The computer code they generate is often buggy and incomplete. From time to time, they even make stuff up. On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled a new version of ChatGPT that could alleviate these flaws. The company said the chatbot, underpinned by new artificial intelligence technology called OpenAI o1, could "reason" through tasks involving math, coding and science. "With previous models like ChatGPT, you ask them a question and they immediately start responding," said Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's chief scientist.

Digital transformation is not the latest industry catchphrase. It's a movement--a significant shift in how companies operate, compete, and grow, according to Archie Deskus, who was appointed Senior Vice President and CIO of Intel, the US chip maker, early this year. Deskus reminds us that a corporation is a living organism; it must continue to shed its skin. Methods, focus and values, all have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.

Recently, Dr. France A. Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, gave a presentation at the U.S. Council on Competitiveness meeting in Washington, D.C. She holds an extraordinary record of accomplishment and has made a tremendous impact on academia and the U.S.'s scientific community. Córdova is also the youngest person -- and first woman -- to serve as Chief Scientist at NASA. Her journey began with her love for STEM. In some ways, the future of work is largely linked to STEM.

The government's peak advisory body on tech and science has turned its attention to the development of an artificial intelligence ethics framework and lifelong learning of STEM skills. The National Science and Technology Council met for the third time in Brisbane last week, after it was launched to replace the Commonwealth Science Council in February this year. The meeting was chaired by Industry Minister Karen Andrews, with education minister Dan Tehan also in attendance. Council members include Professor Genevieve Bell, Professor Barbara Howlett, Professor Debra Henly and Professor Brian Schmidt. They were briefed on the government's progress in developing a national artificial intelligence ethics framework, and the "strong engagement" from stakeholders during consultation.

It is easy to get weighed down by daily tasks, never quite feeling like you can catch up to the never-ending to do list in your mind. This is probably why so many "perfect" visions of our future, as depicted in books and movies, feature robotic companions that help take the pressure off their human counterparts. While the in-home robots on the market today are certainly no C-3PO, they're getting more and more adept at assisting with daily tasks. In fact, newer models will likely focus on taking care of your emotional needs as well as your household chores! A robot that helps you with day-to-day household tasks, making your life easier.

It is often said that women are absent from the sciences. But this is not true. Although a gender gap remains in the sciences overall, the gap is closing. Women are now more likely than men to earn undergraduate degrees in biology, and they are almost as likely as men to earn undergraduate degrees in chemistry and math. There are, however, several scientific disciplines that women are still much less likely than men to choose to study: computer science, engineering and physics.

The role of data scientists will be transformed as machine learning techniques become more widely used by businesses, according to Stephen Brobst, CTO of analytics firm Teradata. While many of the principles behind'AI' approaches are not new, interest within an enterprise setting has exploded in recent years. And as usage becomes more widespread and sophisticated, the role of data scientists will begin to evolve too, according to Brobst. He explains that data scientists have typically spent much of their time'wrangling' data to feed into predictive models. In future, more of this work will be automated and data scientists will instead be more focused on selecting which machine learning or deep learning tools to utilise for specific tasks.

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it's a little strange how I've ended up now--someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler's equation. It's hard to believe I've flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering. One day, one of my students asked me how I did it--how I changed my brain. I wanted to answer Hell--with lots of difficulty! In fact, I didn't start studying remedial math until I left the Army at age 26. If there were a textbook example of the potential for adult neural plasticity, I'd be Exhibit A. Learning math and then science as an adult gave me passage into the empowering world of engineering.