If you have a dog, you might think you have a strong connection with them. But according to a new study, you've probably been reading your pet's emotions all wrong. Although humans and dogs have a unique bond, scientists from Arizona State University say that we are terrible at understanding canine emotions. Participants were shown videos of a dog reacting to positive situations, such as seeing their lead, or negative situations such as being presented with the dreaded vacuum cleaner. Instead of actually trying to understand what the dog is feeling, the researchers found that people tend to'project human emotions onto their pets'.

On his office desk, Aleksandar Gavrilovic keeps two figurines: Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary, and Josip Broz Tito, the former communist leader of Yugoslavia. Gavrilovic is the founder of the video game company Gamechuck. Based out of a tiny office crammed with computers in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, the company is organized around equality: Each worker earns the same salary and shares the profits of the games they create. All decisions are reached through anonymous voting on Discord: The 17-person collective recently voted to shorten workdays from eight hours to six. "We wanted to show that you don't actually have to work like everyone else to be successful," said Gavrilovic. Gavrilovic's company is an outlier in the gaming industry, known for its grueling hours, high turnover rates, and worker discontent.

In an unassuming office on a quiet, mostly residential street in Mountain View, California -- located eight minutes from Google's sprawling headquarters -- a couple of ex-Googlers and their team of 50 are trying to build a search engine they hope will someday rival their former employer's. The company, Neeva, was started in 2020 by Sridhar Ramaswamy, who ran Google's $162 billion advertising arm before stepping down in 2018, and Vivek Raghunathan, a former Google vice president who worked on monetizing YouTube and other parts of the company. For a few years, the startup, which has raised over $77 million from some of Silicon Valley's top investors, focused on differentiating itself from Google by shunning invasive advertising and allowing power users to pay for extra features. Then, around the end of last year, the team at Neeva watched as a chatbot called ChatGPT created by the San Francisco–based startup OpenAI went viral. ChatGPT's ability to divine answers to nearly every question with an eerily humanlike sentience made it an instant hit, unleashing a modern AI wave. Suddenly, people around the world were talking about replacing Google search with ChatGPT. After all, if a chatbot could instantly answer any question for you, why would you need a search engine that simply spat out a bunch of links for you to trawl through?

An artificial intelligence boom is taking over Silicon Valley, with hi-tech firms racing to develop everything from self-driving cars to chatbots capable of writing poetry. Yet AI could also spread conspiracy theories and lies even more quickly than the internet already does – fueling political polarization, hate, violence and mental illness in young people. It could undermine national security with deepfakes. In recent weeks, members of Congress have sounded the alarm over the dangers of AI but no bill has been proposed to protect individuals or stop the development of AI's most threatening aspects. Most lawmakers don't even know what AI is, according to Representative Jay Obernolte, the only member of Congress with a master's degree in artificial intelligence.

The latest artificial intelligence tool to sweep social media is "Historical Figures Chat," a novelty that currently sits at the #34 spot in the "Education" section of Apple's app store. "With this app, you can chat with deceased individuals who have made a significant impact on history from ancient rulers and philosophers, to modern day politicians and artists," the description claims. What it doesn't mention is just how off the mark some of the algorithmic responses can be. The internet being what it is, users have downloaded Historical Figures -- which was first made available some two weeks ago -- and embarked on conversations with unsavory characters including Charles Manson, Jeffrey Epstein, and various high-ranking Nazis. These are just a few of the 20,000 significant personalities available for interview, and they seem especially keen on expressing remorse for the horrible things they did while alive, while whitewashing their own documented views.

It's difficult to convince users to switch search engines. That's one reason why public search service startups rarely succeed. Another is that it's expensive to index a huge number of websites (Google has an estimated tens of billions of pages indexed), but one Y Combinator-backed company, Andi, is undeterred -- forging ahead to build an AI assistant that provides answers instead of links when searching online. Andi was founded by Angela Hoover, who registered for YC's Startup School after dropping out of college and got into YC's Winter 2022 Batch. After working overseas in construction and with Microsoft as a data center project administrator, Hoover met Andi's co-founder, Jed White, at the Denver airport upon her return to the U.S. Hoover and White -- who had a background in AI and search, specifically content quality ranking, querying and classification -- talked about how bad web search had become for things like travel and what it would take to build a new type of search engine from scratch.

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San Francisco, California-based Grammarly, which develops an AI-powered writing assistant, today announced that it raised $200 million, valuing the company at $13 billion post-money. Baillie Gifford led the round with participation from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. Grammarly CEO Brad Hoover says the funding will be put toward further developing the company's technology and "accelerat[ing] efforts to help people communicate … in our digital-first world." As enterprises increasingly embrace digitization, the over $1.2 billion AI writing assistant market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 27.6% from 2018 to 2028. According to a survey from John Snow Labs and Gradient Flow, 60% of tech leaders indicated that their budgets for natural language processing -- which encompasses technologies like Grammarly's -- grew by at least 10% compared to 2020, while a third said that their spending climbed by more than 30%.

While attention continues to be focused on the rise and growing sophistication of voice-based interfaces, a startup that is using artificial intelligence to improve how we communicate through the written word has raised a round of funding to capitalise on its already profitable growth. Grammarly -- which provides a toolkit used today by 20 million people to correct their written grammar, suggest better ways to write things and moderate the tone of what they are saying depending on who will be doing the reading -- has closed a $90 million round of funding. Brad Hoover, the company's CEO, confirmed to TechCrunch that the funding catapults the company's valuation to more than $1 billion as it gears up to grow to more users by expanding Grammarly's tools and bringing them to more platforms. Today, Grammarly can be used across a number of browsers via browser extensions, as a web app, through mobile and on desktop apps, and through specific apps such as Microsoft Office. But in our current era of communication, the number of places where we write to each other is expanding all the time -- consider, for example, how much we use chat and texting apps for leisure and for work -- so expect that list to continue growing.

While some education experts applaud the advancement of high-tech grammar tools as a way to help people more clearly express their thoughts, others aren't so sure. Artificial intelligence, according to the contrarians, is only as smart as the humans who program it, and often just as biased. "Language is part of your heritage and identity, and if you're using a tool that is constantly telling you, 'You're wrong,' that is not a good thing," said Paulo Blikstein, associate professor of communications, media and learning technology design at Columbia University Teachers College. "There is not one mythical, monolithical (English) … And every time we have tried to curtail the evolution of a language, it has never gone well." In the era of spellcheck and auto-correct, does it matter that my son can't spell?