Daiwa Securities Group employees are widely using an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot in Japan as the nation's second-largest brokerage follows global banks in exploring the potential of rapidly evolving technologies. Chief Executive Officer Seiji Nakata said the Tokyo-based firm started an experiment in April that gave around 9,000 workers in Japan the go-ahead to "freely use" ChatGPT. Daiwa has also been strengthening the recruitment of science graduates to develop high-tech experts in house, he said in an interview. The move comes as an AI revolution unfolds on Wall Street in response to widening interest in the technology and its likely business impact. Deutsche Bank is using it to scan wealthy client portfolios, while JPMorgan Chase & Co. is advertising for more AI roles than any of its rivals.

Investors were surprised when the online education company Chegg last month revealed that ChatGPT was hurting subscriber growth--the company lost half of its market value overnight. But long before Chegg became an index case for the disruptive force of ChatGPT, its top brass had heard plenty of warnings about the threat and opportunity of generative AI. For years, on afternoon walks outside Chegg's Silicon Valley headquarters, former executives say they had discussed someday slashing costs by tapping AI programs to replace an army of instructors that answer student questions and draft flashcards. Matthew Ramirez, a product leader who left Chegg two years ago, says he even advised CEO Dan Rosensweig in 2020 that generative AI would be the bus that ran down Chegg if it didn't prepare itself. And just weeks after OpenAI launched ChatGPT last November, a source familiar with the exchange says, one Chegg executive had the bot write an email to Rosensweig urging him to develop a ChatGPT rival.

That sort of computational power requires GPUs, or graphics processing units, that were first made for video games but were found to be the only chips that could handle such heavy computer tasks as large language models. Currently, just one company, Nvidia, sells the best of those, for which it charges tens of thousands of dollars. Nvidia's valuation recently rocketed to $1 trillion on the anticipated sales. The Taiwan-based company that manufactures many of those chips, TSMC, has likewise soared in value.

Getting digitally cloned was easier than Devin Finley expected it to be. The voice-over artist, who also works as a model and bar manager, entered a studio in Manhattan last spring and read a script from a teleprompter. Across the room, a man with a large camera working for Hour One, a Tel Aviv–based video agency specializing in providing clients with lifelike virtual humans, filmed Finley from the waist up. Over Zoom, a director offered instructions about how much to move his hands. He was done in less than an hour.

It has been known to create paintings, write poems and even learn languages on its own. But could Artificial Intelligence also make you richer? Last week, it emerged JPMorgan Chase is developing a service similar to the AI-powered ChatGPT which would help customers select investments and give financial advice. Separately banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have started testing the tech internally as businesses speed up their apparent AI arms race. It begs the question whether financial advisors will be needed at all in a few years as computers offer a quicker (and cheaper) alternative.

The optimism in the AI sector contrasts with the massive layoffs that have been rocking the industry for months. Thousands of tech workers are still out of a job after the massive wave of layoffs that rolled through dozens of start-ups, as well as Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google over the past year. Higher interest rates, which triggered the shakiness for tech companies used to borrowing huge sums to fund their ever-increasing growth, aren't going away.

Code hidden inside PC motherboards left millions of machines vulnerable to malicious updates, researchers revealed this week. Staff at security firm Eclypsium found code within hundreds of models of motherboards created by Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte that allowed an updater program to download and run another piece of software. While the system was intended to keep the motherboard updated, the researchers found that the mechanism was implemented insecurely, potentially allowing attackers to hijack the backdoor and install malware. Elsewhere, Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky revealed that its staff had been targeted by newly discovered zero-click malware impacting iPhones. Victims were sent a malicious message, including an attachment, on Apple's iMessage. The attack automatically started exploiting multiple vulnerabilities to give the attackers access to devices, before the message deleted itself.

When Aparna Pappu, vice president and general manager of Google Workspace, spoke at Google I/O on May 10, she laid out a vision for artificial intelligence that helps users wade through their inbox. Pappu showed how generative AI can whisper summaries of long email threads in your ear, pull in relevant data from local files as you salsa together through unread messages, and dip you low to the ground as it suggests insertable text. Welcome to the inbox of the future. While the specifics of how it'll arrive remain unclear, generative AI is poised to fundamentally alter how people communicate over email. A broader subset of AI, called machine learning, already performs a kind of safety dance long after you've logged off.

One of the reasons Google's Gmail achieved mass adoption was because it found which email you were searching for, fast. Now Gmail is revamping the process, calling out the emails it thinks you're searching for--or should be. Google said Friday that Gmail will call out the most important emails inside a separate "top results" box, using "machine learning models [that] will use the search term, most recent emails and other relevant factors to show you the results that best match your search query," Google said in a blog post. Other results will appear below, in an "all results in mail" category, sorted by recency. Google referred to the new search option as a "highly requested feature," and it will be rolling out over the course of 15 days, beginning on June 2.

In a lengthy blog post last week, Turnitin Chief Product Officer Annie Chechitelli said the company wants to be transparent about its technology, but she didn't back off from deploying it. She said that for documents that its detection software thinks contain over 20 percent AI writing, the false positive rate for the whole document is less than 1 percent. But she didn't specify what the error rate is the rest of the time -- for documents its software thinks contain less than 20 percent AI writing. In such cases, Turnitin has begun putting an asterisk next to results "to call attention to the fact that the score is less reliable."