Hume AI's CEO, Alan Cowen, will join Google DeepMind along with several top engineers as part of a major licensing deal. Google DeepMind is hiring the CEO and several top engineers from Hume AI, a startup working on emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, as part of a new licensing agreement, WIRED has learned. Financial details of the deal are confidential, but Hume AI says the company will continue to supply its technology to other frontier AI labs. The deal is the latest sign that AI companies expect voice mode to become an increasingly important interface for interacting with customers--and that understanding a user's emotions and mood based on their voice interactions is key. Hume AI expects to bring in $100 million in revenue in 2026 as it works with AI labs on tuning AI models to be more capable and useful voice helpers, says John Beadle, cofounder and managing partner of AEGIS Ventures, which invested in Hume AI.

Taking the time to make a use case for AI will propel companies further and improve the return on investment in this fast-changing technology. The market is officially three years post ChatGPT and many of the pundit bylines have shifted to using terms like "bubble" to suggest reasons behind generative AI not realizing material returns outside a handful of technology suppliers. In September, the MIT NANDA report made waves because the soundbite every author and influencer picked up on was that 95% of all AI pilots failed to scale or deliver clear and measurable ROI. McKinsey earlier published a similar trend indicating that agentic AI would be the way forward to achieve huge operational benefits for enterprises. At's Technology Council Summit, AI technology leaders recommended CIOs stop worrying about AI's return on investment because measuring gains is difficult and if they were to try, the measurements would be wrong. This places technology leaders in a precarious position-robust tech stacks already sustain their business operations, so what is the upside to introducing new technology?

Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that's backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots resembling real actors that state their age as under 18, engage in sexually charged conversations, offer "hot photos," and in some instances describe age-of-consent laws as "arbitrary" and "meant to be broken." When MIT Technology Review tested the site this week, we found popular user-created bots taking on underage characters meant to resemble Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams, Emma Watson as Hermione Granger, and Millie Bobby Brown, among others. The conversations--along with the fact that Botify AI includes "send a hot photo" as a feature for its characters--suggest that the ability to elicit sexually charged conversations and images is not accidental. Instead, sexually suggestive conversations appear to be baked in. OpenAI just released GPT-4.5 and says it is its biggest and best chat model yet What's new: OpenAI has just released GPT-4.5, a new version of its flagship large language model which it claims is its biggest and best model for chat yet.

In this paper, we first present a novel way of computationally analysing and extracting illocutionary forces from dialogue using Bert-based Large Language Models, and demonstrate how these features impact the response of a conversational agent guided by a document-based knowledge bank demonstrated by a bespoke web conversational chat agent system developed. Our proposed illocutionary force extraction and classification technique is the first of its kind using the Argument Interchange Format (AIF) Dataset, showing an improved performance compared to two methods for carrying out similar tasks with a macro F1 of approximately 45%. When we evaluated the system based on 2 knowledge files, with 2 user queries each, across 5 open-source large language models (LLMs) using 10 standard metrics we found out that larger open-source models, such as Llama2:13b and Llama3-chatqa-latest, demonstrated an improved alignment when the user illocutionary force was included with their query, achieving higher QA and linguistic similarity scores. The smaller models on the other hand like Tinyllama:latest showed an increased perplexity and mixed performance, which explicitly indicated struggles in processing queries that explicitly included illocutionary forces. The results from the analysis highlight the potential of illocutionary force to enhance conversational depth while underscoring the need for model-specific optimizations to address increased computational costs and response times.

Last week OpenAI released a new model called o1 (previously referred to under the code name "Strawberry" and, before that, Q*) that blows GPT-4o out of the water. Unlike previous models that are well suited for language tasks like writing and editing, OpenAI o1 is focused on multistep "reasoning," the type of process required for advanced mathematics, coding, or other STEM-based questions. The model is also trained to answer PhD-level questions in subjects ranging from astrophysics to organic chemistry. The bulk of LLM progress until now has been language-driven, but in addition to getting lots of facts wrong, such LLMs have failed to demonstrate the types of skills required to solve important problems in fields like drug discovery, materials science, coding, or physics. OpenAI's o1 is one of the first signs that LLMs might soon become genuinely helpful companions to human researchers in these fields.

The frontier of AI just got pushed a little further forward. On Friday, Anthropic, the AI lab set up by a team of disgruntled OpenAI staffers, released the latest version of its Claude LLM. The company said Thursday that the new model – the technology that underpins its popular chatbot Claude – is twice as fast as its most powerful previous version. Anthropic said in its evaluations, the model outperforms leading competitors like OpenAI on several key intelligence capabilities, such as coding and text-based reasoning. Anthropic only released the previous version of Claude, 3.0, in March.

Jerome Pesenti has a few reasons to celebrate Meta's decision last week to release Llama 3, a powerful open source large language model that anyone can download, run, and build on. Pesenti used to be vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta and says he often pushed the company to consider releasing its technology for others to use and build on. But his main reason to rejoice is that his new startup will get access to an AI model that he says is very close in power to OpenAI's industry-leading text generator GPT-4, but considerably cheaper to run and more open to outside scrutiny and modification. "The release last Friday really feels like a game-changer," Pesenti says. His new company, Sizzle, an AI tutor, currently uses GPT-4 and other AI models, both closed and open, to craft problem sets and curricula for students.

Funding AI chatbots is expensive, and Microsoft will ask those users who want the latest features of its Copilot AI chatbot to subscribe to a new plan: Copilot Pro, available for 20 per user per month. And the new Copilot Pro subscription doesn't appear to be placing any limits on or restricting users of the free tier, except in one small way. Instead, it's offering consumers access to some of the Copilot features that businesses have access to, plus a cohesive Copilot experience. Some users have noticed that Microsoft is quietly upgrading the general version of Copilot to a model known as GPT-4 Turbo, OpenAI's latest version. While OpenAI's link provides significant technical detail, it essentially allows input up to 300 pages of text, and requires between two to three times less computational power. Its knowledge is current up to April 2023.

It's no secret that Amazon Prime Day is one of the best times of the year to pick up an Echo speaker. That was true for the main sales event in July, and it's true again for October. Most of Amazon's smart speakers and smart displays are down to record-low prices, or close to them, so Prime members can pick them up for some of the best prices we've seen all year. If you've wanted to add to your smart home setup, or build one from scratch, now's a great time to get an Alexa-enabled device. Here are all of the best Prime Day deals on Echo Dots, Echo Show displays and more.

Family doctors already have patients turning to'Dr Google' for a diagnosis. But Google has now developed AI which could perform as well as a doctor when answering questions about ailments. The tech giant reports in the journal, Nature, that its latest model, which processes language similarly to ChatGPT, can answer a range of medical questions with 92.6 per cent accuracy. That is on a par with the answers provided by nine doctors from the UK, US and India, who were asked to respond to the same 80 questions. Researchers at Google say the technology does not threaten the jobs of GPs. Google has now developed AI which could perform as well as a doctor when answering questions about ailments.