OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently published a post on his personal blog reflecting on AI progress and his predictions for how the technology will impact humanity's future. "We are now confident we know how to build AGI [artificial general intelligence] as we have traditionally understood it,"Altman wrote. He added that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is beginning to turn its attention to superintelligence. While there is no universally accepted definition for AGI, OpenAI has historically defined it as "a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work." Although AI systems already outperform humans in narrow domains, such as chess, the key to AGI is generality.

'The Big Weekend' panelists discuss rumors around Vice President Kamala Harris's future as predictions mount that former First Lady Michelle Obama could replace President Biden. Former Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown refused to comment on Vice President Kamala Harris after expressing confidence in President Biden as the "man of the hour," during a recent media interview. While talking about President Biden and overall feelings of the electorate, Brown told NBC News in a recent interview that the president was the "man of the hour." "I would say he's the man of the hour. He's there," Brown said, adding that he didn't have a political strategy for the Democrats.

Sundar Pichai told '60 Minutes' that the state of the technology is still somewhat of a black box to researchers. Researchers are accusing Google and CBS News of overestimating the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) following an interview between the Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and "60 Minutes." During the recent interview, Pichai claimed that AI programs developed by Google had displayed "emergent properties," or the ability to learn unexpected skills they were not trained on, puzzling researchers. For example, Google tech executive James Manyika claimed the company's AI had learned the language of Bengali without significant implementation of the information beforehand. "We discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in Bengali," Manyika said, "it can now translate all of Bengali."

Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world's first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare. The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers. That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven.

Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world's first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare. The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers. That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven.

Oakland, California – When Silicon Valley chipmaker Marvell learned that one of its chips was found in a Russian surveillance drone recovered in 2016, it set out to investigate how that came to be. The chip, which costs less than $2, was shipped in 2009 to a distributor in Asia, which sold it to another broker in Asia, which later went out of business. "We couldn't trace it any further," Marvell Technology Group Chief Operations Officer Chris Koopmans said in a recent interview. Years later, it reappeared in the drone recovered in Lithuania. Marvell's experience is one of myriad examples of how chipmakers lack ability to track where many of their lower-end products end up, executives and experts said.

Tesla's goal to release its level 5 Full Self Driving (FSD) mode autopilot capability in 2021 was deemed unrealistic by the CEO of competitor Waymo in a recent interview. Tesla is the only autonomous vehicle manufacturer using real-time cameras, rather than pre-mapped Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) to guide vehicle movement. Tesla also uses its own AI chips, developed after early experience with NVIDIA chips. "It is a misconception that you can simply develop a driver-assistance system further until one day you can magically jump to a fully autonomous driving system," stated John Krafcik, CEO of Waymo, the self-driving startup spun off from Google's X lab, in a recent interview with German business magazine Manager Magazin, reported in Observer. Krafcik acknowledged that Tesla "is developing a really good driver assistance system," but very different.

Organizations are looking to secure their data and identities with the help of AI, as business models move online and increased cybercrime follows. The new era of identity authentication incorporates AI and biometrics in more sophisticated systems that make it more difficult for cybercriminals. Biometric data such as fingerprints help prevent identity theft, since criminals would not be able to gain access to information by only providing credentials. "In order to protect data, digital identities need to meet a stricter set of security regulations." "Stolen identities can allow criminals to impersonate someone else and access secured resources," he stated.

We've seen no shortage of scandals when it comes to AI. In 2016, Microsoft Tay, an AI bot built to learn in real time from social media content turned into a misogynist, racist troll within 24 hours of launch. A ProPublica report claimed that an algorithm -- built by a private contractor -- was more likely to rate black parole candidates as higher risk. A landmark U.S. government study reported that more than 200 facial recognition algorithms -- comprising a majority in the industry -- had a harder time distinguishing non-white faces. The bias in our human-built AI likely owes something to the lack of diversity in the humans who built them.

As automation and artificial intelligence continue to transform Canadian workplaces, post-secondary institutions across the country say they are working to prepare students for jobs that may not even exist yet. Climate change, data science and cybersecurity are increasingly in the spotlight at Canadian universities as they adapt their offerings to address "the needs not only of a changing marketplace but of a changing society," Paul Davidson, president of the association Universities Canada, said in a recent interview. Forecasting can prove difficult, however. "There are numbers like 50 per cent of the jobs (of the future) have not yet been defined, and so how does any organization … prepare for that kind of change?" A research paper released in 2018 showed half of Canadian jobs will be affected by automation in the next decade, and so-called "human skills" such as critical thinking and problem solving will be key to remaining competitive and resilient in an era of disruption and artificial intelligence.