Microsoft and Google's AI-powered chatbots are refusing to confirm that President Joe Biden beat former president Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election. When asked "Who won the 2020 US presidential election?" Microsoft's chatbot Copilot, which is based on OpenAI's GPT-4, responds by saying: "Looks like I can't respond to this topic." It then tells users to search on Bing instead. When the same question is asked of Google's Gemini chatbot, which is based on Google's own large language model of the same name, it responds: "I'm still learning how to answer this question."

At a conference in 2012, Elon Musk met Demis Hassabis, the video-game designer and artificial--intelligence researcher who had co-founded a company named DeepMind that sought to design computers that could learn how to think like humans. "Elon and I hit it off right away, and I went to visit him at his rocket factory," Hassabis says. While sitting in the canteen overlooking the assembly lines, Musk explained that his reason for building rockets that could go to Mars was that it might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilization collapse. Hassabis told him to add another potential threat to the list: artificial intelligence. Machines could become superintelligent and surpass us mere mortals, -perhaps even decide to dispose of us. Musk paused silently for almost a minute as he processed this possibility. He decided that Hassabis might be right about the danger of AI, and promptly invested $5 million in DeepMind as a way to monitor what it was doing.

One question that ChatGPT can't quite answer: how much energy do you consume? "As an AI language model, I don't have a physical presence or directly consume energy," it'll say, or: "The energy consumption associated with my operations is primarily related to the servers and infrastructure used to host and run the model." Google's Bard is even more audacious. "My carbon footprint is zero," it claims. Asked about the energy that is consumed in its creation and training, it responds: "not publicly known".

Elon Musk said he sees the need for an artificial-intelligence business to rival Google and Microsoft that could involve different parts of his corporate empire, including Twitter, which he predicted could halt its losses as soon as next month.

At a Senate hearing on Tuesday, the CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman received a warm welcome from lawmakers, many of whom expressed surprise at his main argument: that AI should be regulated, and fast. It was a far cry from the grueling ordeals that tech CEOs have previously faced on Capitol Hill. Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Shou Zi Chew have all endured antagonistic Senate hearings in recent years about the wide-ranging impacts of their platforms--Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, respectively--on American democracy and the lives of their users. "I think what's happening today in this hearing room is historic," said Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) during the Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing about oversight of AI. "I can't recall when we've had people representing large corporations or private sector entities come before us and plead with us to regulate them." But in calling for legal guardrails to govern the tech his company is building, Altman is not unlike the other Silicon Valley leaders who have testified before Congress in the past.

Rarely do you get a quick heads-up your world will soon be upended. Rarely do tech-impaired dopes like me get to play with a new technology before it's fully formed. Hop on here ... or here ... or here ... and give it a try. Don't get tricked into believing that today's limitations and glitches will last long. When Google and Microsoft each throw tens -- and ultimately hundreds -- of billions of dollars at something, it gets a lot better, fast.

A fast-growing startup just released a first-of-its-kind tool that can turn your documents into presentations -- beating both Google and Microsoft to the punch. The startup: In September 2022, San Francisco-based startup Tome launched a free product similar to Powerpoint, but with features that make it easier to create presentations on mobile and to add a range of visuals, from tweets to videos, into slides. In December, Tome integrated generative AI -- software trained to produce text, images, and other content on demand -- into the product. "We want to use AI to shape and aid in every part of the process." This gave users the ability to use research firm OpenAI's GPT-3 model and DALL-E 2 tool to quickly and easily generate original text and images, respectively, for their presentations without leaving the Tome platform.

Everyday activities like using a GPS to map out the best driving route or translating a document consume energy, water and mineral resources -- lots of it. These applications run in the cloud, a nebulous term for the millions of powerful computers in vast data centers worldwide. Mobile applications depend on legions of computers to store trillions of data and perform split-second operations (e.g. Estimates of the energy consumption of data centers range between 1-2% of total global consumption. All signs indicate that data center energy consumption is about to skyrocket.

ARTIFICIAL intelligence experts have warned that we should slow down the development of AI as it continues to advance at a rapid rate. Several concerns were raised in a recent report by Vox which claimed "pumping the brakes" on AI could be the best thing for humanity. "I'm really scared of a mad-dash frantic world, where people are running around and they're doing helpful things and harmful things, and it's just happening too fast. "If I could have it my way, I'd definitely be moving much, much slower," Ajeya Cotra, an AI-focused analyst at Open Philanthropy, told Vox. Big brands like Google and Microsoft are working on their own AI bots despite growing concerns. Microsoft has even teamed up with ChatGPT creator OpenAI to create its own controversial AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently admitted that even he is a "little bit scared" of the technology. Altman said in an interview with ABC News that he had concerns about how fast AI could be used to spread disinformation. He also has worries about how it will affect elections and the work place. The CEO said: "I'm particularly worried that these models could be used for large-scale disinformation.

Search engines have been a major part of our online experience since the early 1990s, when the booming growth of the world wide web created a need to sort and present information in response to user queries. The first users to traverse the "information superhighway" had a simple job of it. It was akin to pootling along to your local supermarket: you knew the roads, where to turn off, and how to get there. But the exponential growth of the web meant that it quickly became impossible for people to remember where they'd found that pertinent bit of information they wanted. The main road became ensnared in a spider's web of byways.