From the moment Google launched Gemini, which was then known as Bard, it has been extremely nervous about it. Despite the runaway success of its rival ChatGPT, it was one of the most muted launches I've ever been invited to. Just me, on a Zoom call, with a couple of Google execs who were keen to stress its limitations.

It is surprisingly easy to remove the safety measures intended to prevent AI chatbots from giving harmful responses that could aid would-be terrorists or mass shooters. The discovery seems to be prompting companies including OpenAI to develop strategies to solve the problem – but research suggests their efforts have been met with only limited success so far.

Is ChatGPT down, at capacity or is it something else? Let's try some easy fixes! The official website address for free and plus members of ChatGPT AI is https://chat.openai.com If the site appears to be non-operational, you can easily determine if ChatGPT actually is "down".

For all the attention that AI audits have received, though, their ability to actually detect and protect against bias remains unproven. The term "AI audit" can mean many different things, which makes it hard to trust the results of audits in general. The most rigorous audits can still be limited in scope. And even with unfettered access to the innards of an algorithm, it can be surprisingly tough to say with certainty whether it treats applicants fairly. At best, audits give an incomplete picture, and at worst, they could help companies hide problematic or controversial practices behind an auditor's stamp of approval.

Artificial intelligence – more specifically, the machine learning (ML) subset of AI – has a number of privacy problems. Not only does ML require vast amounts of data for the training process, but the derived system is also provided with access to even greater volumes of data as part of the inference processing while in operation. These AI systems need to access and "consume" huge amounts of data in order to exist and, in many use cases, the data involved is private: faces, medical records, financial data, location information, biometrics, personal records, and communications. Preserving privacy and security in these systems is a great challenge. The problem grows in sensitivity as the public becomes more aware of the consequences of their privacy being violated and misused.

From the looks of it, 2017 will be a pretty amazing year for technology. Every day consumers are talking about virtual reality, self-driving cars and a limitless menu of on-demand services. The future really has arrived. But even as digital tech gets more streamlined and powerful, glitches keep popping up. Just when we think we have superhuman control of our lives, a device fails to work and we have no clue how to fix it.