Amazon's next-gen Alexa+ chatbot is now available in four new Echo devices and a bevy of Ring cameras. The company also debuted three new Kindle Scribe tablets, one with a color screen. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. It got a large language model power-up earlier this year in the form of Alexa+ (a paid upgrade for non-Amazon Prime subscribers), and now, Amazon has fresh hardware to take advantage of the assistant's new capabilities.

In sci-fi films such as'Frankenstein' and'Re-Animator', human bodies are brought back to life, existing in a freakish condition between life and death. While this sounds like the stuff of fantasy, a new study says a'third state' of existence really does exist in modern biology. According to the researchers, the third state is where the cells of a dead organism continue to function after the organism's death. Amazingly, after the organism's demise, its cells are gaining new capabilities that they did not possess in life, the biologists say. If more experiments with the cells from dead animals – including humans – show they can enter the third state, they could'redefine legal death'.

They say it's for all, but is it really?" So begins a 65-second, AI-generated animated video that touches on hot-button issues in the United States ranging from drug addiction and imprisonment rates to growing wealth inequality. As storm clouds gather over an urban landscape resembling New York City, the words "AMERICAN DREAM" hang in a darkening sky as the video ends. The message is clear: Despite its promises of a better life for all, the United States is in terminal decline. The video, titled American Dream or American Mirage, is one of a number of segments aired by Chinese state broadcaster CGTN – and shared far and wide on social media – as part of its A Fractured America animated series. Other videos in the series contain similar titles that invoke images of a dystopian society, such as American workers in tumult: A result of unbalanced politics and economy, and Unmasking the real threat: America's military-industrial complex. CGTN and the Chinese embassy in Washington, DC did not respond to requests for comment. The Fractured America series is just one example of how artificial intelligence (AI), with its ability to generate high-quality multimedia with minimal effort in seconds, is beginning to shape Beijing's propaganda efforts to undermine the United States' standing in the world. Henry Ajder, a UK-based expert in generative AI, said while the CGTN series does not attempt to pass itself off as genuine video, it is a clear example of how AI has made it far easier and cheaper to churn out content. "The reason that they've done it in this way is, you could hire an animator, and a voiceover artist to do this, but it would probably end up being more time-consuming.

When Amazon launched the Alexa virtual assistant nine years ago, its ability to decode voice commands to set a timer or play a song seemed almost magical. Today, the bar for impressive language skills is much higher, thanks to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Amazon is giving its voice assistant a reboot that takes advantage of the technology behind the new wave of chatbots that can engage in remarkably lifelike conversation. Amazon announced the upgrade to Alexa at an event held at its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The assistant will answer much more complex questions and engage in more flowing, open-ended conversation, dropping the need for users to say "Alexa …" at each turn.

Google is testing a new capability for its generative AI in search that will make it a more veritable rival to Microsoft's AI Copilot in Edge. The tech giant has launched an early experiment for its generative AI-powered Search experience (SGE) that breaks out of Search itself. Called "SGE while browsing," the feature can quickly generate the most salient points of long-form content found on the web. The tech giant positions it as a tool you can use to more easily digest complex topics that might require extensive research. However, the tool will not be able to provide key points for paywalled articles, only for some web pages that you can view free of charge.

Deep neural networks exhibit a fascinating spectrum of phenomena ranging from predictable scaling laws to the unpredictable emergence of new capabilities as a function of training time, dataset size and network size. Analysis of these phenomena has revealed the existence of concepts and algorithms encoded within the learned representations of these networks. While significant strides have been made in explaining observed phenomena separately, a unified framework for understanding, dissecting, and predicting the performance of neural networks is lacking. Here, we introduce the semantic landscape paradigm, a conceptual and mathematical framework that describes the training dynamics of neural networks as trajectories on a graph whose nodes correspond to emergent algorithms that are instrinsic to the learned representations of the networks. This abstraction enables us to describe a wide range of neural network phenomena in terms of well studied problems in statistical physics. Specifically, we show that grokking and emergence with scale are associated with percolation phenomena, and neural scaling laws are explainable in terms of the statistics of random walks on graphs. Finally, we discuss how the semantic landscape paradigm complements existing theoretical and practical approaches aimed at understanding and interpreting deep neural networks.

We introduce Kosmos-2, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), enabling new capabilities of perceiving object descriptions (e.g., bounding boxes) and grounding text to the visual world. Specifically, we represent refer expressions as links in Markdown, i.e., ``[text span](bounding boxes)'', where object descriptions are sequences of location tokens. Together with multimodal corpora, we construct large-scale data of grounded image-text pairs (called GrIT) to train the model. In addition to the existing capabilities of MLLMs (e.g., perceiving general modalities, following instructions, and performing in-context learning), Kosmos-2 integrates the grounding capability into downstream applications. We evaluate Kosmos-2 on a wide range of tasks, including (i) multimodal grounding, such as referring expression comprehension, and phrase grounding, (ii) multimodal referring, such as referring expression generation, (iii) perception-language tasks, and (iv) language understanding and generation. This work lays out the foundation for the development of Embodiment AI and sheds light on the big convergence of language, multimodal perception, action, and world modeling, which is a key step toward artificial general intelligence. Code and pretrained models are available at https://aka.ms/kosmos-2.

Open-source technologies have had a profound impact on the world of AI and machine learning, enabling developers, data scientists, and organizations to collaborate, innovate, and build better AI solutions. As large AI models like GPT-3.5 and DALL-E become more prevalent, organizations are also exploring ways to leverage existing open-source models and tools without needing to put a tremendous amount of effort into building them from scratch. Microsoft Azure AI is leading this effort by working closely with GitHub and data science communities, and providing organizations with access to a rich set of open-source technologies for building and deploying cutting-edge AI solutions. At Azure Open Source Day, we highlighted Microsoft's commitment to open source and how to build intelligent apps faster and with more flexibility using the latest open-source technologies that are available in Azure AI. Recent advancements in AI propelled the rise of large foundation models that are trained on a vast quantity of data and can be easily adapted to a wide variety of applications across various industries.

Since 3G, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has standardized features and specifications for wireless cellular networks around the world. "5G-Advanced enhancements will unleash a diversity of new capabilities for fixed/mobile broadband as well as vertical industries powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and full duplex technologies based on a single platform. Chris Pearson, President of 5G Americas said, "The work done by 3GPP in Release 17 improved 5G New Radio (NR) by adding support for new services, reduced-capability user equipment, non-terrestrial networks, frequency bands beyond 52GHz, and the multicast and broadcast service (MBS). He further added, "The next few years will see initial work on Release18, the 5G-Advanced standard, which will offer a boost to network performance and create even more opportunities." This 5G Americas paper provides a detailed background on 3GPP's work leading into 2025, focusing on the organization's processes, a review of major enhancements and new vertical applications, an assessment of global market trends and use cases, and a developmental timeline for currently active 3GPP releases. It also covers radio access technologies, highlighting 22 new and enhanced RAN features and capabilities.

As businesses grapple with growing volumes of data collected and generated by a myriad of cloud-based applications, Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled a wide range of new applications and product enhancements this week at its annual re:Invent conference that are geared to optimize data analytics and governance, and bolster the computing infrastructure to do so. Over the last few days, the company launched new services and features across its storage, compute, analytics, machine learning, databases, and security services, and made its first foray into supply chain management. Here is a roundup of the major announcements, with links to articles containing more details about the updates. A major theme at re:Invent 2022 was Amazon's efforts to ease data management and analytics for enterprises, as the company announced a dozen updates to data services. The updates included the launch of two new capabilities--Amazon Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift and Amazon Redshift integration for Apache Spark--that it claims will make the extract, transform, load (ETL) process obsolete.