Listen to more stories on the Noa app. Every trip in a self-driving Waymo has the same dangerous moment. But at the very end, you, a flawed human being, will have to place your hand on the door handle, look both ways, and push the door open. From mid-February to mid-August of this year, Waymo's driverless cars were involved in three collisions that came down to roughly identical circumstances: A passenger flung their door open and hit somebody passing by on a bike or scooter. That's according to an independent analysis of crash reports the company has disclosed to the government, which found that most of the 45 serious accidents involving Waymos were the fault of other motorists or seemingly an act of God.

Visit tech startup Skydio's headquarters on the San Francisco peninsula in California and you're likely to find flying robots buzzing on the roof overhead. Docking stations with motorised covers open to allow small drones that resemble the TIE fighters from Star Wars films to take off; when each drone lands back again, they close. The drones can fly completely autonomously and without GPS, taking in data from onboard cameras and using AI to execute programmed missions and avoid obstacles. Skydio, with more than 740m in venture capital funding and a valuation of about 2.5bn, makes drones for the military along with civilian organisations such as police forces and utility companies. The company moved away from the consumer market in 2020 and is now the largest US drone maker.

Paedophiles, scammers, hackers and criminals of all kinds are increasingly exploiting artificial intelligence (AI) to target victims in new and harmful ways, a senior police chief has warned. Alex Murray, the national police lead for AI, said that the use of the technology was growing rapidly because of its increasing accessibility and that police had to "move fast" to keep on top of the threat. "We know through the history of policing that criminals are inventive and will use anything they can to commit crime. They're certainly using AI to commit crime now," he said. "It can happen on an international and serious organised crime scale, and it can happen in someone's bedroom … You can think of any crime type and put it through an AI lens and say: 'What is the opportunity here?'"

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Congress "must move quickly" to regulate artificial intelligence and has convened a bipartisan group of senators to work on legislation. Schumer says the group met on Wednesday and that his staff has already met with close to 100 CEOs, scientists and academics who deal with the technology. "We can't move so fast that we do flawed legislation, but there's no time for waste or delay or sitting back," Schumer said in opening remarks on the Senate floor Thursday.

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that Samsung, which makes more smartphones than any other company, has considered switching its devices' default search engine from Google to Bing, thanks in part to the excitement around Bing's AI features. The Times reported that threat sparked "panic" at Google, whose name is synonymous with online search.

The US government is taking its first tentative steps toward establishing rules for artificial intelligence tools, as the frenzy over generative AI and chatbots reach a fever pitch. The US commerce department on Tuesday announced it is officially requesting public comment on how to create accountability measures for AI, seeking help on how to advise US policymakers to approach the technology. "In the same way that financial audits created trust in the accuracy of financial statements for businesses, accountability mechanisms for AI can help assure that an AI system is trustworthy," said Alan Davidson, the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), at a press conference at the University of Pittsburgh. Davidson said that the NTIA is seeking feedback from the public, including from researchers, industry groups, and privacy and digital rights organizations on the development of audits and assessments of AI tools created by private industry. He also said that the NTIA looking to establish guardrails that would allow the government to determine whether AI systems perform the way companies claim they do, whether they are safe and effective, whether they have discriminatory outcomes or "reflect unacceptable levels of bias", whether they spread or perpetuate misinformation, and whether they respect individuals' privacy.

Less than four months after releasing ChatGPT, the text-generating AI that seems to have pushed us into a science-fictional age of technology, OpenAI has unveiled a new product called GPT-4. Rumors and hype about this program have circulated for more than a year: Pundits have said that it would be unfathomably powerful, writing 60,000-word books from single prompts and producing videos out of whole cloth. Today's announcement suggests that GPT-4's abilities, while impressive, are more modest: It performs better than the previous model on standardized tests and other benchmarks, works across dozens of languages, and can take images as input--meaning that it's able, for instance, to describe the contents of a photo or a chart. Unlike ChatGPT, this new model is not currently available for public testing (although you can apply or pay for access), so the obtainable information comes from OpenAI's blog post, and from a New York Times story based on a demonstration. From what we know, relative to other programs, GPT-4 appears to have added 150 points to its SAT score, now a 1410 out of 1600, and jumped from the bottom to the top 10 percent of performers on a simulated bar exam.

The entrepreneurial disruption phase of "move fast and break things" is being replaced with a mantra of "move fast and keep up" when it comes to applying ethical frameworks and leading practices to emerging technologies, according to a new study by Deloitte. The firm's first-ever State of Ethics and Trust in Technology annual report defines emerging technologies, identifies trustworthy and ethical standards, explains different approaches to operationalizing standards, and encourages actions that can be taken in the short term. Many companies want to be on the cutting edge of emerging technologies to stay competitive and gain benefits such as improved customer experience, operational efficiencies and newly-enabled use cases, according to Deloitte. "But these technologies are often being developed at such breakneck speeds that few companies are pausing to consider the ethical implications,'' the report noted. "With great power comes great responsibility.

In this piece, Bob and Aparna discuss the importance of reliability engineering for ML initiatives. Machine learning is quickly becoming a key ingredient in emerging products and technologies. This has caused the field to rapidly mature as it attempts to transform the process of building ML models from an art to an engineering practice. In other words, many companies are learning that bringing a model that works in the research lab into production is much easier said than done. One particular challenge that ML practitioners face when deploying models into production environments is ensuring a reliable experience for their users. Just imagine, it's 3 am and you awake to a frantic phone call.

Mario may be Nintendo's standard-bearer, but Samus Aran of the "Metroid" games is getting her own chance to headline. And it's the first new story in the series in 19 years to play in 2D, picking up after "Metroid Fusion," released in 2002 for the Game Boy Advance handheld. "Metroid Dread" pays homage to that game with its side-scrolling heritage that goes back to the first installment in the series, "Metroid," from 1986. Samus moves fast and fluidly runs, jumps, slides and climbs through lush landscapes with detailed 2.5D backgrounds. A new power, the Spider Magnet, allows the character to climb walls and stick to ceilings like Spider-Man.