At seventy-three, the former front man of Talking Heads is still asking questions about what it means to be alive. "When you step onstage, it's a very artificial situation," Byrne said. "To pretend it's not--that isn't being authentic." If you spend enough time wandering around downtown Manhattan, the odds are that you'll eventually encounter the musician David Byrne riding a bicycle. One day this past June, pedalling alongside Byrne from his apartment in Chelsea to the Governors Island ferry, I watched at least a dozen New Yorkers clock his profile, whipping around to squint, softly pinching the arm of their companion and whispering, "Was that . . . By then, Byrne was gone, a tuft of white hair whizzing toward the horizon. Spotting Byrne on two wheels has become a New York City rite of passage, like sussing out the best halal cart in midtown, or dropping something important onto the subway tracks. During the few months that Byrne and I spent together, I never saw him traverse the ...

The UN's AI warnings grow louder Welcome back to In the Loop, new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. It was a busy week for our team: Tharin Pillay was on site during the UN General Assembly in New York, while Harry Booth and Nikita Ostrovsky were at the "All In AI" event in Montreal. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? The United Nations General Assembly met this week in New York. While the assembly members spent much of their time on the crises in Palestine and Sudan, they also devoted a good chunk to AI.

This story was supposed to have a different beginning. You were supposed to hear about how, earlier this week, I attended a splashy launch party for a new AI gadget--the Rabbit R1--in New York City, and then, standing on a windy curb outside the venue, pressed a button on the device to summon an Uber home. Instead, after maybe an hour of getting it set up and fidgeting with it, the connection failed. The R1 is a bright-orange chunk of a device, with a camera, a mic, and a small screen. Press and hold its single button, ask it a question or give it a command using your voice, and the cute bouncing rabbit on screen will perk up its ears, then talk back to you.

Two days later on another stage, in another venue, at another developers' conference, Nadella made his second unannounced appearance of the week--this time at GitHub Universe. There Thomas Dohmke, GitHub's CEO, was showing off a new version of the company's AI programming tool, Copilot, that can generate computer code from natural language. Nadella was effusive: "I can code again!" he exclaimed. Today, Nadella will be onstage speaking to developers at Microsoft Ignite, where the company is announcing even more AI-based developer tools, including an Azure AI Studio that will let devs choose between model catalogs from not only Microsoft, but also the likes of Meta, OpenAI, and Hugging Face, as well as new tools for customizing Copilot for Microsoft 365. If it seems like Nadella is obsessed with developers, you're not wrong.

Uematsu has always been passionate about performing the music he's written for video games onstage. While video game concerts have been taking place in Japan since 1987, when Koichi Sugiyama filled the Suntory Hall in Tokyo with his music from Dragon Quest on the NES, it wasn't until 2003 that Uematsu's music was performed onstage in the West. The success of Thomas Böcker's Symphonic Games Music Concert in Leipzig, Germany, spawned a symphony concert series that awakened Uematsu to the global popularity of Final Fantasy music concerts.

An early prototype of Tesla Inc.'s proposed Optimus humanoid robot slowly and awkwardly walked onto a stage, turned and waved to a cheering crowd at the company's artificial intelligence event Friday, Sept. 30. But the basic tasks by the robot with exposed wires and electronics -- as well as a later, next-generation version that had to be carried onstage by three men -- was a long way from CEO Elon Musk's vision of a human-like robot that can change the world. Musk told the crowd, many of whom might be hired by Tesla, that the robot can do much more than the audience saw on Sept. 30. He said it is also delicate and "we just didn't want it to fall on its face." Musk suggested that the problem with flashy robot demonstrations is that the robots are "missing a brain" and don't have the intelligence to navigate themselves, but he gave little evidence on Sept. 30 that Optimus was any more intelligent than robots developed by other companies and researchers.

An early prototype of Tesla Inc.'s proposed Optimus humanoid robot slowly and awkwardly walked onto a stage, turned, and waved to a cheering crowd at the company's artificial intelligence event Friday. But the basic tasks by the robot with exposed wires and electronics -- as well as a later, next generation version that had to be carried onstage by three men -- was a long way from CEO Elon Musk's vision of a human-like robot that can change the world. Musk told the crowd, many of whom might be hired by Tesla, that the robot can do much more than the audience saw Friday. He said it is also delicate and "we just didn't want it to fall on its face." Musk suggested that the problem with flashy robot demonstrations is that the robots are "missing a brain" and don't have the intelligence to navigate themselves, but he gave little evidence Friday that Optimus was any more intelligent than robots developed by other companies and researchers.

An early prototype of Tesla Inc.'s proposed Optimus humanoid robot slowly and awkwardly walked onto a stage, turned, and waved to a cheering crowd at the company's artificial intelligence event Friday. But the basic tasks by the robot with exposed wires and electronics -- as well as a later, next generation version that had to be carried onstage by three men -- was a long way from CEO Elon Musk's vision of a human-like robot that can change the world. Musk told the crowd, many of whom might be hired by Tesla, that the robot can do much more than the audience saw Friday. He said it is also delicate and "we just didn't want it to fall on its face." Musk suggested that the problem with flashy robot demonstrations is that the robots are "missing a brain" and don't have the intelligence to navigate themselves, but he gave little evidence Friday that Optimus was any more intelligent than robots developed by other companies and researchers.

The star of the show was an experimental model called LaMDA, which Google says could one day supercharge the ability of its conversational AI assistants and allow for more natural conversations. "It's really impressive to see how LaMDA can carry on a conversation about any topic," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the presentation. "It's amazing how sensible and interesting the conversation is. But it's still early research, so it doesn't get everything right." To demonstrate LaMDA's abilities, the company showed videos of two short conversations conducted with the model.

Google today awarded $25 million in grants to a range of organizations to help them apply machine learning to fight some of the world's biggest challenges. Recipients range from New York City's fire department, which wants to find ways to reduce emergency call response time, to an experiment to track air quality with sensors attached to mopeds in Uganda, information that may shape public policy. The program is also an extension of Google's AI for Social Good program, which provides flood forecasting to communities in India and is researching how to provide speech recognition for more people with disabilities. More than 2,600 applications were received since the contest was announced in October from 119 countries around the world, Google.org The news was announced today onstage at the Google I/O developer conference by CEO Sundar Pichai and AI head Jeff Dean.