Feinstein, 89, had not previously disclosed those medical details, though she said in a statement last week that she had suffered complications from the virus. The longtime California senator returned from a more than two-month absence on May 10 after weeks of questions about her declining health and whether she would be back in the Senate at all.

Adam Russell, a spokesman for Feinstein, said that the encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, resolved itself shortly after she was released from the hospital in March. Feinstein continues to have complications from the Ramsay Hunt syndrome, Russell said.

Russell confirmed the two complications after the New York Times first reported them, raising questions about whether she had been hiding the extent of her illnesses. Upon her return last week, Feinstein was using a wheelchair and noticeably thinner, and has appeared confused at times when speaking to reporters or being wheeled through the halls.

The senator previously disclosed that she had several complications related to her shingles diagnosis, Russell said in the statement. As discussed in the New York Times article, those complications included Ramsay Hunt syndrome and encephalitis.

Feinsteins face has appeared partially paralyzed since she returned to the Senate, stirring some speculation about whether she had had a stroke. Ramsay Hunt syndrome is a complication that occurs when the shingles virus reaches a facial nerve near the ears. It can also cause hearing loss.

Encephalitis can also be caused by shingles. The swelling of the brain can have a number of different symptoms, including personality changes, seizures, stiffness, confusion and problems with sight or hearing, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Aides to Feinstein said last week that she is still recovering from her illness and would operate on a reduced schedule. Since she has returned, she has missed some votes where she was not needed. On Wednesday, for example, she missed the first three Senate votes of the day but appeared for the last two, in which the margin was much closer.

Feinstein has faced questions for several years about her clearly declining health and her mental acuity. In February Feinstein said she would not run for re-election in 2024.

But some Democrats have pushed for her to leave sooner. A member of the California congressional delegation, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, called on her to resign as she stayed away from Washington for more than ten weeks, and several other House progressives have echoed his call. And Senate Democrats were increasingly anxious during Feinsteins absence as they were unable to confirm some of President Joe Bidens judicial nominees with a narrow 51-49 majority.

As Democrats worried, Feinstein made an unusual request to be temporarily replaced on the Judiciary panel while she remained out of the Senate. But Republicans last month blocked a vote, saying there was little precedent for a temporary committee replacement and that they didnt want to help Democrats confirm the most partisan judges. Others said they thought Democrats were unfairly trying to push her out of office.

Two weeks later, Democrats said that Feinstein would return to Washington.

A senator for more than three decades, Feinstein has had a groundbreaking political career and shattered gender barriers. She was the first woman to serve as president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the 1970s and the first female mayor of San Francisco. She ascended to that post after the November 1978 assassinations of then-Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk by a former supervisor, Dan White. Feinstein found Milks body.

In the Senate, she was the first woman to head the Senate Intelligence Committee and the first woman to serve as the Judiciary Committees top Democrat.

He isnt pushing free speech, the Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank star shared on Twitter on Thursday. When Elon Musk goes out of his way to engage with and promote the accounts and tweets of people who disagree with him, then Ill believe he is about free speech. 

Nor did the investor known for his enthusiasm over cryptocurrencies agree with Musk biographer Walter Isaacson that the big goal for the once-ousted PayPal CEO is disrupting the financial services industry. 

Instead, Cuban believes Musk is primarily focused on developing his own version of ChatGPT after the visionary entrepreneurs very public break with its creator, OpenAI, which he co-founded in late 2015 and helped finance.

He gets to take the entire Twitter firehose to train or feed any open-source model and have a competitor to the Big 3, Cuban continued, referring to Google, Meta and OpenAI together with its partner Microsoft. 

Musk believes he was instrumental in recruiting OpenAIs key talent, first and foremost chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, that ultimately stole Google DeepMinds thunder. 

All of this is why I think @elonmusk is starting his own @truthgpt, or whatever he will call it. He gets to take the entire @twitter firehose to train or feed any open source model and have a competitor to the big 3. He can weight his own tweets and those of the sources he https://t.co/tWk4Kfp8tv

Mark Cuban (@mcuban) May 18, 2023

Yet he no longer holds any formal role after the company traded in its non-profit status and stopped publishing all its proprietary research.

Musk likened it this week to funding an organization to save the Amazon rainforestand instead they became a lumber company, chopped down the forest and sold it for money.

But Musk has the contacts and the plans to create what he has thus far dubbed TruthGPT.

Through the application of large data sets, for example, those generated by the millions of Twitter users every day, a GPT can learn over time to improve its own natural language response data. 

He can weight his own tweets and those of the sources he likes and end up with a consumer-facing AI that can be a virtual Elon, Cuban wrote. Pretty cool. Pretty scary.

Not the time to show his cards on TruthGPT

Generative A.I. has become the hot topic ever since OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, the fastest-growing application in history since it launched on Nov. 30^th. Goldman Sachs has argued it could increase profits at S&P 500 corporations by 30% or more while Cathie Woods ARK Invest believes it could quadruple the productivity of knowledge workers. 

Now OpenAI is bringing the power of its advanced chatbot to Apple smartphones, announcing it would bring an app for iOS and soon even for Android, the proprietary operating system of its A.I. rival Google. 

Yet experts have warned that risks are not limited only to presenting incorrect statements as facts, which prompted the MIT Technology Review to call A.I. chatbots notorious bullshitters earlier this year. 

What we need is TruthGPT

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2023

Instead, they could be weaponized to become agents of misinformation, according to the European Unions disinformation watchdog, the European Digital Media Observatory. 

EDMO argues those users not particularly well informed about the technologys strengths and weaknesses could be tricked into giving more trust, or relying more heavily upon, the results provided by a conversational chatbot than other more open-ended tools. 

This makes it more difficult to properly assess the veracity of the results, and ultimately to exert their critical thinking, it wrote last month.

Speaking earlier this week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella agreed that A.I. deployed by governments such as Russiaor indeed non-state actorscould manipulate voter behavior in the run-up to next years U.S. Presidential election.

Does A.I. further accelerate and give tools, absolutely it does, he said in an interview.

A chatbot created by Musk could in theory skew responses against ideas supported by the Biden administration and the Democratic party, of whom Musk is a vocal critic. 

When the Twitter owner, who openly called for voters to cast their ballot for the Republican party, was asked about his plans for TruthGPT, Musk declined this week to explain his vision for the project.

 We will have a launch event and we will explore the issues in more detail, he pledged. This is not the time.