🥟 Chao-Down #143 Microsoft kills Cortana in favor of Windows Copilot, Toyota partners with Pony AI to mass produce robotaxis in China, Top Hong Kong University drops ban on ChatGPT use for students

Are we about to see a reboot of digital assistants? Microsoft’s latest move seems to suggest so.

The Redmond-based tech giant recently announced that it is shutting down Cortana this month and redirecting those resources toward Bing Chat and Windows Copilot.

Originally released back in 2014, Cortana was named after the artificial intelligence from the Halo video game series. It stood as Microsoft’s attempt to capture the digital assistant market among the likes of Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. But now with its shutting down, what does it mean for the rest of the industry?

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

Microsoft kills Cortana in Windows as it focuses on next-gen AI (TechCrunch)

Toyota, Pony.ai plan to mass produce robotaxis in China (Reuters)

Apple has quietly invested billions in generative AI (Mashable)

Every Amazon division is working on generative AI projects (Engadget)

America’s Most Tech-Forward City Has Doubts About Self-Driving Cars (WSJ)

Top Hong Kong university drops ban on ChatGPT in coursework by students (Hong Kong Free Press)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

Securing LLM Systems Against Prompt Injection (NVIDIA Technical Blog)

How MIT's Liquid Neural Networks can solve AI problems from robotics to self-driving cars (VentureBeat)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

sweepai/sweep: Sweep is an AI junior developer (Github)

hydradatabase/hydra: Hydra: Column-oriented Postgres. Add scalable analytics to your project in minutes. (Github)

getzep/zep: Zep: A long-term memory store for LLM / Chatbot applications (Github)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

From Sparse to Soft Mixtures of Experts (arxiv)

SelfCheck: Using LLMs to Zero-Shot Check Their Own Step-by-Step Reasoning (arxiv)

Training-Free Instance Segmentation from Semantic Image Segmentation Masks (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Musk offers to pay legal bills of people ‘unfairly treated’ for posting on platform | Elon Musk (The Guardian)

Zoom tells employees to return to office for work (nypost.com)

In praise of the boring chief executive (Financial Times)

What you need to know about the incandescent lightbulb ban (CNN)

The Global Sperm Count Decline has Created Big Business Opportunities (NYMag)

How Elon Musk took over Tesla using money, strong-arm tactics, and his own popularity (The Verge)

One Last Bite 😋