Women in AI: Sandra Wachter, professor of data ethics at Oxford

"">To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, technewss is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who've contributed to the AI revolution. We'll publish several pieces throughout the year as th

OpenAI announces new board members, reinstates CEO Sam Altman

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has a seat at the table — or board, rather — once again. OpenAI today announced that Altman will be rejoining the company’s board of directors several months after losing his seat and being pushed out as OpenAI’s CEO. Joining hi

Women in AI: Sarah Kreps, professor of government at Cornell

"">To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, technewss is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who've contributed to the AI revolution. We'll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI bo

Why most AI benchmarks tell us so little

On Tuesday, startup Anthropic released a family of generative AI models that it claims achieve best-in-class performance. Just a few days later, rival Inflection AI unveiled a model that it asserts comes close to matching some of the most capable models out there, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, in

Turnitin laid off staff earlier this year, after CEO forecast AI would allow it to cut headcount

People worry that advances in AI will lead to job losses, but rarely does a company’s CEO openly admit that AI will help to reduce their headcount. Turnitin, a plagiarism detection company whose CEO Chris Caren last year warned that, in 18 months, his company would be able to reduce 20% of it

Political deepfakes are spreading like wildfire thanks to GenAI

This year, billions of people will vote in elections around the world. We will see — and have seen — high-stakes races in more than 50 countries, from Russia and Taiwan to India and El Salvador. Demagogic candidates — and looming geopolitical threats — would test even the mo

OpenAI says Musk only ever contributed $45M, wanted to merge with Tesla or take control

OpenAI, the most valuable AI startup, said Wednesday it intends to dismiss all claims made by Elon Musk in a recent lawsuit and suggested that the billionaire entrepreneur, who was involved in the company’s co-founding, didn’t really have that much impact on its development and success.

Amazon’s new Rufus chatbot isn’t bad — but it isn’t great, either

Last month, Amazon announced that it’d launch a new AI-powered chatbot, Rufus, inside the Amazon Shopping app for Android and iOS. After a few days’ delay, the company began to roll out Rufus to early testers February 1 — including some of us at technewss — to help find and

Google takes aim at SEO-optimized junk pages and spam with new search update

Google today took aim at the SEO industry, which has gamified search rankings to destroy the value of Google Search results. Often, consumers’ web searches for product recommendations, reviews, deals, and discounts return low-quality or spammy websites that don’t deliver the expert revi

Competition in AI video generation heats up as DeepMind alums unveil Haiper

AI-powered video generation is a hot market on the back of OpenAI’s releasing the Sora model last month. Two DeepMind alums, Yishu Miao and Ziyu Wang, have publicly released their video-generation tool Haiper with its own AI model underneath. Miao, who was previously working at TikTok in the

India reverses AI stance, requires government approval for model launches

India has waded into global AI debate by issuing an advisory that requires “significant” tech firms to get government permission before launching new models. India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT issued the advisory to firms on Friday. The advisory — not published on public

Francine Bennett uses data science to make AI more responsible

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, technewss is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who've contributed to the AI revolution. We'll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom

Karine Perset helps governments understand AI

To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, technewss is launching a series of interviews focusing on remarkable women who've contributed to the AI revolution. We'll publish several pieces throughout the year as the AI boom

Rants, AI and other notes from Upfront Summit

The venture capital stars were shining in Los Angeles this week at the Upfront Summit, an invite-only VC conference founded by Mark Suster and known for going all-out. For example, there were Coco robots serving drinks and lots of pink. AI was the talk of the town again and even some celebrities gr