Meta and Google made AI news this week. Here were the biggest announcements

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.

Google taught an AI to design computer chips

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 outlines Recall security: ‘The user is always in control’

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.”

Meta rolls out its own version of Advanced Voice Mode

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.

OpenAI drops nonprofit status in large-scale reorganization

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.

A modder just put ChatGPT on a TI-84 graphing calculator

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.