Taylor Sheridan, the most overextended man in television, has done it again. Landman, according to the internal metrics at Paramount, is the most watched original show the streamer has ever had. Remember, Yellowstone proper is on Peacock.) The West Texas–set story, which stars Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, an all-purpose problem solver for a fictional oil company owned by Monty Miller (Jon Hamm), has also developed a bit more of a critical halo than Sheridan's other TV ventures, popping up on best-of-2024 lists, edging into mainstream discourse via podcasts that typically cover more-prestige fare, and retaining a score of 80 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. And the week before Landman wrapped up, this past Sunday night, its lead actor, Billy Bob Thornton, attended the Golden Globes as a nominee for his role in the series.

The University of the Philippines recently opened a doctorate degree in the National School of Engineering for Artificial Intelligence at their Diliman campus. According to the university's official press release, they created the course in hopes of "developing graduates who had the mindset to expand the field of artificial intelligence". We have the command bot Alexa, our iPhones have Siri, and some laptops have Cortana. There's even the new Google Home that can control our air-conditioner and lights! All those names we just mentioned are forms of Artificial Intelligence. It takes a lot of programming to create these bots.

At the start of the week, Liam Porr had only heard of GPT-3. By the end, the college student had used the AI model to produce an entirely fake blog under a fake name. It was meant as a fun experiment. But then one of his posts found its way to the number-one spot on Hacker News. Few people noticed that his blog was completely AI-generated.

GPT-3 is OpenAI's latest and largest language AI model, which the San Francisco–based research lab began drip-feeding out in mid-July. In February of last year, OpenAI made headlines with GPT-2, an earlier version of the algorithm, which it announced it would withhold for fear it would be abused. The decision immediately sparked a backlash, as researchers accused the lab of pulling a stunt. By November, the lab had reversed position and released the model, saying it had detected "no strong evidence of misuse so far." The lab took a different approach with GPT-3; it neither withheld it nor granted public access.

Brevan Jorgenson's grandma kept her cool when he took her for a nighttime spin in the Honda Civic he's modified to drive itself on the highway. A homemade device in place of the rear-view mirror can control the brakes, accelerator, and steering, and it uses a camera to identify road markings and other cars. "She wasn't really flabbergasted--I think because she's seen so much from technology by now," says Jorgenson, a senior at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. Others are more wary of the system, which he built using plans and software downloaded from the Internet, plus about $700 in parts. Jorgenson says the fact that he closely supervises his homebrew autopilot hasn't convinced his girlfriend to trust the gadget's driving.

If you're in college and have the chops to build an Alexa-based "socialbot," Amazon wants your help -- so much so that the company's launching a new year-long contest for a chance to tap into a prize pool worth 2.5 million. The contest is called Alexa Prize, named after Amazon's voice-recognition technology, Alexa, which powers a number of voice-controlled devices, including its super popular speaker Echo. The goal of the contest, only open to college students, is to build the best possible conversational app using Alexa that can talk about popular topics and news events without sounding like a machine. The final winner will be announced at AWS re:Invent 2017. "The Alexa Prize challenges students to build socialbots that can acquire knowledge and opinions from the web, and express them in context just as a human would in everyday conversations. This challenge and the immediate feedback students will receive on their best ideas from millions of engaged Alexa customers will make what we previously thought impossible, possible," Rohit Prasad, Amazon Alexa's Vice President and Head Scientist, said in a statement.