After less than eight months, Amazon has discontinued the business version of its Astro security robot. GeekWire reported on Wednesday that despite being "fully committed" to its home robotics division, the company has discontinued the higher-end model that doubled as a security guard for spaces as large as 5,000 square feet. Amazon launched Astro for Business in November 2023, pitching it as a workplace security robot. The 2,350 screen-on-wheels had an HD periscope and a tangled web of subscription types and tiers, including Ring Protect Pro, Astro Security and Virtual Security Guard memberships. An Amazon spokesperson told GeekWire that it hasn't laid people off because of Astro for Business' demise, and the company plans to divert resources into its home robotics work.

A Microsoft manager claims OpenAI's DALL-E 3 has security vulnerabilities that could allow users to generate violent or explicit images (similar to those that recently targeted Taylor Swift). GeekWire reported Tuesday the company's legal team blocked Microsoft engineering leader Shane Jones' attempts to alert the public about the exploit. The self-described whistleblower is now taking his message to Capitol Hill. "I reached the conclusion that DALL·E 3 posed a public safety risk and should be removed from public use until OpenAI could address the risks associated with this model," Jones wrote to US Senators Patty Murray (D-WA) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA 9th District), and Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D). GeekWire published Jones' full letter. Jones claims he discovered an exploit allowing him to bypass DALL-E 3's security guardrails in early December.

The newest startup accelerator from Amazon aims to attract companies building generative AI technologies. The Amazon Web Services accelerator, revealed Tuesday, is a 10-week program aims to "empower companies applying generative AI to solutions from legal and marketing, to software engineering, green energy, and life sciences, including drug discovery." It also provides up to $300,000 in AWS credits. The hybrid program is open to all startups, with two week-long in-person events in San Francisco. AWS does not take equity from participating companies.

Artificial intelligence software programs are becoming shockingly adept at carrying on conversations, winning board games and generating artwork -- but what about creating software programs? In a newly published paper, researchers at Google DeepMind say their AlphaCode program can keep up with the average human coder in standardized programming contests. "This result marks the first time an artificial intelligence system has performed competitively in programming contests," the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Science. There's no need to sound the alarm about Skynet just yet: DeepMind's code-generating system earned an average ranking in the top 54.3% in simulated evaluations on recent programming competitions on the Codeforces platform -- which is a very "average" average. "Competitive programming is an extremely difficult challenge, and there's a massive gap between where we are now (solving around 30% of problems in 10 submissions) and top programmers (solving 90% of problems in a single submission)," DeepMind research scientist Yujia Li, one of the Science paper's principal authors, told GeekWire in an email.

DeepMind's AlphaCode program takes a data-driven approach to coding.

An image showing how machines learn from vision, language, and sound together. Most of us have watched television with the sound turned off at one time or another. While it's usually possible to follow the story at least to some degree, the absence of an audio track tends to limit our ability to fully appreciate what's taking place. Similarly, it's easy to miss a lot of information just listening to the sounds coming from another room. The multimodality of combining image, sound and other details greatly enhances our understanding of what's happening, whether it's on TV or in the real world.

Machine learning is the common basis for modern artificial intelligence, using large amounts of data to build AI models that recognize patterns and make predictions when presented with new information. A new Seattle startup led by a former Microsoft distinguished engineer uses a different approach: machine teaching. "It's not extracting knowledge from data; it's extracting knowledge from the person," explained Patrice Simard, CEO and co-founder of Intelus, who oversaw Microsoft research groups in areas including machine learning, databases, graphics, vision and cryptography in more than 20 years at the Redmond company. Intelus emerged from stealth mode Tuesday to launch an open beta of its new machine teaching platform, Duet, which offers a graphical user interface to create AI models from unstructured data without writing code or requiring advanced data science tools. The models can then be used to classify and extract data from text.

You might not have to endure as many unnecessary company meetings in the future. GeekWire has found a Microsoft patent application for an "insight computer system" that would give meetings scores based on body language, facial expressions, the number of attendees and even ambient conditions like the time of day and temperature. If people are clearly distracted by their phones, for example, organizers would know a meeting was wasted even if they couldn't read the room themselves. The technology could apply to both virtual and (eventually) in-person meetings, and would use a mix of cameras and sensors for physical gatherings. It would even predict the likelihood of a useful meeting and suggest alternative times, locations and people if a meet-up was likely to flop.

Artificial intelligence often raises concerns about privacy, bias and trickery in areas such as facial recognition and deep fake videos. But amidst the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, some technology companies and scientists are looking to AI for a positive impact instead. "AI and high tech in general have gotten something of a bad rap recently, but this crisis shows how AI can potentially do a world of good," said Oren Etzioni, CEO of Seattle's Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and a University of Washington computer science professor. Etzioni was speaking on a call Monday organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as part of an announcement of a project called the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset, aka CORD-19. The initiative, building on AI2's Semantic Scholar project, uses natural language processing to analyze scientific papers about coronavirus, including the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Apple has acquired Xnor.ai, a Seattle startup specializing in low-power, edge-based artificial intelligence tools, sources with knowledge of the deal told GeekWire. Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources said Apple paid an amount similar to what was paid for Turi, in the range of $200 million. Xnor.ai didn't immediately respond to our inquiries, while Apple emailed us its standard response on questions about acquisitions: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." When we visited Xnor.ai's office in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood this morning, a move was clearly in progress -- presumably to Apple's Seattle offices. The arrangement suggests that Xnor's AI-enabled image recognition tools could well become standard features in future iPhones and webcams.