Microsoft and OpenAI are planning to announce Tuesday that they are helping to launch an AI training center for members of the second-largest teachers' union in the US, according to details about the initiative that appear to have been inadvertently published early on YouTube. The National Academy for AI Instruction will be based in New York City and aims to equip kindergarten up to 12th grade instructors in the American Federation of Teachers with "the tools and confidence to bring AI into the classroom in a way that supports learning and opportunity for all students," according to the description of a publicly accessible YouTube livestream scheduled for Tuesday morning. The YouTube page also lists Anthropic, which develops the Claude chatbot, as a collaborator on what's described as a 22.5 million initiative to bring free "AI training and curriculum" to teachers. The three AI companies and the union did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the information released on YouTube. On Monday, Microsoft and the union declined to share details ahead of an announcement planned for Tuesday morning in New York.

As Meta's first-ever generative AI conference gets underway, the company is also previewing a significant update on its plans to bring AI features to WhatsApp chats. Buried in its LlamaCon updates, the company shared that it's working on something called "Private Processing," which will allow users to take advantage of generative AI capabilities within WhatsApp without eroding its privacy features. According to Meta, Private Processing is an "optional capability" that will enable people to "leverage AI capabilities for things like summarizing unread messages or refining them, while keeping messages private." WhatsApp, of course, is known for its strong privacy protections and end-to-end encryption. That would seem incompatible with cloud-based AI features like Meta AI.

Turnabout is fair play: At CES 2024, AMD launched desktop versions of its mobile Ryzen 8000 processors, bringing AI to the desktop alongside integrated graphics. And for AMD fans who aren't quite ready to make the leap to AMD's AM5 socket, whoa! There are new Ryzen 5000 desktop chips as well. AMD's launch adds four new Ryzen 8000 G-series processors to AMD's lineup. These are APUs, AMD's desktop chips that combine integrated graphics alongside the CPU die -- in this case, the RDNA 3- based Radeon 780M, Radeon 760M, and Radeon 740M that we saw integrated in the AMD Ryzen 8040 (8000) series chips AMD announced this December. All of the new Ryzen 8000 and 5000 chips will be available on Jan. 31.

Windows Copilot will usher an AI assistant into Windows 11, eight years after Microsoft launched its Cortana assistant alongside Windows 10--then killed it. Windows Copilot will debut in June, Microsoft will announce this week at its Build developer conference, as a preview for Windows 11. That will most likely set up Windows Copilot for a potential feature release in the fall, though Microsoft hasn't said when it will release the new feature. It's no surprise that AI has emerged as a top priority at Microsoft. However, Microsoft has introduced AI to its users first as a web service with Bing Chat, integrating AI within the Edge Copilot, then adapting it via the Microsoft 365 Copilot to Office apps like Word, Excel, and Teams, and later to Edge.

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has generated both excitement and concern among individuals, companies, and societies at large. While some predict that AI will revolutionize the way we live and work, others worry about the impact it could have on employment and society as a whole. The public launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November has only served to amplify these concerns, leading to a growing conversation about the implications of AI development. In a recent interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged that the pace of technological development has outstripped our ability to adapt as societal institutions. Despite this mismatch, Pichai remains optimistic about the future of AI, citing the number of people who have expressed concern about its implications as evidence that the conversation is starting in a serious way.

DoNotPay says it is pivoting away from plans to bring AI to a courtroom. DoNotPay, which bills itself as "the world's first robot lawyer," said last month that it planned to take on two speeding ticket cases in court in February, with its AI instructing the defendants how to respond to their assigned judges. The startup said it would cover any fines and the defendants will be compensated for taking part in the experiment. But CEO and founder Joshua Browder announced late last month that it would be "postponing" those plans, citing "threats from State Bar prosecutors." "Ultimately, it seemed like a distraction from using chatGPT technology to help with consumer rights issues," Browder said in an emailed statement. "We have decided to focus on consumer rights products, where we are very successful.

With inflation sparking an increase in the cost of repairs, labor and claims, fees for insurance are similarly spiking across the board. Car insurance premiums rose 13.7% nationally over the past year, according to a study from Bankrate.com. Home insurance, meanwhile, climbed 12.1% year-on-year, Policygenius found. But Jonathan Matus argues that it doesn't have to be that way. He's the founder of Fairmatic, a company that's applying AI to -- at least according to him -- reduce risk in the car insurance industry.

Writer, the only full-stack generative AI platform built for business, today launches three new proprietary large language models (LLMs) designed for enterprise-ready generative AI. Palmyra Small (128M), Palmyra Base (5B), and Palmyra Large (20B) are the only in-production LLMs that were trained on a set of data specifically curated to power AI use cases for the enterprise. Palmyra Small and Base LLMs are accessible via free download on Hugging Face. Writer's enterprise customers have their generations all powered by Palmyra Large through the Writer platform, and Writer enterprise customers are also now able to integrate generative AI capabilities directly into their products and to scale and improve their experience with Writer via Writer's new API to Palmyra Large. "Writer was built from the ground up to take AI into the enterprise. It all starts with our proprietary model, where customers own their inputs, training data, and outputs," said May Habib, CEO of Writer.

Google is shutting down Duplex on the Web, its AI-powered set of services that navigated sites to simplify the process of ordering food, purchasing movie tickets and more. According to a note on a Google support page, Google on the Web and any automation features enabled by it will no longer be supported as of this month. "As we continue to improve the Duplex experience, we're responding to the feedback we've heard from users and developers about how to make it even better," a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch via email, adding that Duplex on the Web partners have been notified to help them prepare for the shutdown. "By the end of this year, we'll turn down Duplex on the Web and fully focus on making AI advancements to the Duplex voice technology that helps people most every day." Google introduced Duplex on the Web, an outgrowth of its call-automating Duplex technology, during its 2019 Google I/O developer conference. To start, it was focused on a couple of narrow use cases, including opening a movie theater chain's website to fill out all of the necessary information on a user's behalf -- pausing to prompt for choices like seats.

Academic researchers are developing projects to apply artificial intelligence to detect and stop cyberattacks and keep critical infrastructure secure, thanks to grants from the C3.ai