Undeterred by its many detractors, Meta is still trying to make the metaverse happen. This week, the company held its annual Connect developer conference at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to announce a new mixed reality headset, the Meta Quest 3, as well as new smart glasses made by Ray-Ban that let the wearer livestream videos and interact with an AI-powered voice chatbot. Meta also showed off an array of celebrity-infused AI chatbots that can mimic big-name folks like Snoop Dogg and Kendall Jenner. You'd be forgiven for thinking all this feels a little bit like an episode of Black Mirror.

Too often, technologists become wrapped up in doom-and-gloom predictions about job-stealing, prejudicial, and potentially murderous AI. Fear sells, the saying goes, and that seems doubly true when it comes to emerging tech. As my colleague Khari Johnson and I have written countless times, artificial intelligence promises to transform entire verticals for the better, from health care and education to business intelligence and cybersecurity. More excitingly, it's laying the groundwork for new industries and pursuits of which we haven't yet conceived. This week, MIT graduate student and postdoctoral fellow with Event Horizon Telescope Katie Bouman created an algorithm -- Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors, or CHIRP for short -- that combined data from eight radio telescopes from around the globe to generate the first image ever of a black hole. CHIRP -- a three-year collaborative effort among MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the MIT Haystack Observatory -- reconstructs images while accounting for variations in signal strength, such that delays caused by atmospheric noise cancel each other out.

You've probably heard of Prisma, one of the hottest apps this year. Downloaded more than 50 million times since June and powered by artificial intelligence, it uses filters to transform any photo into a stunning work of art evocative of say, Pablo Picasso or a Renaissance master. It's trending in the App Store: ranked fourth in the free photo and video category behind Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube. But you've probably heard less about the Prisma bot with similar features and the same name, launched less than a month ago on Telegram. It's notable that one of today's most popular mobile apps waited only about a month before launching a bot, and it begs the question: Are bots replacing apps?