Category: Artificial Intelligence

The calendar has turned to May, and Aaron Rodgers is still a free agent.

Rodgers has been linked to the Steelers for a couple of months, but Thomas Tull, a part-owner of the Steelers, said the courtship of Rodgers is more “complex” than artificial intelligence. 

“I’m here to talk about AI, and that’s a more complex issue than artificial intelligence,” Tull said when asked about Rodgers in an interview on CNBC’s “Power Lunch.”

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The team has three quarterbacks on its roster — Mason Rudolph, Skylar Thompson and sixth-round draft pick Will Howard. 

After Russell Wilson departed Pittsburgh and signed with the New York Giants, the Steelers have been mentioned as a possible landing spot for the four-time MVP because most teams seem to have their starting quarterbacks for the 2025 season in place.

And Rodgers has not closed the door on retirement. 

“I’m open to anything and attached to nothing. Retirement could still be a possibility, but right now my focus is and has been and will continue to be on my personal life. … There’s still conversations that are being had,” Rodgers said on “The Pat McAfee Show” in April. 

COWBOYS, STEELERS AGREE TO TRADE FOR GEORGE PICKENS

New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers warms up before a game against the San Francisco 49ers in Santa Clara, Calif., Sept. 9, 2024.  (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

“I’m in a different phase of my life. I’m 41 years old, I’m in a serious relationship. I have off-the-field stuff that requires my attention. I have personal commitments I’ve made not knowing what my future was going to look like after last year that are important to me. And I have a couple of people in my inner, inner circle who are really battling some difficult stuff. So, I have a lot of things that are taking my attention — and have, beginning really in January — away from football.”

It remains to be seen whether Rodgers decides to play football and sign with the Steelers or if he will decide to call it a career after 20 seasons. 

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New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers (8) waits for the snap of the ball during the first half of a game against the Los Angeles Rams in East Rutherford, N.J., Dec. 22, 2024.  (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

With the New York Jets last season, Rodgers threw for 3,987 yards, 28 touchdowns and 11 interceptions in 17 games. 

Regardless of who ends up starting for the Steelers in Week 1, they will not have George Pickens as a receiver. The team traded Pickens to the Dallas Cowboys on Wednesday. 

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Apple is “actively looking at” revamping its Safari web browser to concentrate on artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engines and shift away from Google search, potentially creating a colossal shift in the mobile browser landscape.

This disclosure was made by Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services Eddy Cue during his testimony in the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet, the parent company of Google, according to Bloomberg on Wednesday (May 7).

The lawsuit centers on the estimated $20 billion-a-year agreement that makes Google the default search engine in Safari on Apple devices. This legal challenge could potentially compel the two technology giants to dismantle the agreement.

The consideration of AI search integration comes as AI technology gains traction with consumers. Cue noted a recent dip in Safari searches, which he attributed to increased use of AI. He expressed belief that AI search providers, such as OpenAI, Perplexity AI and Anthropic, will eventually supplant standard search engines like Google. Cue stated that Apple plans to add these options to Safari in the future. Apple has held discussions with Perplexity to implement this capability.

According to Cue’s testimony, he previously felt that alternative search options were not “valid choices.” Presently, however, he said he sees “much greater potential because there are new entrants attacking the problem in a different way.”

This move represents a major shift for Apple, whose users have relied on Google search in Safari since the iPhone’s debut in 2007. The company currently has more than 2 billion active devices worldwide.

The testimony reportedly led to declines in both Alphabet and Apple shares on Wednesday. While Cue acknowledged the financial benefits of the current agreement with Google and the potential revenue loss, he also stated his belief that technology shifts, like AI, create opportunities for new entrants and true competition.

Apple currently offers OpenAI’s ChatGPT via the Siri digital assistant and is expected to add Google’s Gemini later in the year. The company also reviewed Anthropic, DeepSeek and Grok from xAI for this purpose. Cue mentioned a “bake-off” between ChatGPT and Google’s offering before ChatGPT was selected for integration into Apple Intelligence in iOS 18 last year.

By Karen Freifeld and Arsheeya Bajwa

(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration plans to rescind and modify a Biden-era rule that curbed the export of sophisticated artificial-intelligence chips, a spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce said on Wednesday.

The regulation was aimed at further restricting AI chip and technology exports, dividing up the world to keep advanced computing power in the United States and among its allies while finding more ways to block China’s access.

The Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion was issued in January, a week before the end of the administration of former President Joe Biden. It capped a four-year effort by the Biden administration to hobble China’s access to advanced chips that could enhance its military capabilities and to maintain U.S. leadership in AI.

“The Biden AI rule is overly complex, overly bureaucratic, and would stymie American innovation,” the Commerce spokeswoman said. “We will be replacing it with a much simpler rule that unleashes American innovation and ensures American AI dominance.”

Last week, Reuters reported the Trump administration was working on changes to the rule that would limit global access to AI chips, including possibly doing away with its splitting the world into tiers that help determine how many advanced semiconductors a country can obtain.

According to the Commerce spokeswoman, officials “didn’t like the tiered system” and said the rule was “unenforceable.” The spokeswoman did not have a timetable for the new rule. She said debate was still under way on the best course of action. The Biden rule was set to take effect on May 15.

Shares of Nvidia, an AI chip designer whose sales could rise if the rule were changed to increase exports, ended 3% higher after the news came out on Wednesday, but then dipped 0.7% in after-hours trade.

The Biden rule divided the world into three tiers: 17 countries and Taiwan were in the first tier, which could receive unlimited chips. Some 120 other countries were in the second tier, which was subject to caps on the number of chips the countries could receive. In the third tier, countries of concern including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea were blocked from the chips.

But Trump administration officials are weighing discarding the tiered approach to access in the rule and replacing it with a global licensing regime with government-to-government agreements, sources told Reuters last week.

(Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru and Karen Freifeld in New York; Editing by Anil D’Silva, Chris Sanders and Matthew Lewis)

For two years, Stacey Wales kept a running list of everything she would say at the sentencing hearing for the man who killed her brother in a road rage incident in Chandler, Ariz.

But when she finally sat down to write her statement, Wales was stuck. She struggled to find the right words, but one voice was clear: her brother’s.

“I couldn’t help hear his voice in my head of what he would say,” Wales told NPR.

That’s when the idea came to her: to use artificial intelligence to generate a video of how her late brother, Christopher Pelkey, would address the courtroom and specifically the man who fatally shot him at a red light in 2021.

On Thursday, Wales stood before the court and played the video — in what AI experts say is likely the first time the technology has been used in the U.S. to create an impact statement read by an AI rendering of the deceased victim.

A sister looking for the right words

Wales has been thinking about her victim impact statement since the initial trial in 2023. The case was retried in 2025 because of procedural problems with the first trial.

The chance to speak in court meant a great deal to Wales, who held back her emotions throughout both trials to avoid influencing the jury.

“You’re told that you cannot react, you cannot emote, you cannot cry,” she said.  ”We looked forward to [sentencing] because we finally were gonna be able to react.”

Wales’ attorney told her to humanize Pelkey and offer a complete picture of who he was.

So Wales went on a mission. She said she contacted as many people from Pelkey’s life — from his elementary school teacher to high school prom date to the soldiers he served alongside in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A photo of Christopher Pelkey walking his sister Stacey Wales down the aisle at her wedding.

A photo of Chris Pelkey walking his sister Stacey Wales down the aisle at her wedding./Stacey Wales

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A photo of Chris Pelkey walking his sister Stacey Wales down the aisle at her wedding./Stacey Wales

In total, Wales gathered 48 victim impact statements — not counting her own. When it was time to write hers, she was torn between saying how she truly felt and what she thought the judge would want to hear.

“I didn’t wanna get up there and say, ‘I forgive you,’ ’cause I don’t, I’m not there yet,” she said. “And the dichotomy was that I could hear Chris’ voice in my head and he’s like, ‘I forgive him.’”

Pelkey’s mantra had always been to love God and love others, according to Wales. He was the kind of man who would give the shirt off his back, she said. While she struggled to find the right words for herself, Wales said writing from his perspective came naturally.

“I knew what he stood for and it was just very clear to me what he would say,” she added.

A digitally trimmed beard and an inserted laugh

That night, Wales turned to her husband Tim, who has experience using AI for work.

“He doesn’t get a say. He doesn’t get a chance to speak,” Wales said, referring to her brother. “We can’t let that happen. We have to give him a voice.”

Tim and their business partner Scott Yentzer had only a few days to produce the video. The challenge: there’s no single program built for a project like this. They also needed a long, clear audio clip of Pelkey’s voice and a photo of him looking straight to the camera — neither of which Wales had.

Still, using several AI tools, Wales’ husband and Yentzer managed to create a convincing video using about a 4.5-minute-video of Pelkey, his funeral photo and a script that Wales prepared. They digitally removed the sunglasses on top of Pelkey’s hat and trimmed his beard — which had been causing technological issues.

Wales, who was heavily involved in making sure the video felt true to life, said recreating her brother’s laugh was especially tough because most clips of Pelkey were filled with background noise.

The experience made Wales reflect on her own mortality. So one evening, Wales stepped into her closest and recorded a nine-minute-video of herself talking and laughing — just in case her family ever needs clear audio of her voice someday.

“It was a weird out-of-body experience to think that way about your own mortality, but you never know when you’re going to not be here,” she said.

The night before the sentencing hearing, Wales called her victim rights attorney, Jessica Gattuso, to tell her about the video. Gattuso told NPR that she was initially hesitant about the idea because she had never heard of it being done before in Arizona court. She was also worried that the video may not be received well. But after seeing the video, she felt compelled that it should be viewed in court.

“I knew it would have an impact on everyone including the shooter, because it was a message of forgiveness,” Gattuso said.

The AI generated video helped with healing, sister says

Ten people spoke in support of Pelkey at the sentencing hearing. The AI-generated video of him went last.
 
“Hello. Just to be clear for everyone seeing this, I’m a version of Chris Pelkey recreated through AI that uses my picture and my voice profile,” the AI avatar said.

The video went on to thank everyone in Pelkey’s life who contributed an impact statement and attended the hearing. Then, the video addressed his shooter, Gabriel Paul Horcasitas.

“It is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances. In another life, we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and in God who forgives. I always have and I still do,” the video said.

The video ended with the avatar encouraging everyone to love one another and live life to the fullest. “Well, I’m gonna go fishing now. Love you all. See you on the other side,” it concluded.

Neither the defense nor the judge pushed back. Later in the hearing, Judge Todd Lang said, “I loved that AI. Thank you for that.”

A photo of Christopher Pelkey.

Stacey Wales

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Stacey Wales

He added, “It says something about the family because you told me how angry you were and you demanded the maximum sentence. And even thought that’s what you wanted, you allowed Chris to speak from his heart, as you saw it. I didn’t hear him asking for the maximum sentence.” Horcasitas received 10.5 years for manslaughter.

Wales said she didn’t realize how deeply the video would affect her and her family. For her teenage son, it was a chance to hear his uncle say goodbye. For Wales, it gave her the strength to finally look back at photos of her brother.

“Going through this process of AI and what he’d sound like and trimming his beard and inserting laughs and all these other things, it was very cathartic and it was part of the healing process,” she said.

What AI and legal experts say

Over the years, there have been a growing number of examples testing the bounds of AI’s role in the courtroom.

For instance, in 2023, President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen unwittingly sent his attorney bogus AI-generated legal citations. More recently, last month, a man attempted to use an AI-generated lawyer avatar in court — an effort that was quickly shut down by the judge.

But the use of AI for a victim impact statement appears novel, according to Maura Grossman, a professor at the University of Waterloo who has studied the applications of AI in criminal and civil cases. She added, that she did not see any major legal or ethical issues in Pelkey’s case.

“Because this is in front of a judge, not a jury, and because the video wasn’t submitted as evidence per se, its impact is more limited,” she told NPR via email.

Some experts, including Grossman, predict generative AI will become more common in the legal system, but it raises various legal and ethical questions. When it comes to victim impact statements, key concerns include questions around consent, fairness and whether the content was made in good faith.

“Victim statements like this that truly try to represent the dead victim’s voice are probably the least objectionable use of AI to create false videos or statements,” Gary Marchant, a professor of law, ethics and emerging technologies at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, wrote in an email.

“Many attempts to use AI to create deep fakes will be much more malevolent,” he added.

Wales herself cautions people who may follow in her footsteps to act with integrity and not be driven by selfish motives. “I could have been very selfish with it,” she said. “But it was important not to give any one person or group closure that could leave somebody else out.”

OpenAI is reportedly envisioning a future where it shares less revenue with longtime benefactor Microsoft.

The artificial intelligence startup has an agreement with Microsoft to share 20% of its top-line revenue. However, OpenAI told investors it expects to share just 10% of its revenue with its partners, Microsoft among them, by 2030, The Information reported Tuesday (May 6), citing financial documents.

The company continues “to work closely with Microsoft and [looks] forward to finalizing the details of this recapitalization in the near future,” an OpenAI spokesperson said, per the report.

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, with an agreement to continue sharing revenue until 2030, the report said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s strategy of installing AI as a default feature on its software seemed to be bearing fruit. The company recorded a 10% uptick in revenue from consumer subscriptions to Office 365 in the three months ending in March versus a year prior.

News about OpenAI’s revenue plans came one day after the company announced it would revise its corporate plan to keep its nonprofit parent firmly in control of the for-profit entity behind ChatGPT. That decision reverses the company’s earlier plan that would have given up voting power in exchange for easier fundraising.

“When we started OpenAI, we did not have a detailed sense for how we were going to accomplish our mission,” CEO Sam Altman wrote in a Monday (May 5) company blog post. “We started out staring at each other around a kitchen table, wondering what research we should do. Back then, we did not contemplate products, a business model. We could not contemplate the direct benefits of AI being used for medical advice, learning, productivity and much more, or the needs for hundreds of billions of dollars of compute to train models and serve users.”

OpenAI is in the middle of planning a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, which could value the company at roughly $300 billion. The round had been contingent on the company switching to for-profit control.

Keeping the nonprofit arm could complicate the fundraising effort, but it could also help to defuse a lawsuit from OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, who accuses the company of straying from its public-interest roots.

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Shares of Alphabet (GOOGL -7.27%) (GOOG -7.50%) are falling on Wednesday. The company’s stock lost 7.8% as of 1:27 p.m. ET and as much as 9.5% earlier in the day. The leg down comes as the S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.43%) gained 0.4% and the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC 0.27%) lost 0.1% on the day.

An Apple executive’s legal testimony Wednesday is sending shock waves through the tech community.

Apple is “actively looking” at adding AI search

Bloomberg is reporting that Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, testified Wednesday that Apple is “actively looking at” reshaping the Safari web browser on its devices to focus on artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search engines. The revelation came during Cue’s testimony in the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet — Google’s parent company — which centers on the cornerstone deal that makes Google the default search engine in Apple’s Safari browser.

When ChatGPT-3 was released to the public in late 2022, investors immediately were concerned that the technology could prove a true threat to Google Search’s near-stranglehold on how users search the web. The $20 billion deal that ensures Google is the default on Apple devices is a key aspect in maintaining its dominance. If Apple chooses to introduce AI-powered alternatives to Google on its devices, Google Search could lose a major chunk of its traffic, and therefore, value to advertisers.

The signs are there

Cue also disclosed the particularly concerning detail that searches on Safari dipped for the first time ever last month, which he attributed to people using AI alternatives. This concrete data suggests the threat to Google’s search monopoly may be materializing faster than many had anticipated.

Market impact extends beyond Alphabet

Google Search is responsible for more than half of Alphabet’s total revenue. Losing its grip on internet searches would be very bad news for the company’s bottom line. Still, as much as the testimony is concerning, the tech giant is supremely aware of the threat and is working to mitigate it. Alphabet’s own AI offering is excellent, and I think it will ultimately weather this storm.

Nearly a century ago, Alexander Fleming discovered a penicillin-producing mold. Over the following decades, various microbes were used to make a range of therapeutics, from insulin to vaccines. Although gene-editing and other techniques can improve the production of microbe-based biologics, artificial intelligence (AI) could push these drugs even further.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning play a crucial role as transformative tools in pharmaceutical research and microbial engineering,” according to Ayaz Belkozhayev, PhD, associate professor in the department of chemical and biochemical engineering at Satbayev University in Kazakhstan, and his colleagues. “These technologies enable the analysis of large datasets, the optimization of metabolic pathways, and the development of predictive models.”

Plus, Belkozhayev’s team points out that AI-based technologies can be used to develop efficient microbes that provide sustainable production of biotherapeutics. These biotherapeutics include ones that battle largely drug-resistant microbes, such as Acinetobacter baumannii, which can infect a person’s blood, lungs, wounds, and more.

AI-based tools could also be applied to microbes that produce lipophilic compounds, such as modified antibodies or peptides. Nonetheless, Zhang Dawei, PhD, an investigator in synthetic biology and microbial manufacturing engineering at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology in China, and his colleagues explain that lipophilic compounds can accumulate in cell membranes during fermentation, which can decrease production or even kill the cells producing the biotherapeutic.

To address this membrane-capturing problem, scientists explore what Dawei’s group called “membrane engineering techniques to construct highly flexible cell membranes … to break through the upper limit of lipophilic compound production.” AI could play a key role in this process. As Dawei’s group notes: “With the continuous advancement of artificial intelligence technology in the field of biomedicine, computer-assisted scientific research will provide a more comprehensive blueprint for the construction process of highly flexible cell membranes.”

Nonetheless, AI alone will not make better microbes for producing biologics. As Belkozhayev’s team emphasizes, “Innovations in genetic engineering, synthetic biology, adaptive evolution, [machine learning], and high-throughput screening have led to substantial progress in optimizing microorganisms for the efficient production of complex biological and chemical compounds.”

So, as is often the case, no one thing is the solution to all of the challenges in making biotherapeutics from microbes. Still, AI will probably enhance this area of bioprocessing.