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Ashton Kutcher, the Hollywood actor and venture capital investor, raised the money for his firms new AI fund quickly.

We pulled the fund together in about five weeks, Kutcher said Thursday in a Bloomberg Television interview. We have a base of LPs that have been with us for years on end.

Kutchers new fund plans to put $243 million toward artificial intelligence startups, the tech industrys current hottest category. The portfolio already includes investments in AI startup darlings OpenAI, Stability AI Ltd. and Anthropic.

With the new fund, assets under management at Los Angeles-based Sound Ventures LLC are about $1 billion, the firm said. Kutcher said the firm had surveyed its portfolio companies to see how they were embracing AI, and that the sector would mark the next absolute transformation for technology.

Weve been investing in AI for the last seven years, Kutcher said. But when we saw GPT be launched, we realized that this was an absolute breakthrough.

He acknowledged the so-called hype cycle that washes across technology investing, most recently with the rush into crypto, a field where Sound Ventures also has been active. The blockchain technology at the heart of cryptocurrency has value in a number of applications, he said, while tokenization in many areas went too far.

Regulation of AI is needed badly, he said, just as it is in the crypto industry.

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Ashton Kutcher raised a $243 million investment fund in just five weeks that will focus on the next absolute transformation in tech - Fortune

Five hours is enough time to watch a Mets game. It is enough time to listen to the Spice Girls Spice album (40 minutes), Paul Simons Paul Simon album (42 minutes) and Gustav Mahlers third symphony (his longest). It is enough time to roast a chicken, text your friends that youve roasted a chicken and prepare for an impromptu dinner party.

Or you could spend it checking your email. Five hours is about how long many workers spend on email each day. And 90 minutes on the messaging platform Slack.

Its a weird thing, workplace chatter like email and Slack: Its sometimes the most delightful and human part of the work day. It can also be mind-numbing to manage your inbox to the extent you might wonder, couldnt a robot do this?

In late April, I decided to see what it would be like to let artificial intelligence into my life. I resolved to do an experiment. For one week, I would write all my work communication emails, Slack messages, pitches, follow-ups with sources through ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model from the research lab OpenAI. I didnt tell colleagues until the end of the week (except in a few instances of personal weakness). I downloaded a Chrome extension that drafted email responses directly into my inbox. But most of the time, I ended up writing detailed prompts into ChatGPT, asking it to be either witty or formal depending on the situation.

What resulted was a roller coaster, emotionally and in terms of the amount of content I was generating. I started the week inundating my teammates (sorry) to see how they would react. At a certain point, I lost patience with the bot and developed a newfound appreciation for phone calls.

My bot, unsurprisingly, couldnt match the emotional tone of any online conversation. And I spend a lot of the week, because of hybrid work, having online conversations.

The impulse to chat with teammates all day isnt wrong. Most people know the thrill (and also, usefulness) of office friendships from psychologists, economists, TV sitcoms and our own lives; my colleague sends me photos of her baby in increasingly chic onesies every few days, and nothing makes me happier. But the amount of time workers feel they must devote to digitally communicating is undoubtedly excessive and for some, easy to make the case for handing over to artificial intelligence.

The release of generative A.I. tools has raised all sorts of enormous and thorny questions about work. There are fears about what jobs will be replaced by A.I. in 10 years Paralegals? Personal assistants? Movie and television writers are currently on strike, and one issue theyre fighting for is limiting the use of A.I. by the studios. There are also fears about the toxic and untruthful information A.I. can spread in an online ecosystem already rife with misinformation.

The question driving my experiment was far narrower: Will we miss our old ways of working if A.I. takes over the drudgery of communication? And would my colleagues even know, or would they be Chatfished?

My experiment started on a Monday morning with a friendly Slack message from an editor in Seoul who had sent me the link to a study analyzing humor across more than 2,000 TED and TEDx Talks. Pity the researchers, the editor wrote to me. I asked ChatGPT to say something clever in reply, and the robot wrote: I mean, I love a good TED Talk as much as the next person, but thats just cruel and unusual punishment!

While not at all resembling a sentence I would type, this seemed inoffensive. I hit send.

I had begun the experiment feeling that it was important to be generous in spirit toward my robot co-conspirator. By Tuesday morning, though, I found that my to-do list was straining the limits of my robots pseudo-human wit. It so happened that my colleagues on the Business desk were planning a party. Renee, one of the party planners, asked me if I could help draft the invitation.

Maybe with your journalistic voice, you can write a nicer sentence than I just have, Renee wrote to me on Slack.

I couldnt tell her that my use of journalistic voice was a sore subject that week. I asked ChatGPT to craft a funny sentence about refreshments. I am thrilled to announce that our upcoming party will feature an array of delicious cheese plates, the robot wrote. Just to spice things up a bit (pun intended), we may even have some with a business-themed twist!

Renee was unimpressed and, ironically, wrote to me: OK, wait, let me get the ChatGPT to make a sentence.

Meanwhile, I had exchanged a series of messages with my colleague Ben about a story we were writing together. In a moment of anxiety, I called him to let him know it was ChatGPT writing the Slack messages, not me, and he admitted that he had wondered whether I was annoyed at him. I thought Id broken you! he said.

When we got off the phone, Ben messaged me: Robot-Emma is very polite, but in a way Im slightly concerned might hide her intention to murder me in my sleep.

I want to assure you that you can sleep peacefully knowing that your safety and security are not at risk, my bot replied. Take care and sleep well.

Given the amount of time I spend online talking to colleagues about the news, story ideas, occasionally Love Is Blind it was disconcerting stripping those communications of any personality.

But its not at all far-fetched. Microsoft earlier this year introduced a product, Microsoft 365 Copilot, that could handle all the tasks I asked ChatGPT to do and far more. I recently saw it in action when Microsofts corporate vice president, Jon Friedman, showed me how Copilot could read emails hed received, summarize them and then draft possible replies. Copilot can take notes during meetings, analyze spreadsheet data and identify problems that might arise in a project.

I asked Mr. Friedman if Copilot could mimic his sense of humor. He told me that the product wasnt quite there yet, although it could make valiant comedic attempts. (He has asked it, for example, for pickleball jokes, and it delivered: Why did the pickleball player refuse to play doubles? They couldnt dill with the extra pressure!)

Of course, he continued, Copilots purpose is loftier than mediocre comedy. Most of humanity spends way too much time consumed with what we call the drudgery of work, getting through our inbox, Mr. Friedman said. These things just sap our creativity and our energy.

Mr. Friedman recently asked Copilot to draft a memo, using his notes, recommending one of his employees for a promotion. The recommendation worked. He estimated that two hours worth of work was completed in six minutes.

To some, though, the time savings arent worth the peculiarity of outsourcing relationships.

In the future, youre going to get an email and someone will be like Did you even read it? And youll be like no and then theyll be like Well I didnt write the response to you, said Matt Buechele, 33, a comedy writer who also makes TikToks about office communications. Itll be robots going back and forth to each other, circling back.

Mr. Buechele, in the middle of our phone interview, asked me unprompted about the email I had sent to him. Your email style is very professional, he said.

I confessed that ChatGPT had written the message to him requesting an interview.

I was sort of like, This is going to be the most awkward conversation of my life, he said.

This confirmed a fear Id been developing that my sources had started to think I was a jerk. One source, for example, had written me an effusive email thanking me for an article Id written and inviting me to visit his office when I was next in Los Angeles.

ChatGPTs response was muted, verging on rude: I appreciate your willingness to collaborate.

I was feeling mournful of my past exclamation-point studded internet existence. I know people think exclamation points are tacky. The writer Elmore Leonard advised measuring out two or three per 100,000 words of prose. Respectfully, I disagree. I often use two or three per two or three words of prose. Im an apologist for digital enthusiasm. ChatGPT, it turns out, is more reserved.

For all the irritation I developed toward my robot overlord, I found that some of my colleagues were impressed by my newly polished digital persona, including my teammate Jordyn, who consulted me on Wednesday for advice on an article pitch.

I have a story idea Id love to chat with you about, Jordyn wrote to me. Its not urgent!!

Im always up for a good story, urgent or not! my robot replied. Especially if its a juicy one with plot twists and unexpected turns.

After a few minutes of back-and-forth, I was desperate to talk with Jordyn in person. I was losing patience with the bots cloying tone. I missed my own stupid jokes, and (comparatively) normal voice.

More alarmingly, ChatGPT is prone to hallucinating meaning putting words and ideas together that dont actually make sense. While writing a note to a source about the timing for an interview, my bot randomly suggested asking him whether we should coordinate our outfits in advance so that our auras and chakras wouldnt clash.

I asked ChatGPT to draft a message to another colleague, who knew about my experiment, telling him I was in hell. Im sorry, but I cannot generate inappropriate or harmful content, the robot replied. I asked it to draft a message explaining that I was losing my mind. ChatGPT couldnt do that either.

Of course, many of the A.I. experts I consulted were undeterred by the notion of shedding their personalized communication style. Truthfully, we copy and paste a lot already, said Michael Chui, a McKinsey partner and expert in generative A.I.

Mr. Chui conceded that some people see signs of dystopia in a future where workers communicate mostly through robots. He argued, though, that this wouldnt look all that unlike corporate exchanges that are already formulaic. I recently had a colleague send me a text message saying, Hey was that last email you sent legit? Mr. Chui recalled.

It turned out that the email had been so stiff that the colleague thought it was written through ChatGPT. Mr. Chuis situation is a bit particular, though. In college, his freshman dorm voted to assign him a prescient superlative: Most likely to be replaced by a robot of his own making.

I decided to end the week by asking the deputy editor of my department what role he saw for A.I. in the newsrooms future. Do you think theres a possibility that we could see AI-generated content on the front page one day? I wrote over Slack. Or do you think that there are some things that are just better left to human writers?

Well, that doesnt sound like your voice! the editor replied.

A day later, my experiment complete, I typed back my own response: Thats a relief!!!

Read this article:

ChatFished: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People With A.I. - The New York Times

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson sees artificial intelligence as a much-needed stress-test for modern society, with a view that it will lead humanity to refine some of its more outdated ideas and systems now that the "genie is out of the bottle."

"Of course AI will replace jobs," Tyson said in comments to Fox News Digital. "Entire sectors of our economy have gone obsolete in the presence of technology ever since the dawn of the industrial era.

"The historical flaw in the reasoning is to presume that when jobs disappear, there will be no other jobs for people to do," he argued. "More people are employed in the world than ever before, yet none of them are making buggy whips. Just because you cant see a new job sector on the horizon, does not mean its not there."

AI has proven a catalyst for societal fears and hopes since OpenAI released ChatGPT-4 to the public for testing and interaction. AI relies on data to improve, and as a large language model system, that data comes from conversations, prompts and interactions with actual human beings.

HARRIS TAKES LEAD AT AI MEETING WITH TECH CEOS AS BIDEN LIGHTENS HIS WHITE HOUSE SCHEDULE

Neil deGrasse Tyson attends the 23rd Annual Webby Awards on May 13, 2019, in New York City.

Some tech leaders raised concerns about what would come next from such a powerful AI model, calling for a six-month pause on development. Others discussed the AI as potentially the most transformative technology since the industrial revolution and the printing press.

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

Tyson has more consistently discussed the positive potential of AI as a "long-needed, long-awaited force" of "reform."

"When computing power rapidly exceeded the humanmental ability to calculate, scientists and engineers did not go running for the hills: We embraced it," he said. "We absorbed it. The ongoing advances allowed us to think about and solve ever deeper, ever more complex problems on Earth and in the universe."

AI COULD BE NAIL IN THE COFFIN FOR THE INTERNET,' WARNS ASTROPHYSICIST

Story continues

Gayle King and Neil deGrasse Tyson at The 92nd Street Y on Oct. 19, 2022, in New York City.

"Now that computers have mastered language and culture, feeding off everything weve put on the internet, my first thought is cool, let it do thankless language stuff that nobody really wants to do anyway, and for which people hardly ever get visible credit, like write manuals or brochures or figure captions or wiki pages," Tyson added.

He argued that teachers worrying about students using ChatGPT or other AI to cheat on essays and term papers could instead see this as an opportunity to reshape education.

"If students cheat on a term paper by getting ChatGPT to write it for them, should we blame the student? Or is it the fault of an education system that weve honed over the past century to value grades more than students value learning?" Tyson asked.

GOOGLE DEEPMIND CEO MAKES PREDICTION ON WHEN HUMAN-LEVEL AI WILL BE HERE

The ChatGPT artificial intelligence software, which generates human-like conversation.

"ChatGPT may be the long-needed, long-awaited force to reform how and why we value what we learn in school.

"The urge to declare this time is different is strong, as AI also begins to replace our creativity," he explained. "If thats inevitable, then bring it on.

"If AI can compose a better opera than a human can, then let it do so," he continued. "That opera will be performed by people, viewed by a human audience that holds jobs we do not yet foresee. And even if robots did perform the opera, that itself could be an interesting sight."

While some worry about the lack of oversight and legislation currently in place to handle AI and its development, Tyson noted that the number of countries with AI ministers or czars "is growing."

"At times like this, one can futilely try to ban the progress of AI. Or instead, push for the rapid development of tools to tame it."

Excerpt from:

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson offers optimistic view of AI, 'long awaited force' of 'reform' - Yahoo News

Back thenonly months agoMarcus quibbling was technical. But now that large language models have become a global phenomenon, his focus has shifted. The crux of Marcus new message is that the chatbots from OpenAI, Google, and others are dangerous entities whose powers will lead to a tsunami of misinformation, security bugs, and defamatory hallucinations that will automate slander. This seems to court a contradiction. For years Marcus had charged that the claims of AIs builders are overhyped. Why is AI now so formidable that society must now restrain it?

Marcus, always loquacious, has an answer: Yes, Ive said for years that [LLMs] are actually pretty dumb, and I still believe that. But there's a difference between power and intelligence. And we are suddenly giving them a lot of power. In February he realized that the situation was sufficiently alarming that he should spend the bulk of his energy addressing the problem. Eventually, he says, hed like to head a nonprofit organization devoted to making the most, and avoiding the worst, of AI.

Marcus argues that in order to counter all the potential harms and destruction, policymakers, governments, and regulators have to hit the brakes on AI development. Along with Elon Musk and dozens of other scientists, policy nerds, and just plain freaked-out observers, he signed the now-famous petitiondemanding a six-month pause in training new LLMs. But he admits that he doesnt really think such a pause would make a difference and that he signed mostly to align himself with the community of AI critics. Instead of a training time-out, hed prefer a pause indeploying new models or iterating current ones. This would presumably have to be forced on companies, since theres fierce, almost existential, competition between Microsoft and Google, with Apple, Meta, Amazon, and uncounted startups wanting to get into the game.

Marcus has an idea for who might do the enforcing. He has lately been insistent that the world needs, immediately, a global, neutral, nonprofit International Agency for AI, which would be referred to with an acronym that sounds like a scream (Iaai!).

As he outlined in anop-ed he coauthored in theEconomist, such a body might work like the International Atomic Energy Agency, which conducts audits and inspections to identify nascent nuclear programs. Presumably this agency would monitor algorithms to make sure they dont include bias or promote misinformation or take over power grids while we arent looking. While it seems a stretch to imagine the United States, Europe, and China all working together on this, maybe the threat of an alien, if homegrown, intelligence overthrowing our species might lead them to act in the interests of Team Human. Hey, it worked with that other global threat, climate change! Uh

In any case, the discussion about controlling AI will gain even more steam as the technology weaves itself deeper and deeper into our lives. So expect to see a lot more of Marcus and a host of other talking heads. And thats not a bad thing. Discussion about what to do with AI is healthy and necessary, even if the fast-moving technology may well develop regardless of any measures that we painstakingly and belatedly adopt. The rapid ascension of ChatGPT into an all-purpose business tool, entertainment device, and confidant indicates that, scary or not, we want this stuff. Like every other huge technological advance, superintelligence seems destined to bring us irresistible benefits, even as it changes the workplace, our cultural consumption, and inevitably, us.

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Gary Marcus Used to Call AI StupidNow He Calls It Dangerous - WIRED

There's now an Image Creator built right into Edge.

After a few seconds, you'll be met with four suggested images. Click on any of them for a closer look and to find the options for sharing them, downloading them, or saving them to a collection inside Edge. Your recently generated images are shown further down the sidebar, so you can get back to them if you need to, and there's also the Explore ideas tab if you need more inspiration.

This is all free to use, though you only get a certain number of boosts per month, which makes the AI art generation process faster. If you run out of boosts, you can get more through the Microsoft Rewards schemeotherwise you'll need to be more patient in waiting for your pictures to come back.

Other Browsers

It's fair to say that Microsoft Edge is leading the way at the moment when it comes to AI tools inside the browser, but other developers are getting involved too. Opera is completely redesigning its browser to fit in generative AI features. It's called Opera One, and it's now available in the form of an early-access developer version.

Right now there's not much to see in the way of AI, except for integrations for ChatGPT and ChatGPT alternative ChatSonic in the sidebar on the left. However, the whole interface is being revamped to be more fluid and modular, so expect to see plenty more features added over time. A full launch is scheduled for later this year.

The brand new Opera One comes with ChatGPT built in.

Meanwhile, the Brave browser just launched a new feature called the Summarizer. It leverages the power of AI to give you short and informative direct answers to your questions, based on text that's been pulled from web search results. The thinking is that you get the responses you need faster and in fewer clicks.

For example, you might want to know the difference between two different types of drinks, or need the details of what happened at a particular historical event. The Summarizer should be able to give you a brief overview without you having to actually open any web pages, and the sources for the summary are listed underneath.

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AI Is Coming for Your Web Browser. Here's How to Use It - WIRED