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Robots are nothing new. They build our cars, vacuum our floors, prepare our e-commerce orders, and even help carry out surgeries. But now the sci-fi vision of a general-purpose humanoid robot seems to be edging closer.

While disembodied artificial intelligence has seen rapid improvements in performance in recent years, most robots are still relatively dumb. For the most part, they are used for highly specialized purposes, the environments they operate in are carefully controlled, and they are not particularly autonomous.

That’s because operating in the messy uncertainty of the real world remains difficult for current AI approaches. As impressive as the recent feats of large language models have been, they are dealing with a fairly limited palette of data types that are fed to them in predictable ways.

Like death and taxes, there seem to be few things more predictable than artificial intelligence going off the rails.

Case in point, remember that influencer who created a virtual version of herself to rent out as an “AI girlfriend”? In a new interview with Insider, Snapchat influencer Caryn Marjorie admitted that the voice-based chatbot she made to mimic her speech and be a paid virtual companion has gotten much hornier than intended.

“The AI was not programmed to do this and has seemed to go rogue,” she told Insider. “My team and I are working around the clock to prevent this from happening again.”

Stockholm-based learning platform Sana has announced a suite of generative AI tools along with an extension to its Series B round, bringing its total funding to $80 million.

Inside companies, information is often scattered across silos, buried in systems and locked in different formats, making it inaccessible to employees when they need it most, says Swedish entrepreneur Joel Hellermark. The 26-year-old hopes to help companies tackle this problem through his learning platform Sana, which uses AI to create an index for companies’ information, allowing employees to query and search it and perform tasks like creating training courses and summarizing and translating information.

Workplace collaboration tools are supposed to make things easier. I think they just make everything more complicated.

From my personal experience, these tools require quite a bit of manual input from users and are limited in their scopes of functionality. Strategy documents, proposals, roadmaps, meetings and notes may be found living in separate apps.

Notion hopes that AI can help cut down on the fragmentation within this space with its new product, Notion Projects. Projects aims to connect all aspects of collaboration in one place, making it easier for teams to plan, manage, and execute work, with the help of AI LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic.

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Vectara is continuing to grow as an AI powered conversational search platform with new capabilities announced today that aim to improve generative AI for business data.

The Santa Clara, Calif.- based startup emerged from stealth in Oct. 2022, led by the former CTO and founder of big data vendor Cloudera. Vectara originally branded its platform as a neural search-as-a-service technology. This approach combines AI-based large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), data integration pipelines and vector techniques to create a neural network that can be optimized for search.

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about CAPTCHA-breaking services that are being offered for sale to bypass systems designed to distinguish legitimate users from bot traffic.

“Because cybercriminals are keen on breaking CAPTCHAs accurately, several services that are primarily geared toward this market demand have been created,” Trend Micro said in a report published last week.

“These CAPTCHA-solving services don’t use [optical character recognition] techniques or advanced machine learning methods; instead, they break CAPTCHAs by farming out CAPTCHA-breaking tasks to actual human solvers.”

Baidu Inc. is investing 1 billion yuan ($140 million) to nurture Chinese startups that explore generative AI, leveraging its Ernie AI model to help drive innovation.

Baidu Inc., China’s internet search leader, is investing 1 billion yuan ($140 million) to incubate Chinese startups that focus on generative AI. As reported in Bloomberg, the move makes Baidu a part of the global investment wave centering on ChatGPT-like services.


Baidu’s $140 Million Venture into Generative AI Startups

According to a statement released by Baidu, the investment will be used to foster projects utilizing its Ernie AI model, with funding potentially as high as 10 million yuan each. Venture investors, including IDG Capital, will evaluate pitches from founders, who will then create demo products before a decision on seed funding.

“We can foresee applications in a wide variety of scenarios, such as search and rescue.”

One difficult challenge in robotics is to make them move smoothly across rough surfaces. Researchers have been experimenting with various methods, including the ones inspired by nature, to make robot movement more flexible.

By taking cues from nature, engineers have created a new centipede-like robot that can easily switch from straight walking to curved motion.