Former Vice President Kamala Harris closed a big door when she announced Wednesday that she would not run for California governor. But she left open a heap of others. Departing presidents, vice presidents, first ladies and failed presidential candidates have pursued a wide variety of paths in the past. Empowered with name recognition and influence but with no official role to fill, they possess the freedom to choose their next adventure. Al Gore took up a cause in global warming, while George W. Bush took up painting.

This past spring, as I closed out my 18th year of teaching, I felt anxiety that I'd never before felt at the end of a school year. By the time grades are submitted and signs of summer arrive, teachers are typically able to breathe for the first time in nine months. Instead of the relaxation, joy, and accomplishment that typically awaits the end of an academic year, I was consumed with worry that this might be the last time in a nearly two-decade career that I taught a class without having to worry about AI. I get it–AI has technically been around forever, and natural language processing tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT are built on decades of research. Anyone who has used spellcheck or language translation apps or heard a spoken text message has used language processing tools driven by AI technology.

When Sen. Chris Murphy watched the video "A.I. Dilemma," he saw a familiar face. Tristan Harris, a tech ethicist well-known among lawmakers for ringing the alarm about the harmful effects of social networks, was now arguing that artificial intelligence represents a potentially catastrophic advance - riskier perhaps to human survival than the advent of nuclear weapons. The video's message - which has been embraced by some tech luminaries like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak - resonated with Murphy (D-Conn.), who quickly fired off a tweet. We aren't ready," the senator warned.

Companies behind ChatGPT and competing technologies have launched a preemptive charm offensive, highlighting their attempts to build artificial intelligence responsibly and ethically, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Since Microsoft's investment in OpenAI -- which allows it to incorporate ChatGPT into its products -- the company's president, Brad Smith, has discussed artificial intelligence on trips to Washington. Executives from OpenAI, who have lobbied Washington for years, are meeting with lawmakers who are newly interested in artificial intelligence following the release of ChatGPT.

"The end goal of good AI infrastructure is similar to traditional IT," said Ken Zamkow, general manager for North America at Run:AI, an AI virtualization tools provider. This includes enabling users in the organization, such as data scientists and engineers, to work faster and more efficiently while keeping costs in check and maintaining control, visibility and security. However, the underlying technologies are different because AI is based on long and repetitive experiments rather than pure coding; the data sets involved are significantly larger; and the compute needs are much greater and involve much more expensive hardware. "Getting all of this right is the key and the main challenge," Zamkow said. Part of the problem lies in navigating the huge variety of workflows, tools, frameworks and platforms that are available for AI training and deployment.

The European Commission has said it intends to draw up new rules to protect citizens against misuses of artificial intelligence (AI) tech. It likened the current situation to "the Wild West" and said it would focus on "high-risk" cases. But some experts are disappointed that a white paper it published did not provide more details. A leaked draft had suggested a ban on facial recognition's use in public areas would be proposed. Industry Commissioner Thierry Breton suggested the new legislation would be comparable to the General Data Protection Regulation.

The Defense Department has pinned its hopes on someday putting artificial intelligence tools in the hands of warfighters to help them make data-driven decisions on the battlefield, but given the current state of the technology and the dearth of training data that algorithms need, that goal appears difficult to achieve in the short-term. The defense community, including the Defense AI Center stood up last year, have rolled out AI pilots on everything from predictive maintenance of aircraft and vehicles to autonomous ships. For all of DoD's aspirational projects, AI tools tend not to fare well in situations where data is spare or not structured in a way that the algorithm can't process. Ranjeev Mittu, the head of the Naval Research Lab's information management and decision architectures branch, said the AI algorithms of today are starved for reliable training data to make informed decisions in the real world. "It's not really clear how much data is needed under what scenarios, for what kinds of problems yet, and I think it's kind of emerging. There's a lot of research going on, but I think fundamentally there's still a lot more research that needs to be done in the relationship between data and training, and what the right tradeoffs are for the different kinds of problems," Mittu said in an interview with Federal News Network.

Decades after Isaac Asimov first wrote his laws for robots, their ever-expanding role in our lives requires a radical new set of rules, legal and AI expert Frank Pasquale warned on Thursday. The world has changed since sci-fi author Asimov in 1942 wrote his three rules for robots, including that they should never harm humans, and today's omnipresent computers and algorithms demand up-to-date measures. According to Pasquale, author of "The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms Behind Money and Information", four new legally-inspired rules should be applied to robots and AI in our daily lives. "The first is that robots should complement rather than substitute for professionals" Pasquale told AFP on the sidelines of a robotics conference at the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences. "Rather than having a robot doctor, you should hope that you have a doctor who really understands how AI works and gets really good advice from AI, but ultimately it's a doctor's decision to decide what to do and what not to do." "The second is that we need to stop robotic arms races. There's a lot of people right now who are investing in war robots, military robots, policing robots."

Legendary programmer Chris Lattner has had a roller coaster of a year. He left Apple (where he developed the Swift programming language) to help build Tesla's Autopilot technology, only to leave months later after realizing that he wasn't a good fit. However, Lattner might be settling down. He just announced that he's joining Google (namely, the Brain team) to make AI "accessible to everyone." While Lattner doesn't specify exactly what he'll be doing, Bloomberg sources say he'll be working on the TensorFlow language Google uses to simplify AI programming.

The marketing world may soon get some new guidance on what they should be doing with artificial intelligence. A working group focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning is being launched by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today with the goal of helping marketing, technology and advertising executives navigate the impact AI and machine learning will have on the digital world of advertising. "IAB formed this group based on significant member interest," said Susan Borst, deputy director, mobile, at IAB One of the challenges of AI is grasping what it actually means and how to tap into it. "The questions we are hearing the most relate to definitions, use cases and governance/ethics," said Borst. "These are the areas that we will focus on first."