Terence Tao, a mathematics professor at UCLA, is a real-life superintelligence. The "Mozart of Math," as he is sometimes called, is widely considered the world's greatest living mathematician. He has won numerous awards, including the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematics, for his advances and proofs. Right now, AI is nowhere close to his level. But technology companies are trying to get it there.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. With artificial intelligence seemingly infiltrating every facet of our lives, one church decided to experiment with the technology for one of its services last week. The Violet Crown City Church, located in Austin, held an AI-generated service on Sunday, describing the experiment as "uncharted territory." "This Sunday we're entering somewhat uncharted territory by letting ChatGPT create the order of worship, prayers, sermon, liturgy, and even an original song for our 10 a.m. ChatGPT logo and AI Artificial Intelligence words are seen in this illustration taken, May 4, 2023. "The purpose is to invite us to consider the nature of truth and challenge our assumptions about what God can make sacred and inspired." The church acknowledged such an experiment would be easy to write off, but encouraged its members to keep an open mind. "[W]hy not attend instead and experience it for yourself?" the church said, clarifying that this would be a "one-time experiment and not something we'll likely do again." The church assuaged any worries that "Skynet" – a reference to the fictional AI system in the Terminator franchise – had taken control of the church. One church attendee told KXAN he was able to worship, but the service ultimately lacked the human touch. "I'm not sure that AI can actually express the emotions of love and kindness and empathy," Chambers said. "I think that we must practice love and express that.

"Control it all the way you want to," reads the slogan for AI girlfriend app Eva AI. "Connect with a virtual AI partner who listens, responds, and appreciates you." A decade since Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with his AI companion Samantha, played by Scarlett Johansson in the Spike Jonze film Her, the proliferation of large language models has brought companion apps closer than ever. As chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard get better at mimicking human conversation, it seems inevitable they would come to play a role in human relationships. And Eva AI is just one of several options on the market. Replika, the most popular app of the kind, has its own subreddit where users talk about how much they love their "rep", with some saying they had been converted after initially thinking they would never want to form a relationship with a bot.

Two companies are coming together to develop humanoid robots with AI that will be able to perform jobs from manufacturing to health care professions. Senators on Tuesday will grill OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the "perils and promise" of artificial intelligence as part of a push to better understand this quickly emerging technology and impose some kind of regulatory regime around it. Altman will testify before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, which will mark his first time as a witness at a public congressional hearing. His testimony comes several weeks after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he is working on a regulatory blueprint and as several members of the House and Senate have talked about the need for rules of the road for AI. Members of the subcommittee have made it clear over the last week that they want to learn more about AI to make sure it's used safely and responsibly.

Hollywood's worst-case scenario involving artificial intelligence (AI) is familiar as a blockbuster sci-fi film: Machines acquire humanlike intelligence, achieving sentience, and inevitably turn into evil overlords that attempt to destroy the human race. This narrative capitalizes on our innate fear of technology, a reflection of the profound change that often accompanies new technological developments. However, as Malcolm Murdock, machine-learning engineer and author of the 2019 novel The Quantum Price, puts it, "AI doesn't have to be sentient to kill us all. There are plenty of other scenarios that will wipe us out before sentient AI becomes a problem." "We are entering dangerous and uncharted territory with the rise of surveillance and tracking through data, and we have almost no understanding of the potential implications."

Once a quarter, VentureBeat publishes a special issue to take an in-depth look at trends of great importance. This week, we launched issue two, examining AI and security. Across a spectrum of stories, the VentureBeat editorial team took a close look at some of the most important ways AI and security are colliding today. It's a shift with high costs for individuals, businesses, cities, and critical infrastructure targets -- data breaches alone are expected to cost more than $5 trillion by 2024 -- and high stakes. Throughout the stories, you may find a theme that AI does not appear to be used much in cyberattacks today.

At dinner this weekend (at a hip salad joint), my friend (a machine-learning expert) talked about a conceptual framework for thinking about decisions: exploration versus exploitation. Just add the term "synergy," and that would be the most California sentence ever written. But the principle is important to think about, because it could help you shift your training paradigm to disrupt the running space. "Machine learning" is how computers can understand tasks without being explicitly programmed for them (think recommendation algorithms on Netflix that seem to know you a bit too well). "Reinforcement learning" is a subset of machine learning inspired by behavioral psychology that addresses how actions maximize cumulative rewards. "Exploration" is trying new things, branching out into uncharted territory.

Amper music uses a proprietary mix of methods to model the fundamentals of music and replicate them. The process can involve neural networks, the types of deep learning models that are fueling much of today's AI renaissance. But, just as often, the team uses other methods that were not specified in the interview. Ingraham said neural networks are good at divining some tasks in the creative process, but not others. This is because they often obscure larger context in favor of specific probabilities.

While today's brands are focused on trying to create exceptional customer experiences, there's a disconnect between marketers and consumers when it comes to understanding their preferences, according to a study from Boxever, which takes a look at consumers and marketers' perceptions around brand loyalty. When it comes to brand loyalty, marketers still focus competition on price alone. Fifty percent of marketers say a competitive price is still the most important factor, but 42% are beginning to consider customer experience as critical. Seventy-five percent of marketers see a greater lift in cross-channel campaigns. However, many companies still think in silos -- Web sites and emails were rated as priority channels among most marketers.

The games industry has been doing its best impression of British springtime's bewildering mix of sunshine and torrential rain with its own rapid cycles of joy and sadness. Holding up the joy end were two magnificent follies: a man managed to get stupid single-button-pressing game Flappy Bird to play on the screen of an e-cigarette, and someone else installed Windows 95 on an Apple Watch. But in that same month we also lost seminal British development studio Lionhead. It was responsible for all-time classics like giant pet-raising game Black & White, and Fable, an RPG that used the full gamut of English regional accents, as well as eccentricities such as The Movies, in which you could produce entire miniature feature films. Lionhead was latterly bought by Microsoft, and suffered the accidental destruction that large corporations routinely inflict on small, quirky developers. Electronic Arts, another well-meaning but lethal behemoth, has acquired and inadvertently milked to death nearly a dozen smaller studios in the last two decades, from SimCity developer Maxis to Westwood, maker of the once-great Command & Conquer series.