Michael Skelly hasn't learned to take no for an answer. For much of the last 15 years, the energy entrepreneur has worked to develop long-haul transmission lines to carry wind power across the Great Plains, Midwest, and Southwest. But so far, he has little to show for the effort. Skelly has long argued that building such lines and linking together the nation's grids would accelerate the shift from coal- and natural-gas-fueled power plants to the renewables needed to cut the pollution driving climate change. But his previous business shut down in 2019, after halting two of its projects and selling off interests in three more.

OpenAI's latest model offers a more human-like conversational experience OpenAI announced its newest artificial intelligence model, called GPT-4o, which will soon power some versions of the company's ChatGPT product. The upgraded ChatGPT can swiftly respond to text, audio and video inputs from its real-time conversational partner – all while speaking with inflections and wording that convey a strong sense of emotion and personality. The company demonstrated the emotional mimicry of the new voice mode during a supposedly live OpenAI presentation, featuring both the ChatGPT mobile app and a new desktop app, on 13 May. Speaking in a female-sounding voice and responding to the name ChatGPT, the new AI's conversational capabilities seemed more akin to the personable AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson in the 2013 science fiction film Her than to the more canned and robotic responses of typical voice assistant technologies. How this moment for AI will change society forever (and how it won't) "The new GPT-4o voice-to-voice interaction more closely parallels human-human interaction," says Michelle Cohn at the University of California, Davis.