Artificial Intelligence

Amazon announced a $20-and-under “Haul” section yesterday to compete with platforms like Temu — and it’s already filled with questionable listings.

ModernRetail rounded up a few, and scrolling through Amazon, it’s not totally clear to me whether images are AI-generated or just very poorly edited (probably both). You have to hand it to Amazon, though: it does look exactly like Temu.

The AI chatbot can now “see” what’s on your screen in VS Code, Xcode, Terminal, and iTerm2, allowing ChatGPT to provide suggestions or answer questions about your code without having to copy and paste it into the app.

Though ChatGPT still can’t write code directly within coding platforms, it seems OpenAI is working on that.

The company announced today it’s opening up its AI ads tool to all advertisers — so prepare to see more AI content on your feed.

TikTok’s Symphony Creative Studio lets advertisers remix content and generate new videos promoting products in just a few minutes. Some of those ads even include AI avatars resembling humans.

Elon Musk’s xAI has a rapidly growing supercomputer that other AI companies are worried about, The Information reports. Hopefully, they also find out how the facility affects the local environment.

The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern spent a full day only interacting with chatbots from Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft to test their companionship skills.

In her delightfully comical blog, Stern notes that all four are “convincing” at first, but it's an act that can’t replace genuine human interaction:

“My big worry is that some people, especially lonely people, might not see the wall. All four bots stayed guarded on depression and other emotional issues, redirecting me to hotlines or encouraging human conversations.”

The AI-powered search engine will begin with showing labeled ads formatted as “sponsored follow-up questions” that will appear next to answers in the US.

TechCrunch reports:

“Perplexity’s embrace of ads stands in contrast to OpenAI’s decision not to launch its AI-powered search tool, ChatGPT Search, with ads. But rival Google has similarly piloted ads in its AI search experience, AI Overviews — recently bringing ads to mobile in the U.S. for certain queries”

OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman, who took a 3-month leave of absence from the company, is back at the company. (Brockman previously said his sabbatical would last through the end of the year.) His return comes after the startup lost several key leaders: CTO Mira Murati and chief research officer Bob McGrew.

Per a memo, he’s working with CEO Sam Altman on creating a new role for him.

The Google Home extension for Gemini is now available on Android, and the AI-powered features for Google Nest cameras are rolling out to select Nest Aware Plus users in Public Preview today and will come to more users in the next few weeks.

Google also announced a new customizable Member access feature for sharing select devices with friends and family.

A neurology ICU nurse relates the unsettling feeling of watching AI tech take over:

“Efficiency” is a buzzword in Silicon Valley, but get it out of your mind when it comes to healthcare. When you’re optimizing for efficiency, you’re getting rid of redundancies. But when patients’ lives are at stake, you actually want redundancy. You want extra slack in the system. You want multiple sets of eyes on a patient in a hospital. 

Anthropic co-founder Darius Amodei said on Lex Fridman’s podcast yesterday that, “if you believe the straight-line extrapolation,” we’ll have artificial general intelligence “in 2026 or 2027.” He also indicates that’s a big if, listing reasons why (which don’t include that LLMs might not be the way to AGI).

Makes sense — after all, according to growth trends, I should have been the size of a dinosaur by age 10.

Spokesperson Elijah Lawal tells The Verge that the company is rolling out a pilot of the app in the Philippines. 9to5Google reported that a user was able to download the app.

Gemini has a standalone app for Android, and from that app, you can access the Gemini Live voice mode.

The VP running Google News, Shailesh Prakash, has resigned, according to The Wall Street Journal, which notes his exit “comes amid a continuing rift between Google and news outlets.”

As I reported last year, Prakash’s org was one of the first inside Google to get hit by rolling layoffs. He told employees at the time that there was a “reckoning” due to the company hiring too many senior workers during the pandemic.

Reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi dug up a menu within the app showing the option to “create An AI profile picture.” While you can already upload an AI-generated profile picture to Instagram, this would streamline the process.

Meta’s other apps — Facebook and WhatsApp — have been spotted working on a similar feature.

A piece of artwork called “A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing,” created in part by AI-equipped robot Ai-Da, went for almost $1.1 million at auction, writes The New York Times.

There was a lot of human involvement, starting with combining the bot’s paintings of parts of Turing’s face:

The works were then photographed and uploaded to a computer that used Ai-Da’s language model to decide on the assembly of a single painting, which was then completed using a 3-D textured printer; studio assistants helped to create a more realistic finished product on the canvas. Ai-Da then added marks and textures to the portrait to complete it.

Caitlin Kalinowski will lead robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI, according to a post on LinkedIn. Kalinowski also worked at Apple as a hardware product design engineer.

Jony Ive — also, famously, formerly of Apple — recently confirmed that he’s working with on an AI hardware project with OpenAI.

Utility planning documents show rising costs for customers in some regions of the US as tech companies build out energy-hungry data centers, the Washington Post reports:

“A lot of governors and local political leaders who wanted economic growth and vitality from these data centers are now realizing it can come at a cost of increased consumer bills,” said Neil Chatterjee, former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.