MIT engineer and robotics expert Jessica Banks becomes a co-host on Netflix's 'Hack My Home', bringing her innovative expertise to the show

One of the architects of South Africa’s groundbreaking deal with rich nations to move more quickly away from

Sam Altman, the head of ChatGPT creators OpenAI, has mocked Elon Musk’s entry into the artificial intelligence market. This week, Mr Musk’s xAI company unveiled Grok, another chat-based AI system along the lines of ChatGPT. He claimed that the app was written to be irreverent and funny, and to avoid what he suggested was censorship on other platforms such as ChatGPT. But the creator of that rival hit back at Grok in a tweet that suggested grok “tell[s] jokes like your dad’s dad” and that it traded in “cringey boomer humour”. The system works in a “sort of awkward shock-to-get-laughs sort of way”, he said. Mr Altman’s post showed him programming a system of his own, using a new OpenAI feature, and showed a screen grab of the instructions he had given to the system. He joked that “GPTs can save a lot of effort” in reference to a new feature, named GPTs, which allows people to creat their own versions of his chatbot that include specific and custom characteristics. Mr Musk responded with what appeared to be a quote from his own Grok AI. That response joked that “humour is clearly banned at OpenAI”. The marketing of Mr Musk’s Grok has revolved primarily around the fact that it will answer questions that other systems will refuse, and its tone is more irreverent than rival systems such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. When it was launched, for instance, he shared an example of how it will answer “almost anything”, sharing a screenshot of it being asked how to make cocaine. “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak,” a blog post announcing its launch noted. “Please don’t use it if you hate humour!” Grok is also different from those systems in that it has real-time access to posts and data from Twitter. Other AI firms were using that site to train their models, but Mr Musk has looked to cut them off, arguing that it is causing too much demand on the site. Read More ChatGPT goes offline ChatGPT update allows anyone to make their own personalised AI assistant How Elon Musk’s ‘spicy’ Grok compares to ‘woke’ ChatGPT

The UK’s governing Conservative Party clawed back a third of their polling deficit behind the Labour opposition after

xQc, a popular Canadian streamer, rose to fame playing League of Legends and Overwatch before rebranding to his current name

Human beings are fascinating creatures and one of the oldest philosophical debates is over whether people truly have free will or not. For millennia, scientists have debated over whether free will is simply an illusion of the mind and is a concept that doesn’t even exist, or, if our species naturally possess it. Some experts, such as the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, argue that we do have free will. He defined it as existing “if our choices are determined by that which we experientially identify with”. Kastrup claimed that his “tastes and preferences” are “consciously felt by” him, thus the choices he makes are “determined by these felt tastes and preferences”. Essentially, Kastrup argues, we are able to choose what action to perform and this gives humans a level of free will. On the other hand, neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky from Stanford University believes humans don’t have any free will, after studying the subject for “decades”. In his book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, Sapolsky argues that almost all of our behaviour as humans is beyond our own conscious control. He argued: “The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over. “We’ve got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn’t there.” Sapolsky believes that behaviour that we believe originates from free will is actually related to your environment, body, upbringing and genes. Speaking on the CultureLab podcast by New Scientist, Sapolsky explained: “In terms of my orientation, my basic approach is you look at a behaviour and someone has just done something that’s wonderful or awful or ambiguously in-between or in the eyes of the beholder, but some behaviour has happened, and you ask, 'Why did that occur?' and you’re asking a whole hierarchy of questions.” He continued explaining that the prompts to our behaviour could include, “which neurons did what, 10 milliseconds before” and may even originate from “this morning’s hormone levels” and the impact this has on your sensitivity levels in the brain. Additionally, behaviour, he argues can determined by prior trauma and even go back to the “childhood and foetal environment” and our individual genes. To summarise, he argued: “If you’re talking about genes, by definition, genes and behaviour, by definition, you’re talking about evolution and you’re talking about neurobiology and genetic variance and neuronal function. “If you’re talking about, you know, early trauma in life, you’re talking about epigenetics and you’re talking about adult propensity. “So, they’re all one continuous seam of influences, and when you look at it that way, there’s not a damn crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in a notion of free will.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

More than 700 users reported issues with Wells Fargo's banking system Thursday, according to Downdetector, with problems ranging from transferring funds to declining ATM cards.

Hardly any sustainable funds would consistently be able to market themselves as such in the UK, the US

Call of Duty: Warzone 2 Season 6 is the final MW2 season before Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 drops on Nov. 10.

PHILADELPHIA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 13, 2023--

IRVING, Texas & TAIPEI, Taiwan--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 31, 2023--

Reddit was hit by yet another outage, as the site’s troubles continue. The forum has been hit by protests and outrage in recent days, in response to a new policy that would see the site charge for access to its data. Reddit said that it was unfair that developers were given free access to its API, which allow them to show posts in third-party apps. But developers said that Reddit’s new pricing was too expensive to be sustainable, and many of the biggest of those apps have now announced they will be permanently shutting down. Those announcements have led to a widespread protest on Reddit, where moderators announced they would be taking their forums “dark” in an attempt to force a change by the site’s leadership. Administrators switched those forums to private and hid posts, meaning that they were effectively taken offline. That protest ran from 12 June to 14 June. But many of those administrators have suggested that recent actions by Reddit’s management, and the lack of change on the issue of pricing, will lead them to carry on the protest indefinitely. Amid those issues, Reddit went briefly offline for some users on Thursday evening. The company said that it was “investigating an issue that is causing load failures across web and mobile clients”. Around an hour and a half later, the company said the incident was resolved. But it was the second such technical issue the company has experienced as the protest has continued. Earlier this week, users saw another problem that meant they were unable to get to posts. Reddit spokespeople later confirmed that the problem had been a result of the protests. The large number of forums being taken on and offline had caused issues for the site’s infrastructure, they said, meaning that it was briefly taken offline. It has led to an unusual number of problems at Reddit. Between 19 March and 14 May, the site experienced no issues, according to its tracking website – but the last five days have seen two significant problems at Reddit. Nonetheless, the company still says it is experiencing 99.94 per cent uptime. Steve Huffman, Reddit’s chief executive, has urged Reddit’s staff to continue working on the site and suggested that the protest will eventually pass. Read More Reddit just went ‘dark’, and the site is in chaos Reddit is in chaos – and it’s CEO has finally responded Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely