Artificial Intelligence news

There’s nothing more romantic than having an AI-powered bot write your vows for you. Earlier this month, wedding planning platform Joy launched a new OpenAI-powered “Wedding Writer’s Block” tool that uses AI technology to generate a draft for one of the most important speeches of your life.
The AI assistant is designed to help write vows and wedding toast speeches, among other “wedding-related wordage,” the company claims, like a love story for your wedding we

Following on the heels of GPT-4’s buzzy debut and the announcement of Microsoft 365’s AI makeover, Baidu, China’s search engine giant, introduced its Ernie Bot.
Since ChatGPT blew the world away, Baidu has been widely considered the closest Chinee candidate to build an equivalent to the OpenAI chatbot. Naturally, Ernie’s launch was much anticipated. On Thursday, Baidu CEO Robin Li gave a one-hour presentation on Ernie that only offered a small glimpse into the chatbot. Th

A year or two before launching Actuator, someone on staff floated the idea of my writing a weekly robotics newsletter. I balked at the suggestion. Surely, I suggested, we would be struggling to fill the pages by week two. It’s not so much that I doubted whether there was enough robotics content to keep the engine running; it was more a question of whether there would be enough relevant robotics content.
We do a lot of vetting at TechCrunch. Not everything that crosses over the transom make

My favorite approach to human-robot interaction is minimalism. I’ve met a lot of robots, and some of the ones that have most effectively captured my heart are those that express themselves through their fundamental simplicity and purity of purpose. What’s great about simple, purpose-driven robots is that they encourage humans to project needs and wants and personality onto them, letting us do a lot of the human-robot-interaction (HRI) heavy lifting.In terms of simple, purpose-driven

At its virtual “Future of Work” event, Microsoft today announced the launch of an AI copilot — and make no mistake, Microsoft is all-in on using this ‘copilot’ metaphor across all of its products — to Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate. The idea here is to use AI to make using these tools for building line-of-business apps, flows and bots even easier by letting users use natural language to describe what they want to build.
“With Copilot

Warp, a fast-growing startup that is working on building a better terminal, today announced that it has added a new chat feature (unsurprisingly based on ChatGPT) that will help its user with using the command line and troubleshooting errors.
We’ve obviously seen a flood of ChatGPT-enabled services lately, with some more interesting than others, but this feels like a legitimately useful application of the technology. The command line is, after all, isn’t necessarily the most user fri

Exclusive: Voiceprint program used by millions of Australians to access data held by government agencies shown to have a serious security flaw Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastA voice identification system used by the Australian government for millions of people has a serious security flaw, a Guardian Australia investigation has found.Centrelink and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) both give people the option of using a “voiceprint”, along

Exclusive: Voiceprint program used by millions of Australians to access data held by government agencies shown to have a serious security flaw Get our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastA voice identification system used by the Australian government for millions of people has a serious security flaw, a Guardian Australia investigation has found.Centrelink and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) both give people the option of using a “voiceprint”, along

If not for last week’s Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse almost every conversation in tech seems to be centered around AI and chatbots. In the last few days, Microsoft-backed OpenAI released a new language model called GPT-4. Its competitor Anthropic released the Claude chatbot. Google said that it is integrating AI into its Workspace tools like Gmail and Docs. Microsoft Bing has brought attention to itself with a chatbot-enabled search. The one name missing from the action? Apple.
Last m

There’s a long-standing debate in the world of logistics robotics. On one side stand the greenfield folk, who insist that the best possible experience is one built from the ground up, with these automated systems at its core. Brownfield proponents, on the other hand, point to the time and money required for a full rebuild. Many firms looking to automate their warehouses simply don’t have the resources to effectively start from scratch.
Most people ultimately land on some combination

With inflation sparking an increase in the cost of repairs, labor and claims, fees for insurance are similarly spiking across the board. Car insurance premiums rose 13.7% nationally over the past year, according to a study from Bankrate.com. Home insurance, meanwhile, climbed 12.1% year-on-year, Policygenius found.
But Jonathan Matus argues that it doesn’t have to be that way. He’s the founder of Fairmatic, a company that’s applying AI to — at least according to him &mdas

Shares plummet after Ernie Bot AI chatbot software falls short of expectations at unveiling in BeijingThe Chinese search engine company Baidu’s shares have fallen by as much as 10% after the company unveiled its ChatGPT-like AI software, with investors unimpressed by the bot’s display of linguistic and maths skills.The artificial intelligence-powered ChatGPT, created by the San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems and programming cod

The rise of ChatGPT has fuelled growth in the public awareness of AI, as well as the growing discourse around AI ethics. How should AI be used? What are its implications for society, not just business?
The inherent bias within AI applications — remember, it’s not just how the algorithm is built and by whom, it’s also about how the model itself is built — means we should be treading carefully in this brave new AI wold.
After all, there have been very public examples o

Microsoft’s Bing is enjoying the spotlight for the first time in a decade after it released a GPT-powered interface last month. But the tech giant has so far been cautious about the pace at which it is making the new Bing offering — powered by  OpenAI’s GPT-4 tech — available to users. But it appears, Bing is bringing those walls down.
Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, appears to have lifted the waitlist from the new Bing, ostensibly allowing anyone to gain inst

Artificial intelligence in its current form is based on the wholesale appropriation of existing culture, and the notion that it is actually intelligent could be actively dangerousIn January 2021, the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI gave a limited release to a piece of software called Dall-E. The software allowed users to enter a simple description of an image they had in their mind and, after a brief pause, the software would produce an almost uncannily good interpretation of