From Meta’s AI-empowered AR glasses to its new Natural Voice Interactions feature to Google’s AlphaChip breakthrough and ChromaLock’s chatbot-on-a-graphing calculator mod, this week has been packed with jaw-dropping developments in the AI space. Here are a few of the biggest headlines.
Deciding how and where all the bits and bobs go into today’s leading-edge computer chips is a massive undertaking, often requiring agonizingly precise work before fabrication can even begin. Or it did, at least, before Google released its AlphaChip AI this week. Similar to AlphaFold, which generates potential protein structures for drug discovery, AlphaChip uses reinforcement learning to generate new chip designs in a matter of hours, rather than months. The company has reportedly been using the AI to design layouts for the past three generations of Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and is now sharing the technology with companies like MediaTek, which builds chipsets for mobile phones and other handheld devices.
Microsoft got itself raked over the proverbial coals back in June when it attempted to foist its Recall feature upon users. The AI-powered tool was billed as a way for users to search their computing history using natural language queries, except it did so by automatically capturing screenshots as users worked, which led to a huge outcry by both users and data privacy advocates. This week, Microsoft published a blog post attempting to regain users’ trust by laying out the steps it is taking to prevent data misuse, including restrictions on which apps it can track and which hardware systems it can run on, all while reasserting that “the user is always in control.”
Fancy Ray-Ban smart glasses weren’t the only items to debut at Meta’s Connect 2024 event this past Wednesday. The company also announced the release of its new Natural Voice Interactions feature for Meta AI. Just as with Gemini Live and Advanced Voice Mode, Natural Voice Interactions enables you to speak directly with the chatbot as you would another person, rather than type or dictate your prompts to the AI. The new feature is available to play with right now and, unlike AVM, is completely free to use.
In what should come as a surprise to nobody, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is taking steps to further consolidate his control over the multibillion-dollar AI startup. Reuters reported this week that OpenAI is discussing plans to reorganize its core business, not as a nonprofit as its been since its founding in 2015, but as a for-profit entity. The company is apparently trying to make itself more “attractive to investors” but the fact that the nonprofit board of directors, which briefly ousted Altman last November, will no longer have jurisdiction over his actions is of obvious benefit to him specifically.
The latest version of the large language model that ChatGPT runs on, GPT-4o, is not what you’d call petite, given that it was trained on more than 200 billion parameters. Yet, despite its girth, YouTuber ChromaLock managed to stuff the chatbot’s capabilities into a TI-84 graphing calculator. Granted, they didn’t load the AI into the calculator itself to run locally, but the modder did manage to gain access to the online resource with the clever application of a custom Wi-Fi module and an open-source software suite. Best I could ever do with my old TI-83 was make crude anatomical references.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.