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Mentions of the “metaverse” were relatively few and far between in Meta’s quarterly earnings call this week — we counted a mere seven mentions compared to 23 for “AI” — but the company’s investment into its vision of a VR-connected social future remains colossal.

Starting in 2021, Meta began breaking out its Reality Labs VR and AR division into its own segment for financial reporting purposes. That makes it possible to see just how much Meta is pouring into those areas, and the numbers are staggering.

Meta reported $13.7 billion in operating losses for Reality Labs for 2022, more than the already jaw-dropping $10.2 billion it sunk into the division in 2021. Reality Labs brought in $2.16 billion last year in revenue, a drop from $2.27 billion in 2021.

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Google worked to reassure investors and analysts on Thursday during its quarterly earnings call that it’s still a leader in developing AI. The company’s Q4 2022 results were highly anticipated as investors and the tech industry awaited Google’s response to the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has the potential to threaten its core business.

During the call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai talked about the company’s plans to make AI-based large language models (LLMs) like LaMDA available in the coming weeks and months. Pichai said users will soon be able to use large language models as a companion to search. An LLM, like ChatGPT, is a deep learning algorithm that can recognize, summarize and generate text and other content based on knowledge from enormous amounts of text data. Pichai said the models that users will soon be able to use are particularly good for composing, constructing and summarizing.

“Now that we can integrate more direct LLM-type experiences in Search, I think it will help us expand and serve new types of use cases, generative use cases,” Pichai said. “And so, I think I see this as a chance to rethink and reimagine and drive Search to solve more use cases for our users as well. It’s early days, but you will see us be bold, put things out, get feedback and iterate and make things better.”

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Bing users said a ‘new Bing’ interface just appeared — and disappeared — this morning. Microsoft is reportedly integrating OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT into its search engine, with plans to announce the update soon.

Microsoft is reported to be capitalizing on the success of ChatGPT by integrating the AI chatbot into its search engine Bing. But what might that look like? We may now have some idea, thanks to Bing users who said a new, AI-assisted version of the search engine mysteriously appeared (and disappeared) earlier today.

Student and designer Owen Yin reported seeing the “new Bing” on Twitter this morning.

An apparition of Bing’s AI-powered future.

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Colossal Biosciences, a genetic engineering company focused on de-extincting past species, has announced $150 million in Series B funding, which it plans to use for bringing back the iconic dodo.

The resurrection of several extinct species is predicted to occur within the next five years. One company aiming to make that a reality is Texas-based startup Colossal Biosciences, founded in 2021 by some of the world’s leading experts in genomics. In May 2022, it appeared in the World Economic Forum’s list of Technology Pioneers and it won Genomics Innovation of the Year at the BioTech Breakthrough Awards.

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The world’s biggest commercial aircraft makers seem increasingly convinced that autonomous passenger flight is a question of when, not if.

Where it stands: Flying today’s high-tech passenger jets is often a matter of setting up and overseeing their autopilot and other automated systems — but we’re not yet at a point where computer systems can entirely replace human pilots.

Driving the news: “Autonomy is going to come to all of the airplanes eventually,” Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun told Bloomberg TV at an event this week marking the delivery of the last commercial 747.

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