Google is set to introduce a new system called Astra later this year and promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched.  The current generation of AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, can retrieve information and offer answers, but that is about it. But [...]

Imagine you and a friend are playing a game where your goal is to communicate secret messages to each other using only cryptic sentences. Your friend's job is to guess the secret message behind your sentences. Sometimes, you give clues directly, and other times, your friend has to guess the [...]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In the world of AI, a lot can happen in a year. Last year, at the beginning of Big Tech’s AI wars, Google announced during its annual [...]

OpenAI just debuted GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model that you can communicate with in real time via live voice conversation, video streams from your phone, and text. The model is rolling out over the next few weeks and will be free for all users through both the GPT [...]

Would you trust a robot to look after your cat? New research suggests it takes more than a carefully designed robot to care for your cat, the environment in which they operate is also vital, as well as human interaction. [...]

Actually, sometimes consumers don't want to talk to a real person when they're shopping online, a new study suggests. In fact, what they really want is a chatbot that makes it clear that it is not human at all. In a new study, researchers found that people preferred interacting with [...]

In June 2007, Apple unveiled the first iPhone. But the company made a strategic decision about iPhone software: its new App Store would be a walled garden. An iPhone user wouldn’t be able to install applications that Apple itself hadn’t vetted, at least not without breaking Apple’s terms of service.That [...]

A wave of AI systems have “deceived” humans in ways they haven’t been explicitly trained to do, by offering up untrue explanations for their behavior or concealing the truth from human users and misleading them to achieve a strategic end.  This issue highlights how difficult artificial intelligence is to control and [...]

Imagine a slime-like robot that can seamlessly change its shape to squeeze through narrow spaces, which could be deployed inside the human body to remove an unwanted item.While such a robot does not yet exist outside a laboratory, researchers are working to develop reconfigurable soft robots for applications in health [...]

Ashutosh Kumar is a classically trained materials engineer. Having grown up with a passion for making things, he has explored steel design and studied stress fractures in alloys.Throughout Kumar’s education, however, he was also drawn to biology and medicine. When he was accepted into an undergraduate metallurgical engineering and materials [...]

A new machine-learning technique can train and control a reconfigurable soft robot that can dynamically change its shape to complete a task. The researchers also built a simulator that can evaluate control algorithms for shape-shifting soft robots. [...]

Researchers have developed a robotic feeding system that uses computer vision, machine learning and multimodal sensing to safely feed people with severe mobility limitations, including those with spinal cord injuries, cerebral palsy and multiple sclerosis. [...]