stay ahead of the trend? Andrew Coward, GM of Software Defined Networking at IBM, argues that the enterprise has already lost control of its networks. The shift to the cloud has left the traditional enterprise network stranded, and AI and automation are required if enterprises hope to regain control.

Fictional humans have been falling in love with robots for decades, in novels like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), The Silver Metal Lover (1981) and films like Her (2013). These stories have allowed authors to explore themes like forbidden relationships, modern alienation and the nature of love. When those stories were written, machines were not quite advanced enough to spark emotional feelings from most users. But recently, a new spate of artificial intelligence (AI) programs have been released to the public that act like humans and reciprocate gestures of affection. And some humans have fallen for these bots--hard. Message boards on Reddit and Discord have become flooded with stories of users who have found themselves deeply emotionally dependent on digital lovers, much like Theodore Twombly in Her.

The Bing chatbot is powered by a kind of artificial intelligence called a neural network. That may sound like a computerized brain, but the term is misleading. A neural network is just a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing vast amounts of digital data. As a neural network examines thousands of cat photos, for instance, it can learn to recognize a cat. Most people use neural networks every day. It's the technology that identifies people, pets and other objects in images posted to internet services like Google Photos.

ChatGPT, an AI chatbot developed by OpenAI that went viral because it can give people direct answers to just about any query possible, apparently has alarm bells ringing at Google, according to a report by the New York Times Wednesday. A Google executive the Times spoke to but didn't name said AI chatbots like ChatGPT could upend the search giant's business, which relies heavily on ads and e-commerce found in Google Search. In a memo and audio recording obtained by the Times, the publication says CEO Sundar Pichai has been in meetings to "define Google's AI strategy" and has "upended the work of numerous groups inside the company to respond to the threat that ChatGPT poses." Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that uses available data found online to give users conversational answers to a host of questions.