It used to be just a sci-fi nightmare scenario, but today, AI phishing is real, and it's costing companies millions. We've already touched upon this one, but the Hong Kong phishing scam that targeted an employee at Arup deserves a deeper dive. The employee was tricked by deepfake versions of her CFO and colleagues into transferring HK 200 million across 15 transactions. The case has been widely reported and confirmed by the Hong Kong police. Every face and voice was AI-generated.

Among the AI-related technologies to have emerged in the past several years is generative AI--deep-learning algorithms that allow computers to generate original content, such as text, images, video, audio, and code. And demand for such content will likely jump in the coming years--Gartner predicts that by 2025, generative AI will account for 10% of all data created, compared with 1% in 2022. "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" is an example of AI-generated content (AIGC), created with the Midjourney text-to-art generator program. Several other AI-driven art-generating programs have also emerged in 2022, capable of creating paintings from single-line text prompts. The diversity of technologies reflects a wide range of artistic styles and different user demands.

If the King of Sweden wants help drafting his annual Christmas speech this year, he could ask the same AI model that's available to his 10 million subjects. As a test, researchers prompted the model, called GPT-SW3, to draft one of the royal messages, and it did a pretty good job, according to Magnus Sahlgren, who heads research in natural language understanding at AI Sweden, a consortium kickstarting the country's journey into the machine learning era. "Later, our minister of digitalization visited us and asked the model to generate arguments for political positions and it came up with some really clever ones -- and he intuitively understood how to prompt the model to generate good text," Sahlgren said. Early successes inspired work on an even larger and more powerful version of the language model they hope will serve any citizen, company or government agency in Scandinavia. The current version packs 3.6 billion parameters and is smart enough to do a few cool things in Swedish.

The AI underlying assistants like Alexa gets better in part through manual data transcription and annotation, which takes outsized time and effort. In pursuit of a more scalable approach, scientists at Amazon -- noting that people tend to reformulate misinterpreted commands -- leveraged feedback from interactions to glean insights. In a paper detailing their work, they say that the automated self-learning system they deployed reduced errors across "millions" of Alexa customers. It's yet another step for Amazon along the way to a largely unsupervised and more human-like Alexa, as scientists and product managers from the company told VentureBeat in September. Such techniques have imbued Alexa with better contextual understanding of its surroundings with respect to smart home devices, as well as the ability to detect emotions like frustration in users' voices.