I Let Google's'Auto Browse' AI Agent Take Over Chrome. Auto Browse can shop for clothes, plan a trip, and buy tickets for you. So, while testing Google's new "Auto Browse" feature for Chrome, I was filled with a strange sense of loss as I watched the AI agent open browser tabs and attempt to complete digital tasks with automated clicks. Sure, I felt some loss of control as the bot tapped away on my laptop screen. But also a kind of preemptive nostalgia for how the internet currently works, flaws and all, considering Google's plans to fundamentally alter the user experience.

Ads Are Coming to ChatGPT. OpenAI says ads will not influence ChatGPT's responses, and that it won't sell user data to advertisers. OpenAI plans to start testing ads inside ChatGPT in the coming weeks, marking a significant shift for one of the world's most widely used AI products. The company announced Friday that initial ad tests will roll out in the United States before expanding globally. OpenAI says ads will not influence ChatGPT's responses, and that all ads will appear in separate, clearly labeled boxes directly below the chatbot's answer.

At CES 2026, Everything Is AI. Integrated chatbots and built-in machine intelligence are no longer standout features in consumer tech. If companies want to win in the AI era, they've got to hone the user experience. The New Year's Eve champagne isn't even warm yet, and CES week is already upon us. The giant annual celebration of consumer tech kicks off the first full week of January as companies across the world convene in Las Vegas to hawk their latest innovations.

Presenting users with diverse responses from foundation models is crucial for enhancing user experience and accommodating varying preferences. However, generating multiple high-quality and diverse responses without sacrificing accuracy remains a challenge, especially when using greedy sampling. In this work, we propose a novel framework, Synthesize-Partition-Adapt (SPA), that leverages the abundant synthetic data available in many domains to elicit diverse responses from foundation models.By leveraging signal provided by data attribution methods such as influence functions, SPA partitions data into subsets, each targeting unique aspects of the data, and trains multiple model adaptations optimized for these subsets.Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in diversifying foundation model responses while maintaining high quality, showcased through the HumanEval and MBPP tasks in the code generation domain and several tasks in the natural language understanding domain, highlighting its potential to enrich user experience across various applications.

A surge of AI-generated content is frustrating Pinterest users and left some questioning whether the platform still works at all. For five years, Caitlyn Jones has used Pinterest on a weekly basis to find recipes for her son. In September, Jones spotted a creamy chicken and broccoli slow-cooker recipe, sprinkled with golden cheddar and a pop of parsley. She quickly looked at the ingredients and added them to her grocery list. But just as she was about to start cooking, having already bought everything, one thing stood out: The recipe told her to start by "logging" the chicken into the slow cooker.

This study focuses on understanding the complex dynamics between humans and AI systems by analyzing user reviews. While previous research has explored various aspects of human-AI interaction, such as user perceptions and ethical considerations, there remains a gap in understanding the specific concerns and challenges users face. By using a lexical approach to analyze 55,968 online reviews from G2.com, Producthunt.com, and Trustpilot.com, this preliminary research aims to analyze human-AI interaction. Initial results from factor analysis reveal key factors influencing these interactions. The study aims to provide deeper insights into these factors through content analysis, contributing to the development of more user-centric AI systems. The findings are expected to enhance our understanding of human-AI interaction and inform future AI technology and user experience improvements.

An AI-powered data visualization platform that automates the entire data analysis process, from uploading a dataset to generating an interactive visualization. Advanced machine learning algorithms are employed to clean and preprocess the data, analyse its features, and automatically select appropriate visualizations. The system establishes the process of automating AI-based analysis and visualization from the context of data-driven environments, and eliminates the challenge of time-consuming manual data analysis. The combination of a Python Flask backend to access the dataset, paired with a React frontend, provides a robust platform that automatically interacts with Firebase Cloud Storage for numerous data processing and data analysis solutions and real-time sources. Key contributions include automatic and intelligent data cleaning, with imputation for missing values, and detection of outliers, via analysis of the data set. AI solutions to intelligently select features, using four different algorithms, and intelligent title generation and visualization are determined by the attributes of the dataset. These contributions were evaluated using two separate datasets to assess the platform's performance. In the process evaluation, the initial analysis was performed in real-time on datasets as large as 100000 rows, while the cloud-based demand platform scales to meet requests from multiple users and processes them simultaneously. In conclusion, the cloud-based data visualization application allowed for a significant reduction of manual inputs to the data analysis process while maintaining a high quality, impactful visual outputs, and user experiences

Are traditional classification approaches irrelevant in this era of AI hype? We show that there are multiclass classification problems where predictive models holistically outperform LLM prompt-based frameworks. Given text and images from home-service project descriptions provided by Thumbtack customers, we build embeddings-based softmax models that predict the professional category (e.g., handyman, bathroom remodeling) associated with each problem description. We then compare against prompts that ask state-of-the-art LLM models to solve the same problem. We find that the embeddings approach outperforms the best LLM prompts in terms of accuracy, calibration, latency, and financial cost. In particular, the embeddings approach has 49.5\% higher accuracy than the prompting approach, and its superiority is consistent across text-only, image-only, and text-image problem descriptions. Furthermore, it yields well-calibrated probabilities, which we later use as confidence signals to provide contextualized user experience during deployment. On the contrary, prompting scores are overly uninformative. Finally, the embeddings approach is 14 and 81 times faster than prompting in processing images and text respectively, while under realistic deployment assumptions, it can be up to 10 times cheaper. Based on these results, we deployed a variation of the embeddings approach, and through A/B testing we observed performance consistent with our offline analysis. Our study shows that for multiclass classification problems that can leverage proprietary datasets, an embeddings-based approach may yield unequivocally better results. Hence, scientists, practitioners, engineers, and business leaders can use our study to go beyond the hype and consider appropriate predictive models for their classification use cases.

Autonomous micro-mobility platforms face challenges from the perspective of the typical deployment environment: large indoor spaces or urban areas that are potentially crowded and highly dynamic. While social navigation algorithms have progressed significantly, optimizing user comfort and overall user experience over other typical metrics in robotics (e.g., time or distance traveled) is understudied. Specifically, these metrics are critical in commercial applications. In this paper, we show how imitation learning delivers smoother and overall better controllers, versus previously used manually-tuned controllers. We demonstrate how DAAV's autonomous wheelchair achieves state-of-the-art comfort in follow-me mode, in which it follows a human operator assisting persons with reduced mobility (PRM). This paper analyzes different neural network architectures for end-to-end control and demonstrates their usability in real-world production-level deployments.

The proliferation of assistive chatbots offering efficient, personalized communication has driven widespread over-reliance on them for decision-making, information-seeking and everyday tasks. This dependence was found to have adverse consequences on information retention as well as lead to superficial emotional attachment. As such, this work introduces 8bit-GPT; a language model simulated on a legacy Macintosh Operating System, to evoke reflection on the nature of Human-AI interaction and the consequences of anthropomorphic rhetoric. Drawing on reflective design principles such as slow-technology and counterfunctionality, this work aims to foreground the presence of chatbots as a tool by defamiliarizing the interface and prioritizing inefficient interaction, creating a friction between the familiar and not.