AI

Amazon announced Friday evening that it has hired Covariant’s founders — Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan — along with “about a quarter” of the startup’s employees. It’s also signed a non-exclusive license to use Covariant's robotic foundation models. Earlier

Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, caused a stir a few months ago.  He announced that the organization's prestigious Grammy Awards would finally accept music made with artificial intelligence. At first, people were confused, and then Mason came out to clarify that he meant on

Google is gearing up for the upcoming U.S. presidential election by rolling out safeguards for more of its generative AI products. Although the company already previously announced that it would restrict Gemini queries related to the election, it’s now applying additional restrictions to its

Jam & Tea Studios is the latest gaming startup implementing generative AI to transform the way players interact with non-playable characters (NPCs) in video games.  Traditionally, video game NPCs are directed by predetermined scripts, which can feel repetitive, unrealistic and boring. It

Gmail users on Android devices can now chat directly with Google’s AI assistant, Gemini, about their emails in the Gmail app. Google rolled out the new feature, Gmail Q&A, on Thursday to users who pay for Gemini, according to a blog post, and announced the feature would be coming to iOS d

Butterflies AI, the new social network where humans and AIs interact with each other, is launching a new Clones feature that turns you into an AI character. This latest addition builds on a feature launched to the public back in June that lets users create AI personas, called Butterflies, that au

Apple has added yet more AI features in its latest developer betas for iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1, and this time we’re getting the ability to remove objects from photos. The feature, called Clean Up, lets users identify and remove objects from pictures without affecting the rest o

Hiya, folks, welcome to technewss's regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Say what you will about generative AI. But it’s commoditizing — or, at least, it appears to be. In early August, both Google and OpenAI slashed pr

"">Back in February, Google paused its AI-powered chatbot Gemini's ability to generate images of people after users complained of historical inaccuracies. Told to depict “a Roman legion,” for example, Gemini would show an anachronistic group of racially diverse so

How many times does the letter “r” appear in the word “strawberry”? According to formidable AI products like GPT-4o and Claude, the answer is twice. Large language models (LLMs) can write essays and solve equations in seconds. They can synthesize terabytes of data faster th

Given India’s language diversity, digital content companies already face a challenge in trying to show and translate content accurately. Google is facing a similar problem with AI Overviews recently rolled out in the country. The company introduced Hindi support for AI Overviews in the count

Smart scheduling and calendar tool Clockwise is changing up its interface with an AI-powered assistant called Prism that lets you manage scheduling conflicts, create or clear events in bulk, and turn to-do lists into calendar blocks with text prompts. Like rival startups YC-backed Vimcal and Recla

Generative AI models aren’t actually humanlike. They have no intelligence or personality — they’re simply statistical systems predicting the likeliest next words in a sentence. But like interns at a tyrannical workplace, they do follow instructions without complaint — includ

Mathematician and scientist Stephen Wolfram grew up in a household where his mother was a philosophy professor at Oxford University. As such, his younger self didn't want anything to do with the subject, but an older and perhaps wiser Wolfram sees value in thinking deeply about things. Now he w