George Orwell once wrote that every generation "imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it". Today, the second part of that observation feels more astute than ever, as we face constant concerns about the ways modern technology is supposedly destroying the minds and cognitive abilities of children and young people. For decades, scientists have noted the occurrence of the Flynn effect, which essentially describes how, in terms of performance on various tests, each generation is more intelligent than the previous one.

Amazon is always flooded with deals on everything from noise-cancelling headphones to robot vacuums. You just might have to do a little digging to find the ones that are worth it. Fortunately, we've done the hard part for you. Here are a few of our top picks for the best Amazon deals of the day on April 16. Be sure to check out our selections from April 14 and April 15.

OpenAI is releasing not one but two new models. The company today announced the public availability of o3 and o4-mini. Of the former, OpenAI says o3 is its most advanced reasoning model yet, with it showing "strong performance" in coding, math and science tasks. As for o4-mini, OpenAI is billing it as a lower cost alternative that still delivers "impressive results" across those same fields. More notably, both models offer novel capabilities not found in OpenAI's past systems.

Following the recent launch of a new family of GPT-4.1 models, OpenAI released o3 and o4-mini on Wednesday, its latest addition to the existing line of reasoning models. The o3 model, previewed in December, is OpenAI's most advanced reasoning model to date, while o4-mini is a smaller, cheaper, and faster model. Simply put, reasoning models are trained to "think before they speak," which results in a longer time to process the prompt but higher-quality responses. However, they also have an important new addition: Visual understanding. Also: How to use ChatGPT: A beginner's guide to the most popular AI chatbot OpenAI o3 and o4-mini are OpenAI's first models to "think with images."

Google's use of AI to combat harmful ads has resulted in the suspension 39.2 million fraudulent accounts. On Wednesday, the tech giant published its 2024 Ads Safety Report, highlighting its use of advanced LLMs (Large Language Models) to detect and enforce advertiser fraud. Since 2023, Google has added "50 enhancements" to its LLMs that "need only a fraction of the information earlier models needed to quickly recognize emerging threats, identify patterns of abuse, and distinguish legitimate businesses from scams." Indicators of abuse that can be detected by Google's AI tool include business impersonation and illegal payment details. As a result, Google blocked or removed 5.1 billion ads last year.

OpenAI has rolled out a "library" feature to the ChatGPT website and app that brings all your AI-generated images together in one easy-to-access place. Now, you can view every image you've made right from the ChatGPT sidebar. This new library not only shows the images you've created but also lets you jump back into editing those images -- and it includes a clear button to generate new images, if you want. Here's how it all works and how to find the library, whether on mobile or desktop. OpenAI released a video to announce the new feature.

In the coming years, agents are widely expected to take over more and more chores on behalf of humans, including using computers and smartphones. For now, though, they're too error prone to be much use. A new agent called S2, created by the startup Simular AI, combines frontier models with models specialized for using computers. The agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on tasks like using apps and manipulating files--and suggests that turning to different models in different situations may help agents advance. "Computer-using agents are different from large language models and different from coding," says Ang Li, cofounder and CEO of Simular. In Simular's approach, a powerful general-purpose AI model, like OpenAI's GPT-4o or Anthropic's Claude 3.7, is used to reason about how best to complete the task at hand--while smaller open source models step in for tasks like interpreting web pages.

This is undoubtedly the case for scientific and statistical databases, which have largely replaced traditional reference works. Database and Web technologies have led to an explosion in the number of databases that support scientific research, for obvious reasons: Databases provide faster communication of knowledge, hold larger volumes of data, are more easily searched, and are both human- and machine-readable. Moreover, they can be developed rapidly and collaboratively by a mixture of researchers and curators. For example, more than 1,500 curated databases are relevant to molecular biology alone.10 The value of these databases lies not only in the data they present but also in how they organize that data.

Most AI providers try to enhance their products by training them with both public information and user data. However, the latter method puts a privacy-conscious company like Apple in a difficult position. How can it improve its Apple Intelligence technology without compromising the privacy of its users? It's a tough challenge, but the company believes it has found a solution. The goal is to improve the reliability and accuracy of their AIs by scraping data from real conversations.

Tech expert Kurt'CyberGuy' Knutsson joins'Fox & Friends' to discuss the future of AI development in the United States. Vice President JD Vance is poised to kick off a trip to Italy and India on Friday – marking his third international trip with the Trump administration. Vance and the second family are poised to meet with and "discuss shared economic and geopolitical priorities with leaders in each country," according to a statement from Vance's office. When in Rome, Vance is scheduled to meet with Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin. He will meet with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi while visiting New Delhi, Jaipur and Agra.