Will international rivalries fragment international cooperation in machine learning? Countries competing for AI dominance will lash out at competitors.

People granted early access to OpenAI’s latest language model are raving about its way with words — and more. Beta testers of GPT-3 are showing off the model’s ability to write business memos, craft blogs, pen tweets, and even generate computer code.

A chatbot is providing companionship for the locked-down and lonely. Downloads of Replika, a chatbot designed to be a virtual friend, have spiked during the coronavirus pandemic, reports the New York Times.

Natural language processing lately has come to resemble an arms race, as the big AI companies build models that encompass ever larger numbers of parameters. Microsoft recently held the record — but not for long.