Web search is such a routine part of daily life that it’s easy to forget how marvelous it is. Type into a little text box and a complex array of technologies—vast data centers, ravenous web crawlers, and stacks of algorithms that poke and parse a query—spring into action to serve …

Six months ago this week, many prominent AI researchers, engineers, and entrepreneurs signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on development of AI systems more capable than OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 language generator. It argued that AI is advancing so quickly and unpredictably that it could eliminate countless jobs, …

FedEx unveiled a two-armed robot called DexR this week that’s designed to automate one of the trickiest tasks facing the company’s human employees—loading a truck with packages. The new robot aims to use artificial intelligence to stack rows of differently sized boxes inside a delivery truck as efficiently as possible, …

I recently needed to contact the CEO of a startup called Lindy, a company developing personal assistants powered by artificial intelligence. Instead of looking for it myself, I turned to an AI helper of my own, an open source program called Auto-GPT, typing in “Find me the email address of …

When Amazon launched the Alexa virtual assistant nine years ago, its ability to decode voice commands to set a timer or play a song seemed almost magical. Today, the bar for impressive language skills is much higher, thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Amazon is giving its voice assistant a reboot that …

OpenAI has announced Dall-E 3, its latest AI art tool. It uses OpenAI’s smash-hit chatbot, ChatGPT, to help create more complex and carefully composed works of art by automatically expanding on a prompt in a way that gives the generator more detailed and coherent instruction. What’s new with Dall-E 3 …

A couple of weeks ago, startup CEO Flo Crivello typed a message asking his personal assistant Lindy to change the length of an upcoming meeting from 30 to 45 minutes. Lindy, a software agent that happens to be powered by artificial intelligence, found a dozen or so 30-minute meetings on …

You’d have to be pretty brave to bet against the idea that applying more computing power and data to machine learning—a recipe that birthed ChatGPT—won’t lead to further advances of some kind in artificial intelligence. Even so, you’d be braver still to bet that combo will produce specific advances or …

Governments around the world are rushing to embrace the algorithms that breathed some semblance of intelligence into ChatGPT, apparently enthralled by the enormous economic payoff expected from the technology. Two new reports out this week show that nation-states are also likely rushing to adapt the same technology into weapons of …

In May, Sputnik International, a state-owned Russian media outlet, posted a series of tweets lambasting US foreign policy and attacking the Biden administration. Each prompted a curt but well-crafted rebuttal from an account called CounterCloud, sometimes including a link to a relevant news or opinion article. It generated similar responses …