Archive 28.04.2025

In an extremely aggressive promotion, Google is offering U.S. college students a free, one-year ride on Google One AI Premium — a fierce competitor to ChatGPT.

The deal translates into $20/month savings for a year — and gives those students access to some of the most advanced AI on the planet, including the Gemini Advanced chatbot, Deep Research, text editor Canvas and auto-video generation.

Observes Josh Woodward, vice president, Google Labs & Google Gemini: “To top all of this off, you’ll get 2 TB of storage, providing plenty of space for school projects, research, high-resolution media and your personal photos or videos.”

Currently, students are the number one users of Google’s chief competitor, ChatGPT, according to ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

In other AI news and analysis:

*New ChatGPT AI Engine Smarter than 98% of Humans: Stick a fork in it: Apparently, the battle of wits between humans AI is so yesterday — and we flesh-bags have lost.

New test results from Mensa — the global group of the rumoredly smartest people in the world — show that one of ChatGPT’s newest AI engines, o3, has an IQ of 136.

Observes writer Liam Wright: “The score, calculated from a seven-run rolling average, places the model above approximately 98% of the human population, according to a standardized bell-curve IQ distribution used in the benchmarking.”

Currently, ChatGPT runs on a number of specialized AI engines — including ChatGPT-40, which is rated best overall for writing.

ChatGPT-03 was designed to excel in reasoning, math and other hard sciences applications.

*Grok AI Chatbot Adds AI Writing Editor: Elon Musk’s answer to ChatGPT — the Grok AI Writer/Chatbot — has added an online editor for use when working with writing or code.

Dubbed Grok Studio, the editor is similar to the online editor ‘Canvas’ tool that ChatGPT added a few months back — which is also featured in a similar form on the Google AI chatbot Gemini.

Observes writer Eric Hal Schwartz: “One element that stands out, though, is that Grok Studio links with Google Drive and can pull in your files directly from Drive, including documents, spreadsheets and presentations.”

*ChatGPT Now Synthesizes Its Knowledge of You When Searching: ChatGPT will now synthesize analysis of how you use the chatbot when you do searches with the chatbot.

The result: Ideally, you should see more personalized results from your ChatGPT search, based on what ChatGPT thinks you’re looking for.

Observes writer Kyle Wiggers: “For example, for a user that ChatGPT ‘knows’ from memory is vegan and lives in San Francisco, ChatGPT may rewrite the prompt ‘what are some restaurants near me that I’d like’ as ‘good vegan restaurants, San Francisco.'”

*Quick Study: Update on ChatGPT’s Flurry of New Features: AI expert Kevin Stravert offers a great ‘How To’ overview on the flurry of new features that have popped-up in ChatGPT during the past few months in this video.

Click to this video for tips on how to get ChatGPT to do your research for you while you work on other tasks, AI-automate use of your writing and related apps — and much more.

Observes Stravert: “Whether you’re a student, creator, or professional, these updates are designed to supercharge your productivity and creativity.”

*United Arab Emirates Now Writing Laws With AI: While some industries fret over the implications of implementing AI, the UAE law community has gone full throttle instead.

Observes TechInAsia: “This initiative represents a significant change in the UAE’s legislative processes.

“The newly established Regulatory Intelligence Office will oversee this initiative, which aims to expedite law creation.”

*For Many, An Outrage: Some California Bar Exam Questions Were Written by AI: More than a few members of the California legal community are incensed that AI was used to help write some questions for the state’s Bar Exam.

Observes writer Benj Edwards: “The State Bar disclosed that its psychometrician — a person or organization skilled in administrating psychological tests, ACS Ventures — created 23 of the 171 scored multiple-choice questions with AI assistance.

Adds Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills, University of California: “The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined.

“I’m almost speechless. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using artificial intelligence is just unbelievable.”

*Australians Duped: Radio DJ Presented as Human Is Really an AI: Listeners to ‘Australia’s Home of Hip Hop and R&B’ have been gas-lighted: The DJ for the show — presented as human — is really just AI-generated.

Essentially, the DJ has been on the air for about six months “without any disclosure that it’s an AI-generated presenter,” according to writer Simon Thomsen.

Adds Teresa Lim, vice president, Australian Association of Voice Actors: “Listeners deserve honesty and upfront disclosure — instead of a lack of transparency.”

*Chinese Competitor to ChatGPT ‘Profound Threat’ to U.S. Security: DeepSeek, the AI writer/chatbot that roiled the stock market in early 2025 after it was revealed that it only cost $6 million to create, is a profound security threat to the U.S., according to a U.S. Congressional Committee.

According to the committee’s report on DeepSeek, “the app siphons data back to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), creates security vulnerabilities for its users — and relies on a model that covertly censors and manipulates information pursuant to Chinese law.

“For these reasons, it is evident that the DeepSeek Web site and app act as a direct channel for foreign intelligence gathering on Americans’ private data.”

AI BIG PICTURE: AI ‘Pulse Check’ from the ‘Godfather of AI:’ Nobel laureate and key developer of AI Geoffrey Hinton is out with a new interview — and a new dose of potential gloom and doom.

Hinton, a former AI researcher at Google who left so he could more freely talk about AI’s dangers now says in this April 2025 interview that the emergence of AI agents — which enable AI to work independently from humans — has increased the chance that humanity could lose control of AI.

While Hinton freely admits that the ultimate trajectory of AI — either as an overall catalyst of good or evil in the world — is anyone’s guess, he adds that humanity needs to work much harder to prevent a dystopian outcome.

One of the key threats of AI’s breakneck development, according to Hinton: Bad actors who harness the tech for malicious — and potentially massively destructive ends.

Observes Hinton: “We’re at this very, very special point in history where in a relatively short time, everything might totally change — a change of scale we’ve never seen before.”

Bottom line: If you’re looking for an extremely in-depth, extremely informed and extremely insightful overarching look at the current — and short-term future — of AI, this 51-minute video is your ticket.

The video is presented by ‘CBS Mornings’ and squired by extremely talented and AI-knowledgeable interviewer, Brook Silva-Braga.

Share a Link:  Please consider sharing a link to https://RobotWritersAI.com from your blog, social media post, publication or emails. More links leading to RobotWritersAI.com helps everyone interested in AI-generated writing.

–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.

The post Google AI Offers Free Ride for College Students appeared first on Robot Writers AI.

A team of roboticists at Tsinghua University, working with a trio of colleagues from Beihang University, all in China, has designed a new type of microrobot that can continuously transform its shape and "lock" into specific configurations. In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the group describes the factors that went into their design, the capabilities of the microrobots and possible uses for them.

Many products in the modern world are in some way fabricated using computer numerical control (CNC) machines, which use computers to automate machine operations in manufacturing. While simple in concept, the ways to instruct these machines is in reality often complex. A team of researchers has devised a system to demonstrate how to mitigate some of this complexity.

Claire chatted to Miranda Lowther from the University of Bristol about soft, sensitive electronic skin for prosthetic limbs.

Miranda Lowther is a PhD researcher at the FARSCOPE-TU Centre for Doctoral Training, a joint venture between University of Bristol, University of West of England, and Bristol Robotics Laboratory, where she is pursuing her passion for using soft robotics and morphological computation to help people in healthcare. For her PhD, she is investigating how soft e-skins and morphological computation concepts can be used to improve prosthetic user health, comfort, and quality of life, through sensing and adaptation.

At Automate 2025, the company will display all four models from the range: the THE400, THE600, THE800 and THE1000. The compact THE400 is ideal for fast, precise operations in assembly and inspection processes, particularly within the electronics and automotive sectors.

Humans are better than current AI models at interpreting social interactions and understanding social dynamics in moving scenes. Researchers believe this is because AI neural networks were inspired by the infrastructure of the part of the brain that processes static images, which is different from the area of the brain that processes dynamic social scenes.

To build the experimental stations of the future, scientists at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, are learning from some of the challenges that face them today. As light source technologies and capabilities continue to advance, researchers must navigate increasingly complex workflows and swiftly evolving experimental demands.

Researchers developed a more efficient way to control the outputs of a large language model, guiding it to generate text that adheres to a certain structure, like a programming language, and remains error free.

Combining two different kinds of signals could help engineers build prosthetic limbs that better reproduce natural movements, according to a new study. A combination of electromyography and force myography is more accurate at predicting hand movements than either method by itself.

An international team has explored how in future aerial robots could process construction materials precisely in the air -- an approach with great potential for difficult-to-access locations or work at great heights. The flying robots are not intended to replace existing systems on the ground, but rather to complement them in a targeted manner for repairs or in disaster areas, for instance.

Helping music professionals explore the potential of generative AI

For a robot, the real world is a lot to take in. Making sense of every data point in a scene can take a huge amount of computational effort and time. Using that information to then decide how to best help a human is an even thornier exercise.

The core innovation of our new patent lies in its self-supervised approach to depth estimation. What that means is, the AI learns to judge the depth of an item it needs to pick up by using its own sensor data and the feedback it gets from its actions.

New research led by Imperial College London and co-authored by the University of Bristol, has revealed that aerial robotics could provide wide-ranging benefits to the safety, sustainability and scale of construction.

Inspired by the movements of a tiny parasitic worm, engineers have created a 5-inch soft robot that can jump as high as a basketball hoop. Their device, a silicone rod with a carbon-fiber spine, can leap 10 feet high even though it doesn't have legs. The researchers made it after watching high-speed video of nematodes pinching themselves into odd shapes to fling themselves forward and backward.