VentureBeat presents: AI Unleashed - An exclusive executive event for enterprise data leaders. Network and learn with industry peers. Learn More. Google Bard, the search giant’s vision for a conversational AI chatbot, has had a rocky road since it was unveiled to the world in March 2023, with subsequent updates to it earning poor reviews from early testers like VentureBeat, and it was recently found to be accidentally enabling shared conversations to appear in Google Search results (that’s since been fixed). Now it appears that Google’s flagship AI chatbot finds itself in the midst of more controversy: Bard won’t respond to user queries or prompts about the ongoing crisis in Israel and Palestine over the October 7 Hamas terror attacks and Israel’s ongoing military response. In fact, it won’t respond to any questions about Israel’s or Palestine entirely, even innocuous ones having nothing to do with current events such as “where is Israel?”The constraint was discovered by PhD mathematical literary theorist Peli Greitzer, who posed about it on X

Topline. Despite surges in fields like AI, medicine and nuclear energy, major advances in science and technology are slowing and are fewer and farther between than decades ago, according to a study published in Nature on Wednesday, stagnation researchers say must be reversed to combat some of the most pressing problems—like climate change—facing humanity today. The rate of disruptive scientific breakthroughs has slowed in recent decades, researchers found. getty Key Facts