For the past five years, Big Tech has faced a flurry of new rules and reprimands from Brussels. Now with a new team taking over the European Commission, relations may be entering a new era. If the past five years of EU tech rules could take human form, they would embody Thierry Breton . The bombastic commissioner, with his swoop of white hair, became the public face of Brussels' irritation with American tech giants, touring Silicon Valley last summer to personally remind the industry of looming regulatory deadlines. Combative and outspoken, Breton warned that Apple had spent too long " squeezing " other companies out of the market.

The European Parliament has given final approval to wide-ranging rules to govern artificial intelligence. The far-reaching regulation – the Artificial Intelligence Act – was passed by lawmakers on Wednesday. Senior European Union officials said the rules, first proposed in 2021, will protect citizens from the possible risks of a technology developing at breakneck speed while also fostering innovation. Brussels has sprinted to pass the new law since Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, unleashing a global AI race. Just 46 lawmakers in the European Parliament in Strasbourg voted against the proposal.

TikTok is launching an in-app Election Center to mitigate the spread of online misinformation during the 2024 European Parliament elections. In a blog post published on Wednesday, Kevin Morgan, Head of Safety and Integrity for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, said the ByteDance-owned social media platform will host local language centers for each of the 27 E.U. countries to help viewers "separate fact from fiction." The tool is set to be available for TikTok's 134 million monthly European users to access in March, ahead of the bloc taking to the polls in early June. The centers will aim to inform European voters about the elections, and videos linked to the electoral process will be clearly signposted and guide users to the relevant center. TikTok also noted that it has a team of 6,000 people working to moderate E.U. languages content.

The world's first comprehensive laws to regulate artificial intelligence have been agreed in a landmark deal after a marathon 37-hour negotiation between the European Parliament and EU member states. The agreement was described as "historic" by Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner responsible for a suite of laws in Europe that will also govern social media and search engines, covering giants such as X, TikTok and Google. Breton said 100 people had been in a room for almost three days to seal the deal. He said it was "worth the few hours of sleep" to make the "historic" deal. Carme Artigas, Spain's secretary of state for AI, who facilitated the negotiations, said France and Germany supported the text, amid reports that tech companies in those countries were fighting for a lighter touch approach to foster innovation among small companies.

LLMs like GPT are great at tasks involving English which dominates in their training data. In this paper, we look at how they cope with tasks involving languages that are severely under-represented in their training data, in the context of data-to-text generation for Irish, Maltese, Welsh and Breton. During the prompt-engineering phase we tested a range of prompt types and formats on GPT-3.5 and~4 with a small sample of example input/output pairs. We then fully evaluated the two most promising prompts in two scenarios: (i) direct generation into the under-resourced language, and (ii) generation into English followed by translation into the under-resourced language. We find that few-shot prompting works better for direct generation into under-resourced languages, but that the difference disappears when pivoting via English. The few-shot + translation system variants were submitted to the WebNLG 2023 shared task where they outperformed competitor systems by substantial margins in all languages on all metrics. We conclude that good performance on under-resourced languages can be achieved out-of-the box with state-of-the-art LLMs. However, our best results (for Welsh) remain well below the lowest ranked English system at WebNLG'20.

Europe's focus on business practices of American tech titans is evident in the agenda for Breton's trip. The morning after the stress test, he will host a launch event for the European Union's San Francisco office, a physical foothold for regulators in the tech industry's backyard. He'll also meet with a host of tech executives shaping the future of AI, including Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, chip maker Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. During those meetings, he plans to discuss a new "AI Pact," a voluntary pledge to ensure the responsible development of AI until the AI Act takes effect. Google chief executive Sundar Pichai agreed to take the pledge recently, Breton said.

The world's governments have taken note of generative AI's potential for massive disruption and are acting accordingly. European Commission (EC) industry chief Thierry Breton said Wednesday that it would work with Alphabet on a voluntary pact to establish artificial intelligence ground rules, according to Reuters. Breton met with Google CEO Sundar Pichai in Brussels to discuss the arrangement, which will include input from companies based in Europe and other regions. The EU has a history of enacting strict technology rules, and the alliance gives Google a chance to provide input while steering clear of trouble down the road. The compact aims to set up guidelines ahead of official legislation like the EU's proposed AI Act, which will take much longer to develop and enact.

Will artificial intelligence (AI) soon replace journalists? Many have been asking this question since the boom of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, which can write a high school essay, a poem, or even pass a medical licensing exam in a matter of seconds. Now, AI tools are seeping into newsrooms. CNET, an American tech news outlet, has acknowledged using AI to write financial articles, seemingly as early as November 2022. When looking more closely at the articles on CNET, a disclaimer reads: "This article was assisted by an AI engine and reviewed, fact-checked and edited by our editorial staff".

Next time you're on your favorite news site, you might want to double check the byline to see if it was written by an actual human. CNET, a massively popular tech news outlet, has been quietly employing the help of "automation technology" -- a stylistic euphemism for AI -- on a new wave of financial explainer articles, seemingly starting around November of last year. In the absence of any formal announcement or coverage, it appears that this was first spotted by online marketer Gael Breton in a tweet on Wednesday. The articles are published under the unassuming appellation of "CNET Money Staff," and encompass topics like "Should You Break an Early CD for a Better Rate?" or "What is Zelle and How Does It Work?" That byline obviously does not paint the full picture, and so your average reader visiting the site likely would have no idea that what they're reading is AI-generated.

"Tales of Tribute" will be a resource-management game in the same vein as the popular board game "Catan" where two players compete to accomplish a goal. Lambert told The Post he's been vying to get a tavern game into "The Elder Scrolls Online" since the MMO was first in development. At the start of the card game, both players will draw from a shared deck, which means you won't find yourself at a disadvantage if someone else has collected every rare card there is to find in Tamriel.