AI

How do machine learning models do what they do? And are they really “thinking” or “reasoning” the way we understand those things? This is a philosophical question as much as a practical one, but a new paper making the rounds Friday suggests that the answer is, at least for n

In late September, Shield AI co-founder Brandon Tseng swore that weapons in the U.S. would never be fully autonomous — meaning an AI algorithm would make the final decision to kill someone. “Congress doesn't want that,” the defense tech founder told technewss. “No one wants that.”&nb

Hiya, folks, welcome to technewss's regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This week in AI, synthetic data rose to prominence. OpenAI last Thursday introduced Canvas, a new way to interact with ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbo

Amazon announced on Wednesday the upcoming addition of new AI-powered package retrieval technology to its electric vehicle fleet. The vision-based tech is designed to help drivers prioritize packages. Vision-Assisted Package Retrieval (VAPR) works by highlighting packages with either a green circl

Meta is bringing its AI chatbot Meta AI to six countries today, including Brazil, the U.K., the Philippines, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay, Mark Zuckerberg said today in an announcement on his WhatsApp channel. The company said that apart from these countries, the company plans to release Meta

Amazon on Wednesday introduced the latest in a series of AI features and products aimed at consumers: AI shopping guides. The guides, arriving Thursday, will span over 100 product types on Amazon.com and will help to consolidate the key information consumers tend to research before making a purchas

It has been a big week for Nobel Prizes in the world of artificial intelligence. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today announced the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners for 2024, with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Director John Jumper sharing one-half of the prize, with Dav

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024. Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield are jointly sharing the prestigious award for their work on artificial neural networks starting back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. More specifically, Hinton and Hopfield were gi

Uber is continuing its push to bring more electric vehicles onto the ride-hail and delivery platform, and it thinks giving drivers a chatbot to answer all their EV questions will help. Starting early 2025, Uber will launch an AI assistant for drivers in the U.S. powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o. At

Will generative AI tools help people build better websites, or will they just fill the web with spam? With the recent launch of Design Intelligence, a new website builder full of generative AI tools, Squarespace is betting on the former. I spoke with chief product officer Paul Gubbay about Design

On Sunday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill, AB 2013, requiring companies developing generative AI systems to publish a high-level summary of the data that they used to train their systems. Among other points, the summaries must cover who owns the data and how it was procured or licen

Are you confused about artificial general intelligence, or AGI? It’s that thing OpenAI is obsessed with ultimately creating in a way that “benefits all of humanity.” You may want to take them seriously since they just raised $6.6 billion to get closer to that goal. But if you

Google is upgrading its visual search app, Lens, with the ability to answer near-real-time questions about your surroundings. English-speaking Android and iOS users with the Google app installed can now start capturing a video via Lens and ask questions about objects of interest in the video.

After Meta recently reignited controversial plans to use the public posts of U.K. Facebook and Instagram users’ as AI training fodder, the social networking giant has taken the next step and begun to notify local users it will soon start helping itself to their information again. The bad ne