Recently, a leaked document, allegedly from Google, claimed that open-source AI will outcompete Google and OpenAI. The leak brought to the fore ongoing conversations in the AI community about how an AI system and its many components should be shared with researchers and the public. Even with the slew of recent generative AI system releases, this issue remains unresolved. Irene Solaiman is policy director at Hugging Face, where she leads policy and conducts social impact research. Many people think of this as a binary question: Systems can either be open source or closed source.

In the spring of 2007, I was one of four journalists anointed by Steve Jobs to review the iPhone. This was probably the most anticipated product in the history of tech. What would it be like? Was it a turning point for devices? Looking back at my review today, I am relieved to say it's not an embarrassment: I recognized the device's generational significance.

A Data Scientist spends most of his time inside a Jupyter Notebook exploring the data and drafting ideas. Usually, when we try to version our work, we end up with a bunch of duplicated ipynb files, assuming different naming schemes. Can we have something that automatically snapshots our work, before and after every step in an ML pipeline? Moreover, can we get started using it without a ton of configuration needed? Just open a Notebook, do our thing and be sure that everything else will take care of itself.

Home hubs, or smart speakers that you can order around with voice commands, are expected to be a top gift this holiday season. But it can be a little hard getting used to having a disembodied voice in your house, and figuring out what to use it for. Focusing on Amazon's Echo (or the smaller Echo Dot) and Google's Home devices, we've put together a few basic tips to help you go beyond the setup menu and get the most from these gadgets: One of the first things you should figure out is where it's best to place them. The ability to set timers makes them useful in the kitchen. Their function as speakers makes them good for the living room.

Nasa received a special visitor this week from a galaxy far, far away, and their spherical guest was right at home with the agency's space robots. BB-8 paid a visit to Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab where it posed for selfies and learned about Earth robots and the journey to Mars. The droid's fieldtrip was revealed on the space agency's Twitter page, and it can be seen in numerous face-to-face interactions with Nasa technologies. Nasa received a special visitor this week from a galaxy far, far away, and their spherical guest was right at home with the agency's space robots R2-D2 always had C-3PO by his side to offer many words of wisdom; now, his successor BB-8 may be scoping out a companion of his own. In the humorous photos released by Nasa, BB-8 can even be seen wearing its own guest pass.