For years, Google executives have argued that AI chatbots and features won't cut significantly into its search business, but investors have worried about AI's impact. Alphabet's shares fell more than 13%, erasing more than $500 billion in its biggest-ever market plunge, after the company reported disappointing search and advertising sales that reinforced investor concerns about AI's threat to its core business. The Google parent reported sales, excluding partner payouts, of $111.2 billion for the third quarter, falling short of analysts' projections. Ad sales from search and other channels -- a business line that accounts for roughly half of overall revenue and is critical to financing the massive AI investments -- also missed forecasts, growing at the slowest pace in five quarters. The results and share reaction "show us the margin for error when a hyperscaler spending hundreds of billions on the AI infrastructure buildout" posts disappointing results in its core business, JPMorgan analysts including Doug Anmuth said in a note.

ECB's Lagarde steps down, saying she can't remain neutral on world events European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde speaks during a debate at European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, in February 2023. FRANKFURT - European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said on Thursday she would step down early from her position in order to have the freedom to speak out on matters of importance beyond monetary policy. She will depart on Feb. 7, giving current European Union leaders time to pick her successor before a French presidential election that polls show far-right candidate Marine Le Pen is favored to win. Her term was due to expire in October 2027. Lagarde's decision ends months of speculation about her future just as Europe enters a period of rising economic volatility and divisive electoral politics, particularly in her native France.

Cranes remove wrecked carriages of a train crash between a Renfe AVE train and an Iryo train, one day after the deadly accident in Urda, in the province of Toledo, on Thursday. TOLEDO, SPAIN - Spain began demanding answers on Thursday after its second high-speed train collision this year killed 69 people and injured scores, with distraught relatives desperately seeking news about their loved ones. One of Europe's deadliest rail disasters this century struck south of Madrid on Wednesday morning when a service by state operator Renfe ploughed into the back of a stationary train belonging to private Spanish company Iryo. Manuel San Emeterio, whose 54-year-old brother Pepe is missing, came to the central city of Toledo to provide DNA samples to the Civil Guard. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Games and puzzles play important pedagogical roles in STEM learning. New AI algorithms that can solve complex problems offer opportunities for scaffolded instruction in puzzle solving. This paper presents the ALLURE system, which uses an AI algorithm (Deep CubeA) to guide students in solving a common first step of the Rubik's Cube (i.e., the white cross). Using data from a pilot study we present preliminary findings about students' behaviors in the system, how these behaviors are associated with STEM skills - including spatial reasoning, critical thinking and algorithmic thinking. We discuss how data from ALLURE can be used in future educational data mining to understand how students benefit from AI assistance and collaboration when solving complex problems.

Black Mirror is more than science fiction – its stories about modernity have become akin to science folklore, shaping our collective view of technology and the future. Each new innovation gets an allegory: smartphones as tools for a new age caste system, robot dogs as overzealous human hunters, drones as a murderous swarm, artificial intelligence as new age necromancy, virtual reality and brain chips as seizure-inducing nightmares, to name a few. It is a must-watch, but must we take it so seriously? Black Mirror fails to consistently explore the duality of technology and our reactions to it. It is a critical deficit.

Will it be easier to retreat to a replicant of a deceased partner than to navigate the confusing and painful realities of human relationships? Indeed, the AI companionship provider Replika was born from an attempt to resurrect a deceased best friend and now provides companions to millions of users. Even the CTO of OpenAI warns that AI has the potential to be "extremely addictive." We're seeing a giant, real-world experiment unfold, uncertain what impact these AI companions will have either on us individually or on society as a whole. Will Grandma spend her final neglected days chatting with her grandson's digital double, while her real grandson is mentored by an edgy simulated elder?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform education with its power of uncovering insights from massive data about student learning patterns. However, ethical and trustworthy concerns of AI have been raised but are unsolved. Prominent ethical issues in high school AI education include data privacy, information leakage, abusive language, and fairness. This paper describes technological components that were built to address ethical and trustworthy concerns in a multi-modal collaborative platform (called ALLURE chatbot) for high school students to collaborate with AI to solve the Rubik's cube. In data privacy, we want to ensure that the informed consent of children, parents, and teachers, is at the center of any data that is managed. Since children are involved, language, whether textual, audio, or visual, is acceptable both from users and AI and the system can steer interaction away from dangerous situations. In information management, we also want to ensure that the system, while learning to improve over time, does not leak information about users from one group to another.

From grading papers to summarizing medical documents, large language models (LLMs) are evermore used for evaluation of text generated by humans and AI alike. However, despite their extensive utility, LLMs exhibit distinct failure modes, necessitating a thorough audit and improvement of their text evaluation capabilities. Here we introduce ALLURE, a systematic approach to Auditing Large Language Models Understanding and Reasoning Errors. ALLURE involves comparing LLM-generated evaluations with annotated data, and iteratively incorporating instances of significant deviation into the evaluator, which leverages in-context learning (ICL) to enhance and improve robust evaluation of text by LLMs. Through this iterative process, we refine the performance of the evaluator LLM, ultimately reducing reliance on human annotators in the evaluation process. We anticipate ALLURE to serve diverse applications of LLMs in various domains related to evaluation of textual data, such as medical summarization, education, and and productivity.

One of the more famous scenes in recent video-game history can be found at the beginning of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, from 2017. The player's avatar, Link, starts on a plateau high above the land of Hyrule. It's a test zone in which to familiarize oneself with the mechanics of the game. But a paraglider tool, obtained at the end of the introduction, makes it possible to leave the plateau behind and enter the rest of the environment. After exiting a cavern, Link stands at the lip of a cliff, and the camera pans out to survey the vast landscape, a patchwork of forests, rolling hills, seas of fog, and darkened mountains. Like Simba in "The Lion King," the player gets the sense that everything the light touches is her kingdom, a sprawling natural world explorable from end to end.

Most of the attendees at the Consumer Electronics Show, in January, were on the hunt for self-driving cars and improved smartphone cameras, but I arrived at the Las Vegas expo looking for high-tech innovations in beauty. I walked past the AI chemistry teachers and the robot puppy, and headed straight to the at-home lipstick maker and plaque-detecting toothbrush. Over the course of three days, I discovered that our makeup and skin-care routines will be just as high-tech as our living rooms--and change is coming faster than you'd think. Brushing your teeth is possibly the least sexy part of your daily routine, which is probably why the average person only spends about 45 seconds doing it. But new electric brushes are making this mundane experience more fun, more efficient, and more worthy of 120 seconds. This story originally appeared on Allure.