On Tuesday, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) announced that it will be laying off 10,000 employees as part of its "Year of Efficiency" plan. The move is aimed at cutting back on spending due to falling digital advertising revenue and rising interest rates. However, buried in CEO Mark Zuckerberg's statement about the layoffs was a clear message to both Silicon Valley and Wall Street: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now as important to the company as the metaverse. Meta's push for AI is motivated by its desire to improve its financial standing and regain Wall Street's trust. By building out its AI capabilities, the company hopes to earn the capital it needs to advance its metaverse ambitions over the coming years.

Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk once played the Mr. Money Bags role to Silicon Valley's newest darling OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT and DALLE-2. The nonprofit has become the center of the tech world's new obsession with AI, but a new report claims that back in 2018 Musk proposed he take over the nonprofit research lab entirely. Musk was a well-known financier for the fledgling startup that came on the scene back in 2015. He and other big tech powerhouses like Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel all put money totalling more than $1 billion into the venture. Musk once sat as co-chair of the group and was there when the nonprofit wanted to train its systems on Reddit posts.

Last week, Ben Shapiro--editor emeritus of the conservative media organization the Daily Wire, prolific right-wing firebrand, and someone who seems to wear a blazer and button-up every day of his life--played a round of Minecraft on his YouTube channel. Often, the sandbox game is about the quiet joys of pastoral life, where players construct homesteads, rear livestock, and grow crops in a world made up entirely of perfectly equilateral cubes. It's also the best-selling game ever, which is why Minecraft videos tend to pop up on the channels of blue-haired Twitch celebrities, not a 39-year old political commentator who initially entered the upper tier of pundit-influencers as an anti-anti-Trump Republican who toured America's college campuses in order to argue with 19-year-olds about Marxism. Yet here he was, in 2023, doing his best to defeat the Ender Dragon for all five and a half million of his subscribers. "I'm still hitting the wrong buttons here, I'm not used to the controls," Shapiro said as he limply gestured his pickaxe toward a stone laden with glowing rubies.

It was 7 a.m. when Benjamin Perkin's parents got an alarming call. The person on the other end of the line identified themselves as a lawyer and said Perkin had killed a U.S. diplomat in a car accident, was in jail, and needed money for legal fees. The lawyer then put Perkin on the phone. "Hey Mom and Dad, I love you. I need this money," he said.

Defense attorney Mark Geragos on the latest from the Gwyneth Paltrow case over an alleged skiing hit-and-run. Gwyneth Paltrow is currently in Utah fighting a lawsuit that alleges she caused serious harm to a skier in Park City at Deer Valley resort several years ago. While many people are talking about the facts and legitimacy of the case, some viewers of the live-streamed proceedings can't help but comment on her fashion and her demeanor during the initial days of trial. Paltrow's multiple facial expressions during the first few days of the court case went viral, as the Goop founder found it difficult to remain stoic. One social media user dubbed the actress as "Gwyneth pout-trow."

The graph represents a network of 1,692 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained "iot machinelearning", or who were replied to, mentioned, retweeted or quoted in those tweets, taken from a data set limited to a maximum of 5,000 tweets, tweeted between 3/26/2006 12:00:00 AM and 3/14/2023 5:00:36 PM. The network was obtained from Twitter on Wednesday, 15 March 2023 at 12:17 UTC. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 2072-day, 12-hour, 58-minute period from Tuesday, 11 July 2017 at 11:00 UTC to Tuesday, 14 March 2023 at 23:59 UTC. There is an edge for each "replies-to" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "mentions" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "retweet" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "quote" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "mention in retweet" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "mention in reply-to" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "mention in quote" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "mention in quote reply-to" relationship in a tweet, and a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not from above. The graph's vertices were grouped by cluster using the Clauset-Newman-Moore cluster algorithm.

March 21 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google on Tuesday began the public release of its chatbot Bard, seeking users and feedback to gain ground on Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) in a fast-moving race on artificial intelligence technology. Starting in the U.S. and UK, consumers can join a waiting list for English-language access to Bard, a program previously open to approved testers only. Google describes Bard as an experiment allowing collaboration with generative AI, technology that relies on past data to create rather than identify content. The release last year of ChatGPT, a chatbot from the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI, has caused a sprint in the technology sector to put AI into more users' hands. The hope is to reshape how people work and win business in the process.

Jaron Lanier, the godfather of virtual reality and the sage of all things web, is nicknamed the Dismal Optimist. And there has never been a time we've needed his dismal optimism more. It's hard to read an article or listen to a podcast these days without doomsayers telling us we've pushed our luck with artificial intelligence, our hubris is coming back to haunt us and robots are taking over the world. There are stories of chatbots becoming best friends, declaring their love, trying to disrupt stable marriages, and threatening chaos on a global scale. Is AI really capable of outsmarting us and taking over the world? Well, your question makes no sense," Lanier says in his gentle sing-song voice. "You've just used the set of terms that to me are fictions.

As generative AI and its eerily human chatbots explode into the public realm -- including Google's Bard, released yesterday -- Silicon Valley looks ripe for another big era of disruption. Think about the era of personal computers, or online businesses, or social platforms, when an accessible, unpredictable new idea shakes up the establishment. But unlike earlier disruptions, the reality of the generative AI race is already looking a little … top-heavy. With AI, the big innovation isn't the kind of cheap, accessible technology that helps garage startups grow into world-changing new companies. The models that underpin the AI era can be extremely, extremely expensive to build.

Google Bard got off to a rocky start when the demo provided incorrect information about the James Webb Telescope. It's been over a month since that incident and Google just began rolling out access to Bard via a waitlist. ZDNET got access and here are my first impressions. Also: What is Google Bard? Here's everything you need to know ChatGPT has the ability to write code, hold conversations, pass benchmark exams, co-edit papers and so much more.