AI & Robotics

Google revamped its artificially intelligent chatbot Bard last week in a major overhaul that now gives users access to it from some of its most popular products including Gmail, Docs, Drive, Maps, YouTube, and more. The update theoretically gives Google’s Bard an advantage over ChatGPT, which is the market leader pushed jointly by OpenAI and Microsoft. Together, Google’s search engine and…

Historically, periods of rapid advancement and change have ushered in times of great uncertainty. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about such a time in his 1977 book The Age of Uncertainty, in which he discussed the successes of market economics but also predicted a period of instability, inefficiency and social inequity.  Today, as we navigate the transformative waves of AI, we…

AI’s carbon footprint is no open-and-shut case, according to scientists from the University of California-Irvine and MIT, who published a paper earlier this year on the open access site arXiv.org that shakes up energy use assumptions of generative AI models, and which set off a debate among leading AI researchers and experts this past week.  The paper found that when producing a page of text…