Have you ever said "thanks" to ChatGPT, or "please" to Claude? Maybe you're just being polite, showing some civility to a helpful and eloquent conversational partner. You may even consider politeness a safe choice, just in case machines someday reveal that they were conscious all along and decide to take revenge on those who were rude to them.

Combining ideas inspired by ant colonies and flocks of birds may hold the key to unlocking more effective artificial intelligence, according to a researcher at Missouri S&T. "With the way AI algorithms are currently structured, they sometimes settle on an answer that seems good enough and stop searching before finding one that may be much better," says Dr. Donald Wunsch, director of Missouri S&T's Kummer Institute Center for AI and Autonomous Systems. "It's important that we find ways to help these algorithms keep searching instead of stopping too soon. When AI is used in areas that affect people's health, safety or cost of living, the difference between good enough and great can have significant implications."

They can mix cocktails, run marathons and fold laundry. But humanoid robots are still a long way from doing lots of different jobs on command, whatever the marketing says.

Whether you're playing poker against a single opponent or find yourself in a bidding war over a home purchase with another prospective buyer, you are operating under conditions of imperfect information. You know what cards you're holding in the poker game, and you also know how much above the home's asking price you can afford, but you don't know your opponent's hand in the card game or how high the other home buyer is willing to go.

French AI researcher Yann LeCun said Wednesday that governments were right to seek sovereign access to the potentially transformative technology.