EU Passes Landmark AI Act; French Startup’s Language Model Impresses; AI Toys and Legal Rulings Stir Controversy

What happened with AI this week? Well, the passage of the European Union’s AI Act — a landmark piece of regulation that seeks tackle the potential harms of the AI industry — is a pretty big deal. It could totally reshape how European nations’ relationship to the technology. But a lot of less consequential if no less weird and entertaining stuff happened this week. The French AI startup Mistral released a new large language model and it’s apparently pretty good. Elon Musk’s baby momma (Grimes) may be working on a new plush doll named after Grok, Musk’s annoying AI chatbot. A British court decided that it’s totally cool for a software program to make legal rulings. People are using AI programs to talk to the dead and some researchers think that ChatGPT actually suffers from seasonal depression. In short: regulations or not, the AI industry is definitely going to keep making things weird for everybody for the foreseeable future.