I was dreading buying Christmas gifts this year. My family tends to buy things they need as they go, and my sister would kill me if I bought her another sweater. So when my editor suggested I use ChatGPT to plan my Christmas shopping for me and write about it, I jumped at the opportunity. And I figured it was a win-win. If its suggested gifts were good, I wouldn't need to worry about coming up with present ideas for another 12 months! If they were a disaster, it would be a good opportunity to showcase how rudimentary artificial intelligence is (I'm extremely skeptical about the predictions of AI enslaving us in the future).

Artificial intelligence can do a lot of things. But can AI predict what you're getting for Christmas? Classifying images is something AI does exceptionally well. A type of model known as a convolutional neural network performs exceptionally on image tasks. The field of computer vision is constantly advancing and improving.

Finland is offering a hi-tech Christmas gift to all European Union citizens - a free-of-charge online course in artificial intelligence, in their own language, officials said on Tuesday. The tech-savvy Nordic nation, led by the 34-year-old Prime Minister Sanna Marin, is marking the end of its rotating presidency of the EU at the end of the year with a highly ambitious goal. Instead of handing out the usual ties and scarves to EU officials and journalists, the Finnish government has opted to give practical understanding of AI to 1 percent of all EU citizens - about five million people - through a basic online course by the end of 2021. It is teaming up with the University of Helsinki, Finland's largest and oldest academic institution, and the Finland-based tech consultancy Reaktor. Teemu Roos, a University of Helsinki associate professor in the department of computer science, described the nearly $2m project as "a civics course in AI" to help EU citizens cope with society's ever-increasing digitisation and the possibilities AI offers in the jobs market.

The Amazon reviews of course don't count, at least 10 out of 11 are clearly written by neophytes. I heard the book is quite critical of current trends in AI research, which might be good if the critique is well-articulated. But I also heard the book criticizes the ImageNet dataset, which was fundamental for ML progress in Computer Vision and beyond, so I'm skeptical. I don't know much about the author's research: doesn't seem to have published much in conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc. so I'm not sure about her qualifications as an expert on the subfield of AI she decides to talk about. On the other hand, apparently both Anima Anandkumar and Thomas Dietterich had good words for the book, and they're definitely experts in the field.

If you want them to do something, you need to give them extremely specific instructions. Imagine learning to kick a football. You could probably learn this by seeing a few examples of how your friends do it. If you want a computer to do this, you would need to tell it exactly how to move every single muscle fiber. Instead of doing this, we just give the computer lots of examples, and tell it to figure it out itself.

CANAVERAL FLORIDA – Japan's unmanned cargo spaceship loaded with supplies docked at the International Space Station at an altitude of about 400 km early Wednesday, the country's space agency said. Japan time after astronauts at the ISS caught the cargo transporter with a robotic arm. An H-IIB rocket carrying the cargo spaceship blasted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture on Friday. After the launch, the Kounotori6 was controlled by the Tsukuba Space Center of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in Ibaraki Prefecture, JAXA said. The cargo spaceship was carrying 5.9 tons of supplies including food, drinking water and other daily necessities for astronauts aboard the ISS, seven ultrasmall satellites developed by some universities and firms, and Japanese-made lithium-ion batteries for use on the space station, according to JAXA.

What do you buy someone who has everything? Simple answer: something tested and tried on this list! If you're struggling to find the perfect gift to give your grandparents this Christmas season, we've got you covered with these 10 original ideas, perfect for grandma or grandpa. Let your grandparents show off their heritage with pride! You can also add some additional personal touches by picking the matte, frame, coloring letter and more.