Artificial Intelligence

On Tuesday, the peer-reviewed journal Science published a study that shows how an AI meteorology model from Google DeepMind called GraphCast has significantly outperformed conventional weather forecasting methods in predicting global weather conditions up to 10 days in advance. The achievement suggests that future weather forecasting may become far more accurate, reports The Washington Post and Financial Times.

Last week, Elon Musk flew to the UK to hype up the existential risk posed by artificial intelligence. A couple of days later, he announced that his latest company, xAI, had developed a powerful AI—one with fewer guardrails than the competition.

The AI model, called Grok (a name that means “to understand” in tech circles), “is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!” reads an announcement on the company’s website. “It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

After being convicted of federal crimes related to a foreign influence campaign, rapper Prakazrel "Pras" Michel says he should get a new trial because his lawyer "used an experimental AI program to write his closing argument." In a motion for a new trial filed Monday, the Fugees rapper's new lawyers say Michel's previous representation used "an experimental AI program in which they had a financial stake to write the closing argument, resulting in a frivolous and ineffectual closing argument."

On Tuesday, dozens of speakers gathered in San Francisco for the first TED conference devoted solely to the subject of artificial intelligence, TED AI. Many speakers think that human-level AI—often called AGI, for artificial general intelligence—is coming very soon, although there was no solid consensus about whether it will be beneficial or dangerous to humanity. But that debate was just Act One of a very long series of 30-plus talks that organizer Chris Anderson called possibly "the most TED content in a single day" presented in TED's nearly 40-year history.

About 10 years ago, Žiga Avsec was a PhD physics student who found himself taking a crash course in genomics via a university module on machine learning. He was soon working in a lab that studied rare diseases, on a project aiming to pin down the exact genetic mutation that caused an unusual mitochondrial disease.

Across a sterile white table in a windowless room, I’m introduced to a woman in her forties. She has a square jaw and blonde hair that has been pulled back from her face with a baby-blue scrunchie. “The girls call me Marmalade,” she says, inviting me to use her prison nickname. Early on a Wednesday morning, Marmalade is here, in a Finnish prison, to demonstrate a new type of prison labor.

Apple has built its own large language model (LLM) AI framework and associated chatbot service similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Bard, and Microsoft's ChatGPT-based Bing Chat, according to a new report.

On Tuesday, Anthropic introduced Claude 2, a large language model (LLM) similar to ChatGPT that can craft code, analyze text, and write compositions. Unlike the original version of Claude launched in March, users can try Claude 2 for free on a new beta website. It's also available as a commercial API for developers.

In June 2021, GitHub announced Copilot, a kind of auto-complete for computer code powered by OpenAI’s text-generation technology. It provided an early glimpse of the impressive potential of generative artificial intelligence to automate valuable work. Two years on, Copilot is one of the most mature examples of how the technology can take on tasks that previously had to be done by hand.

Amid increasing use of generative AI in music, the Recording Academy has updated its rules for the 66th annual Grammy Awards regarding the role of AI in considered works, Reuters reports. To be eligible for an award, a song must have meaningful human authorship. Purely algorithmically generated music cannot win a Grammy.