That was how long Google was giving Sissie Hsiao. A hundred days to build a ChatGPT rival. By the time Hsiao took on the project in December 2022, she had spent more than 16 years at the company. She led thousands of employees. Hsiao had seen her share of corporate crises--but nothing like the code red that had been brewing in the days since OpenAI, a small research lab, released its public experiment in artificial intelligence.

The Google owner, Alphabet, has dropped its pledge not to use artificial intelligence for purposes such as developing weapons and surveillance tools. The US technology company said on Tuesday, just before it reported lower than forecast earnings, that it had updated its ethical guidelines around AI, and they no longer refer to not pursuing technologies that could "cause or are likely to cause overall harm". Google's AI head, Demis Hassabis, said the guidelines were being overhauled in a changing world and that AI should protect "national security". In a blogpost defending the move, Hassabis and the company's senior vice-president for technology and society, James Manyika, wrote that as global competition for AI leadership increases, the company believes "democracies should lead in AI development" that is guided by "freedom, equality, and respect for human rights". They added: "We believe that companies, governments, and organisations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security."

Sundar Pichai told '60 Minutes' that the state of the technology is still somewhat of a black box to researchers. Researchers are accusing Google and CBS News of overestimating the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) following an interview between the Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and "60 Minutes." During the recent interview, Pichai claimed that AI programs developed by Google had displayed "emergent properties," or the ability to learn unexpected skills they were not trained on, puzzling researchers. For example, Google tech executive James Manyika claimed the company's AI had learned the language of Bengali without significant implementation of the information beforehand. "We discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in Bengali," Manyika said, "it can now translate all of Bengali."

Like a human possessed, Google's artificial intelligence appears to know things it shouldn't -- and yeah, it's freaking us out. In an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes, Google tech exec James Manyika admitted that the company's AI had somehow learned a language on which it had not been trained. "We discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in Bengali," Manyika said, "it can now translate all of Bengali." As CBS notes, these kinds of "emergent properties" are "mysterious" and continue to puzzle developers even as they become more and more common. One AI program spoke in a foreign language it was never trained to know.

Big Tech has long faced accusations that it's a detriment to society, and Google thinks it can address those criticisms more directly. Axios' Ina Fried says the internet pioneer has hired James Manyika as the company's first Senior VP of Technology and Society. As Google told Engadget, the McKinsey Global Institute director will help explore tech's impact on society and shape the firm's points of view on subjects including AI, the future of work, sustainability and other areas that could make a significant difference. Manyika will report directly to Alphabet and Google chief Sundar Pichai, and will work with outsiders as well as internal staff. He'll help build leadership on technological impact at the company, Google said, and will focus on top-level, longer-term initiatives.

California's high poverty rate, low wages and frayed public safety net require a new "social compact" between workers, business and government, according to a report by a blue-ribbon commission that highlights the state's widening inequality. In a report released Monday, the Future of Work Commission, a 21-member body appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in August 2019, laid out a grim picture of the challenges facing the world's fifth-largest economy, even as it acknowledged the Golden State's technology leadership, its ethnically and culturally diverse workforce and world-class universities. "Too many Californians have not fully participated in or enjoyed the benefits of the state's broader economic success and the extraordinary wealth generated here, especially workers of color who are disproportionately represented in low-wage industries," the report says. California has the highest poverty rate in the country when accounting for the cost of living, 17.2%, according to the report. Since 2012, wages in the state grew by 14% while home prices increased by 68%.

Stuart Russell, a leading artificial-intelligence (AI) researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the book Human Compatible (Penguin Random House, October 2019), sits down with McKinsey Global Institute chairman James Manyika to discuss our future as AI transforms our world. In this broad conversation, they explore the immense benefits ahead and what our role will be as AI becomes more pervasive. They also delve into potential challenges we may face with our current approach to AI, and how we can redefine AI to ensure it helps humanity achieve its full potential. James Manyika: When you look at the AI field today and you see all these announcements and breakthroughs, what excites you the most? Stuart Russell: With today's technology, delivering high-quality education to everybody on Earth is just the beginning. Even fairly simple AI tutoring tools have been shown to be very effective. So that can only get better if we figure out how to roll it out to the people who really need it.

With soft, nimble fingers, an arm stretches out to delicately pluck an apple from a shelf and place it gently into a basket. In this special series, Future Now takes a close look at the biggest, most important issues we face in the 21st Century. For two months, we'll bring you insight from leading scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs and influencers to help you make sense of the challenges we face in today's rapidly evolving world. It performs the task again with a bag of limes and again with a pepper, never tiring, never complaining. This is a prototype robotic arm being tested by Ocado, the British online supermarket.

On the heels of a mostly positive jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) (4.6% unemployment is the lowest it's been in nine years), the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) released a more sobering snapshot of the world of work. A briefing by MGI director James Manyika, compiled from the company's extensive research, took a deeper dive into employment numbers. In the United States and the 15 core European Union countries (E.U.-15), there are 285 million adults who are not in the labor force--and at least 100 million of them would like to work more. Some 30% to 45% of the working-age population around the world is underutilized--that is, unemployed, inactive, or underemployed. Manyika says that unemployment figures typically get the most attention at the expense of those who are underemployed.

I want to make one point, that this is on the record. But we're going to have a great time discussing "Robots and the Future of Jobs: The Economic Impact of Artificial Intelligence." So I'll start with simple introductions, and then we'll lay out some definitions about the kinds of terms that will be involved in this conversation. So my name is John Paul Farmer. Very happy to be here with three experts on the topic. Next to me is Dr. James Manyika, who is a recovering roboticist. And his day job is at McKinsey, at the McKinsey Global Institute, where he's been focusing on the future of jobs and the future of work in this new era. In the middle, we have Dr. Daniela Rus. Dr. Rus is a professor and roboticist at MIT, and she is also the director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab there. And at the end, we have Edwin van Bommel. Edwin is formerly of McKinsey, but now he's the chief cognitive officer at IPsoft. So, with that, let me lay out some definitions that are going to be important, I think, to following this conversation. You may have read in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere about this fourth industrial revolution, the changes that are happening in our society today and many more that will be coming down the pike. So as we--as we talk about these things, one, we should all be on the same page in terms of what artificial intelligence is. What do we mean when we say AI? And the definition that many accept is it's the development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and even translation between languages. AI is sometimes humorously referred to as whatever computers can't do today. Machine learning is another term you're going to hear a lot, sometimes thought of as a rebranding of AI, of artificial intelligence. But there's one key difference, which is that it takes a much more probabilistic approach as opposed to deterministic. So it looks at not just yes or no; it looks at a 30 percent chance of X, a 10 percent chance of Y, and so on. Big data, a term that I think we've all heard. Data is the raw material. Some people call it the new oil for this new era.