Russell Wald, director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, sounds off on'The Story.' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the age of the giant artificial intelligence model is already over. "I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models," he told an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over Zoom last week. "We'll make them better in other ways." During the same event, Altman also confirmed that his company is not developing Chat GPT-5. "An earlier version of the letter claimed OpenAI is training GPT-5 right now," he said, referencing a letter from billionaire Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Tech companies, retailers and real-estate firms working on ways to alleviate the strain of constant delivery on urban environments envision an alternate scenario: skies filled with zipping delivery drones and floating dirigible warehouses, streets and sidewalks teeming with as many robots as people, familiar storefronts serving as automated stockrooms for online fulfillment. A look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. The e-commerce process, from order to fulfillment, will gradually move toward total automation, says David Wilson, chief executive of machinery company Columbus McKinnon, which uses robotic components in warehouse lifting equipment. "The vehicle that pulls up is an autonomously driven vehicle. The unpacking is done with vision technology and robotic equipment. The movement of equipment to automated storage and retrieval systems is done via mobile robots," Mr. Wilson says, describing the warehouse of the future.

Augmented reality in spine surgery is taking off, and its growth could be exponential in the near future. With more and more places adopting the technology, many surgeons have a positive outlook for the technology. It's the first AR system driven by artificial intelligence, using machine-learning-based guidance and automated surgical planning. In December, Royal Philips expanded its ClarifyEye AR spine system in Spain and Oman. In February, Neo Medical raised $20.6 million in funding, which will support the product's U.S. launch.

In the fall of 2018, corporate finance advisory firm Hampleton published a report titled, "The healthtech sector is currently one of the most dynamic in technology M&A." As a summary of the report notes, "aging populations, increasing patient demands and the rise of lifestyle diseases, coupled with pressure on the costs for delivering care are forcing healthcare providers to innovate to improve the quality of their services and lower their prices." Those innovations are made possible by technologies that range from blockchain and artificial intelligence to big data analysis and advanced sensors. IoT connectivity plays a key role, too. And data is central, but not on its own.

A Waymo self-driving car pulls into a parking lot in Mountain View, Calif., on May 8, 2019. A Waymo self-driving car pulls into a parking lot in Mountain View, Calif., on May 8, 2019. It was a modern mystery. In a tiny neighborhood in San Francisco's Richmond District, self-driving Waymo cars have been converging at all hours of the day and night, mystifying neighbors, KPIX reported earlier this week. Most would drive to the dead-end on 15th Avenue, where they then had no choice but to turn around and leave, according to the outlet -- and neighbors have no idea why.

More than $3.5 billion in funding was funneled into 35 startups last month, much of that scattered across the globe. Several Chinese companies received significant funding as the country bulks up domestic production of wafers and GPUs. In addition, with attention increasing on the need for electric vehicles and renewable energy, big investments went into battery manufacturing startups. One company making EV batteries garnered $1.5 billion, while several other large rounds were targeted at grid-scale energy storage companies. Metax designs high-performance, reconfigurable GPUs based on its own instruction set for data center, gaming, and AI. Funds will be used for R&D, and the company recently launched a corporate research institute at Zhejiang University. Based in Shanghai, China, Metax was founded in 2020.

Walmart is applying artificial intelligence to the palletizing of products in its regional distribution centers. Since 2017, the discount giant has worked with Symbotic to optimize an automated technology solution to sort, store, retrieve and pack freight onto pallets in its Brooksville, Fla., distribution center. Under Walmart's existing system, product arrives at one of its RDCs and is either cross-docked or warehoused, while being moved or stored manually. When it's time for the product to go to a store, a 53-foot trailer is manually packed for transit. After the truck arrives at a store, associates unload it manually and place the items in the appropriate places.

Despite teething problems, artificial intelligence (AI) has become mainstream. In fact, it is more than mainstream. That is to say, no matter how enterprises set up their technology infrastructure, it seems unlikely they will remain competitive without AI. Based on a survey of 5,501 businesses globally, the report shows that one-third of companies are currently using AI in some way, while 43% are exploring it. While recent advances are making AI more accessible than ever, the survey found that a lack of AI skills and increasing data complexity are top challenges.

Self-driving trucking startup PlusAI Inc. raised $200 million in fresh capital from investors including several top-tier Silicon Valley venture-capital firms as well as a Chinese investment firm and automotive companies. The funding will help the Cupertino, Calif.-based startup as it begins mass production of its self-driving systems this year and aims to fill thousands of preorders from Chinese fleets in a joint effort with Chinese truck manufacturer FAW Jiefang, part of state-owned FAW Group, Plus Chief Executive and co-founder David Liu said. Plus will also use the capital to increase production for commercial shipments this year in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. The funding comes as investors have fueled competitors in the autonomous vehicle sector while a crop of smaller self-driving startups stumbled last year amid the pandemic. Financing for the capital intensive sector has increasingly consolidated behind a select few as timelines for mass commercial implementation of the technology have been pushed out in recent years.

Artificial intelligence has been a hot technology area in recent years and machine learning, a subset of AI, is one of the most important segments of the whole AI arena. Machine learning is the development of intelligent algorithms and statistical models that improve software through experience without the need to explicitly code those improvements. A predictive analysis application, for example, can become more accurate over time through the use of machine learning. But machine learning has its challenges. Developing machine-learning models and systems requires a confluence of data science, data engineering and development skills.