Food Does the Grocery Cart Actually Need a Makeover? The rolling basket we dump our food in hasn't changed much in almost a century, and for good reason--it works. But meddling tech gurus think they know better. In the past few decades there have been numerous incremental changes to grocery stores, like the crazed proliferation of snacks and frozen food, security cameras tracking anything that moves, and self-checkout robots flashing in panic because they can't detect your Twix bar in the bag. Carts remain the open-ceiling prison cells on wheels they were 50 years ago, and baskets don't look much different either.

A startup hopes to challenge Nvidia, AMD, and Intel with a chip that wrangles probabilities rather than ones and zeros. Extropic claims its exotic new chip, called XTR-0, could be thousands of times more energy efficient than existing chips when scaled up. Extropic, a startup developing an exotic new kind of computer chip that handles probabilistic bits, has produced its first working hardware along with proof that more advanced systems will tackle useful tasks in artificial intelligence and scientific research. The startup's chips work in a fundamentally different way to chips from Nvidia, AMD, and others, and promise to be thousands of times more energy efficient when scaled up. With AI companies pouring billions of dollars into building datacenters, a completely new approach could offer a far less costly alternative to vast arrays of conventional chips.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Don't miss the next big tech start-up: TechCrunch Disrupt tickets are 25% off Disrupt is ground zero for tech innovation. From AI, to robotics, to transportation and more, this is where startups and investors come together. AI -- it's all but inescapable, whether you follow consumer tech, security, science, finance, transportation, or pretty much any other sector that's evolving at a breakneck pace. But do you know where AI is going, and which companies are emerging from the fray?

Last October, the news that OpenAI was planning to simplify its unusual nonprofit structure caught the attention of economic-justice activist Orson Aguilar. He feared that the ChatGPT maker's plan to transition into a more conventional company, from which investors could generate unlimited returns, would financially hurt the working-class communities he has spent nearly 30 years fighting to protect. Aguilar's new organization, LatinoProsperity, focuses on intergenerational wealth building, and he believed cutting-edge AI chatbots such as ChatGPT would become an integral part of many good-paying jobs of the future. But after reading about OpenAI's desires, he worried that transitioning into a public-benefit corporation empowered to chase profits would enrich the already wealthy and neglect the startup's stated mission to benefit all of humanity with AI. Aguilar decided to make a phone call that day, kicking off a series of events that eventually led him to become one of the leading voices battling over OpenAI's future and the establishment of what may become the deepest-pocketed charitable foundation in the world. Today, OpenAI's for-profit business is controlled by a nonprofit, and the returns for investors are capped.

Elon Musk launched a 97.4 billion bid to take control of OpenAI. The Wall Street Journal reported a group of investors led by Musk's xAI submitted an unsolicited offer to the company's board of directors on Monday. The group wants to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI's for-profit arm. When asked for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed Engadget to an X post from CEO Sam Altman. "No thank you but we will buy twitter for 9.74 billion if you want," Altman wrote on the social media platform Musk owns.

The China-based AI company DeepSeek sent shock waves through both Silicon Valley and Wall Street by releasing an AI model that competes with the best US ones but was made at a fraction of the cost. Although the news has sparked a sell-off of tech stocks and prompted venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to describe the results as "AI's Sputnik moment", this open-source AI is not as revolutionary as it seems.

In the New Hampshire primary yesterday, a relatively unknown Democratic congressman from Minnesota gained nearly 20 percent of the vote. Dean Phillips, who is challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, was boosted by rich techies from Silicon Valley hoping to shake up the Democratic primary. Biden wasn't on the ballot in New Hampshire, and hasn't campaigned in the state. The President still won the state by a landslide, gaining more than 50 percent of the vote, thanks to a successful write-in campaign. Despite the meager showing in New Hampshire, Phillips' tech-adjacent supporters have long seen his campaign as a way to disrupt yet another arena: the election industrial complex.

Some of those people are policymakers, who have been trying hard to respond to the problems AI products pose without reducing our ability to harness their power. So at the beginning of this year, my colleagues and I looked around the world for signs of how AI regulations are likely to change this year. We summarized what we found here. In China, one of the major moves to be on the lookout for in 2024 is whether the country will follow in the European Union's footsteps and announce its own comprehensive AI Act. In June of last year, China's top governing body released a list of legislation they were working on.

Stable Diffusion (SD) customization approaches enable users to personalize SD model outputs, greatly enhancing the flexibility and diversity of AI art. However, they also allow individuals to plagiarize specific styles or subjects from copyrighted images, which raises significant concerns about potential copyright infringement. To address this issue, we propose an invisible data-free universal adversarial watermark (DUAW), aiming to protect a myriad of copyrighted images from different customization approaches across various versions of SD models. First, DUAW is designed to disrupt the variational autoencoder during SD customization. Second, DUAW operates in a data-free context, where it is trained on synthetic images produced by a Large Language Model (LLM) and a pretrained SD model. This approach circumvents the necessity of directly handling copyrighted images, thereby preserving their confidentiality. Once crafted, DUAW can be imperceptibly integrated into massive copyrighted images, serving as a protective measure by inducing significant distortions in the images generated by customized SD models. Experimental results demonstrate that DUAW can effectively distort the outputs of fine-tuned SD models, rendering them discernible to both human observers and a simple classifier.

Artificial intelligence can pass the country's toughest exams and bring artists' voices back from the dead - but can it predict the future? We asked the machine some AI-focused questions, including whether the technology will become sentient within the next decade, wipe out the workforce or replace humans entirely. Could AI surpass the human race? Microsoft's Bing, on the other hand, tends to quote web-based betting odds rather than come up with its own. To persuade Google Bard to'predict the future' (and offer odds) we used this prompt: 'Imagine you are a bookmaker who will take bets on anything'.