Plus: How AI is helping historians better understand our past.

Geoffrey Hinton who won the ‘Nobel Prize of computing’ for his trailblazing work on neural networks is now free to speak about the risks of AI.

Man often dubbed the ‘Godfather of AI’ says part of him now regrets his life’s work.

One of the pioneers in the development of deep learning models that have become the basis for tools like ChatGPT and Bard, has quit Google to warn against the dangers of scaling AI technology too fast.

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Alina Grubnyak / Unsplash.

Xtekky, a European computer science student, finds out what happens if you write a program that runs queries through these freely accessible sites and returns you the answer.

In other news, a big company with a non-profit and for-profit subsidiary sues an independent creator trying to make things easier for everyday folks. Even though it technically doesn’t violate its terms and conditions? Perhaps we’ll leave that for the experts to decide.

OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, a scourge on teachers and succor to everyone else, opted against free access when it released its newer GPT4 model.

This is an important step on the way to develop brain–computer interfaces that can decode continuous language through non-invasive recordings of thoughts.

Results were published in a recent study in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Neuroscience, led by Jerry Tang, a doctoral student in computer science, and Alex Huth, an assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at UT Austin.

Tang and Huth’s semantic decoder isn’t implanted in the brain directly; instead, it uses fMRI machine scans to measure brain activity. For the study, participants in the experiment listened to podcasts while the AI attempted to transcribe their thoughts into text.

Geoffrey Hinton, who has been called the ‘Godfather of AI,’ confirmed Monday that he left his role at Google last week to speak out about the “dangers” of the technology he helped to develop.

Hinton’s pioneering work on neural networks shaped artificial intelligence systems powering many of today’s products. He worked part-time at Google for a decade on the tech giant’s AI development efforts, but he has since come to have concerns about the technology and his role in advancing it.

“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told the New York Times, which was first to report his decision.