What’s occurring: Google is about to launch a brand new system referred to as Astra later this 12 months. It guarantees that will probably be essentially the most highly effective, superior kind of AI assistant it’s ever launched. 

What’s an agent? The present technology of AI assistants, resembling ChatGPT, can retrieve data and provide solutions, however that’s about it. However this 12 months, Google is rebranding its assistants as extra superior “brokers,” which it says may present reasoning, planning, and reminiscence abilities and are capable of take a number of steps to execute duties. 

The large image: Tech firms are in the course of a fierce competitors over AI supremacy, and  AI brokers are the most recent effort from Massive Tech companies to indicate they’re pushing the frontier of growth. Learn the total story.

—Melissa Heikkilä

Know-how might be altering us for the more severe—or so we at all times assume

Can we use expertise, or does it use us? Do our devices enhance our lives or simply make us weak, lazy, and dumb? These are outdated questions—possibly older than you assume. You’re most likely accustomed to the best way alarmed grown-ups by means of the a long time have assailed the mind-rotting potential of engines like google, video video games, tv, and radio—however these are simply the current examples.

Right here at MIT Know-how Assessment, writers have grappled with the consequences, actual or imagined, of tech on the human thoughts for over a century. However whereas we’ve at all times greeted new applied sciences with a combination of fascination and worry, one thing attention-grabbing at all times occurs. We get used to it. Learn the total story.