PaLM

The long-dormant struggle to dominate the web-search business reignited in a display of AI-driven firepower — and hubris. Google and Microsoft announced competing upgrades powered by the latest generation of chatbots. Baidu, too, flexed its natural-language-processing muscles.

Researchers pushed the boundaries of language models to address persistent problems of trustworthiness, bias, and updatability.

A new method enables robots to respond helpfully to verbal commands by pairing a natural language model with a repertoire of existing skills.