Google plans to add conversational artificial-intelligence features to its flagship search engine, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said, as it deals with pressure from chatbots such as ChatGPT and wider business issues. Advances in AI would supercharge Google's ability to answer an array of search queries, Mr. Pichai said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He dismissed the notion that chatbots posed a threat to Google's search business, which accounts for more than half of revenue at parent Alphabet Inc.

OpenAI, the research lab behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot, is in talks to sell existing shares in a tender offer that would value the company at around $29 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, making it one of the most valuable U.S. startups on paper despite generating little revenue. Venture-capital firms Thrive Capital and Founders Fund are in talks to buy shares, the people said. The tender could total at least $300 million in OpenAI share sales, they said. The deal is structured as a tender offer, with the investors buying shares from existing shareholders such as employees, the people said.

It is my view that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner

Founded in 2016 by its chief executive, Marcus Hyung-Sik Kim, the Seoul-based firm plans to use the investment to further its expansion into the U.S. and other key markets, said Robert Nestor, Qraft's U.S. CEO. The companies declined to disclose Qraft's valuation. Tokyo's SoftBank is one of the world's largest investors in technology companies, with its Vision Fund and a successor managing a portfolio of more than $100 billion. Asset managers, once skeptical of the value of AI and mindful of their staffs' concerns that the programs would replace human stock- and bond-pickers, are now looking to add data-analysis tools that can help them combat chronic underperformance and justify the fees they charge investors. The industry's awakening has triggered an arms race to hire the programmers who can develop those tools and spot the market signals hidden in the data.

They would also look to make available computing power to analyze the data, with the goal of allowing access to researchers across the country. "This is a moment that is calling us to be strengthening our speed and scale" when it comes to advances in AI technology, said National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan in an interview. "It is also calling us to make sure that innovation is everywhere." The task force, which Congress mandated in the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020, is part of an effort across the government to ensure the U.S. remains at the vanguard of technological advancements. The Senate this week approved a bipartisan bill to invest $250 billion in technology research and development, and the House is considering similar legislation.

WASHINGTON--The Biden administration launched an initiative Thursday aiming to make more government data available to artificial intelligence researchers, part of a broader push to keep the U.S. on the cutting edge of the crucial new technology. The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force, a group of 12 members from academia, government, and industry led by officials from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation, will draft a strategy for potentially giving researchers access to stores of data about Americans, from demographics to health and driving habits. They would also look to make available computing power to analyze the data, with the goal of allowing access to researchers across the country. "This is a moment that is calling us to be strengthening our speed and scale" when it comes to advances in AI technology, said National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan in an interview. "It is also calling us to make sure that innovation is everywhere."

Walmart Inc. has ended its effort to use roving robots in store aisles to keep track of its inventory, reversing a yearslong push to automate the task with the hulking machines after finding during the coronavirus pandemic that humans can help get similar results. The retail giant has ended its contract with robotics company Bossa Nova Robotics Inc., with which it joined over the past five years to gradually add six-foot-tall inventory-scanning machines to stores.

Amazon.com Inc. has adjusted its product-search system to more prominently feature listings that are more profitable for the company, said people who worked on the project--a move, contested internally, that could favor Amazon's own brands. Late last year, these people said, Amazon optimized the secret algorithm that ranks listings so that instead of showing customers mainly the most-relevant and best-selling listings when they search--as it had for more than a decade--the site also gives a boost to items that are more profitable...