In 1948, the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon, proposed modelling language in terms of the probability of the next word in a sentence given the previous words. These types of probabilistic language models were largely derided, most famously by linguist Noam Chomsky: "The notion of'probability of a sentence' is an entirely useless one." In 2022, 74 years after Shannon's proposal, ChatGPT appeared, which caught the attention of the public, with some even suggesting it was a gateway to super-human intelligence. Going from Shannon's proposal to ChatGPT took so long because the amount of data and computing time used was unimaginable even a few years before. ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) learned from a huge corpus of text from the internet.

Scientists say online daters and singletons'might as well let a stranger pick their dates' because they don't really know what they want in a romantic partner. US researchers say they've found little evidence that people actually desire romantic partners who uniquely fit their ideal description or type. Singletons often become so romantically interested in prospective matches that they convince themselves that their date does possess the traits they deem most desirable. A person's ideal partner does not reflect'any unique personal insight' of tastes, researchers say – and when we say what we like in a partner we're actually just describing qualities that everyone likes. The research could help shift online dating away from a model that focuses on stringently matching profiles and attributes.

It started with a chilling phone call: a voice on the other end of the line telling you to unplug your devices and that they are being listened to. Then it became something even more worrying, when you realise that it's true, and the Amazon Echo in your house has been sending your private conversations to random people. The revelation that an Amazon Echo speaker had been quietly recording its owners and then sharing those recordings have shocked and scared many people who own the useful but intimate little cylinders. Amazon has said that such an event is extremely rare – and that it is working to make it even less likely – but the fact that it can happen at all has worried many people who have let Alexa into their home. The bizarre occurrence seems to be the consequence of a relatively innocent sounding feature: a messaging tool that allows people to send voice notes to other people with Echos.

An "unlikely" string of events prompted Amazon's Echo personal assistant device to record a Portland, Oregon, family's private conversation and send it to an acquaintance in Seattle, the company said Thursday.

In case you needed another reminder that Amazon's Echo, an internet-connected recording device designed to listen and respond to verbal commands, can pose security and privacy risks for you and your loved ones, here you go. A family in Portland, Oregon contacted the company recently to ask it to investigate why the device had recorded private conversations in their home and sent the audio to a person in another state. The family did as told, after the employee told them about receiving an audio file containing what seemed like a private conversation. At first the family did not believe the employee, but then the employee was able to relay details of the private conversation. "My husband and I would joke and say I'd be these devices are listening to what we're saying," a woman named Danielle, who didn't want her last name used, told KIRO-TV in Portland.

A family in Portland, Ore., received a nightmarish phone call two weeks ago. "Unplug your Alexa devices right now," a voice on the other line said. Alexa-powered Echo devices in their house had silently sent recordings to the caller without the family's permission. The person, who happened to be an employee of the husband, was in the family's contact list. "My husband and I would joke and say, 'I'd bet these devices are listening to what we're saying,' " a woman who identified herself only by her first name, Danielle, told KIRO 7, a news station covering Seattle and western Washington state.