Tiny robots packed with yeast speed up the fermentation of beer and eliminate the need to filter it before bottling. Using living yeast to convert sugar to alcohol is a key part of making beer, but it can be time consuming, and the yeast can spoil and ruin a whole batch of the drink. Martin Pumera at the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic and his colleagues thought that both issues could be addressed by swapping yeast for tiny, metallic yeast-filled bots.

Koopman told me that Waymo has a reputation for being methodical and conservative and may deserve more trust than other driverless car companies. Mostly, though, he believes that driverless cars shouldn't be allowed to ditch human backup in vehicles until they have a proven safety record and that companies should be forced to comply with industry standards for human test drivers.

If you spend any time on the internet, you're likely now familiar with the gray-and-teal screenshots of AI-generated text. At first they were meant to illustrate ChatGPT's surprising competence at generating human-sounding prose, and then to demonstrate the occasionally unsettling answers that emerged once the general public could bombard it with prompts. OpenAI, the organization that is developing the tool, describes one of its biggest problems this way: "ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers." In layman's terms, the chatbot makes stuff up. As similar services, such as Google's Bard, have rushed their tools into public testing, their screenshots have demonstrated the same capacity for fabricating people, historical events, research citations, and more, and for rendering those falsehoods in the same confident, tidy prose.

The UK economy is at a pivotal moment. Two years on from Covid, and it remains the only country in the developed world where people have continued to drop out of the labour market in greater numbers beyond the pandemic. Rates of economic inactivity have risen and vacancies in the hospitality, health and technology sectors are proving hard to fill. The UK is experiencing new forms of polarisation between good and poor-quality work. How the government responds to the challenges the current jobs market presents is crucial.

Consider a team of three guards (in green) trying to defend a fort from a team of three attackers (in red) in Figure 1. In this "Fort Attack" (FA) domain, each agent can move in one of four cardinal directions with a particular velocity, rotate clockwise or anticlockwise, shoot at an opponent within a given range, or do nothing. Each agent may have partial or full knowledge of the state of the world (e.g., location, status of each agent) at each step, but it has no prior experience of working with the other agents. Also, each agent may have limited (or no) ability to communicate with others. An episode ends when all members of a team are eliminated, an attacker reaches the fort, or the guards protect the fort for a sufficient time period.

A "Ukrainian" drone has been found outside Moscow, an official has said, adding that the discovery had forced local authorities to call off a Victory Day parade for security reasons. Moscow has accused Ukraine of being behind a number of drone attacks on military infrastructure deep inside Russian territory. On Monday, Igor Sukhin, head of the Bogorodsky city district outside the capital Moscow, said that a local resident had found a "Ukrainian" drone in a forest. "This is not the first drone that appeared in the Moscow region," Sukhin said on the messaging app Telegram. A similar drone was in February found in the town of Kolomna approximately 100km (about 60 miles) southeast of Moscow, he added.

Russia's Black Sea Fleet has warded off a drone attack on the Crimean port of Sevastopol, the Moscow-installed governor of the city says. "An attempted attack on Sevastopol was repelled from 3:30am [00:30 GMT]," Mikhail Razvojayev said on Telegram on Monday. "A surface drone [naval] was destroyed by the anti-sabotage forces, the second one exploded on its own," he said, adding that no damage was reported. Passenger ferry service were suspended in the port city, Russia's Interfax news agency reported, citing Sevastopol transport authorities. No reason was given, but the agency said traffic had been suspended in the past due to drone attacks or storms.

A California state court jury has handed Tesla Inc a sweeping win, finding that the carmaker's Autopilot feature did not fail to perform safely in what appears to be the first trial related to a crash involving the partially automated driving software. The verdict could be an important victory for Tesla as it tests and rolls out its Autopilot and more advanced "Full Self-Driving (FSD)" system, which Chief Executive Elon Musk has touted as crucial to his company's future, but which has drawn regulatory and legal scrutiny. Justine Hsu, a resident of Los Angeles, sued the electric vehicle maker in 2020, saying her Tesla Model S swerved into a curb while it was on Autopilot and then an airbag was deployed "so violently it fractured Plaintiff's jaw, knocked out teeth, and caused nerve damage to her face". She alleged there were defects in the design of Autopilot and the airbag, and sought more than $3m in damages for the alleged defects and other claims. Tesla denied liability for the 2019 accident.

Waste-sorting robots that have been learning their job while wandering through Google offices can now effectively sort items in bins into recycling, compost and rubbish. One way of teaching machines to perform tasks is by reinforcement learning, in which a robot is told what a successful outcome looks like and is left to figure out how to achieve it by trial and error and a system of feedback, gradually building up an optimal model of what to do.

Developing the AI systems behind tools such as ChatGPT and the image generator Dall-E costs hundreds of millions of dollars--and it's about to get more expensive. OpenAI, Google, and other companies building large-scale AI projects have traditionally paid nothing for much of their training data, scraping it from the web. But Stack Overflow, a popular internet forum for computer programming help, plans to begin charging large AI developers as soon as the middle of this year for access to the 50 million questions and answers on its service, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says. The site has more than 20 million registered users. Stack Overflow's decision to seek compensation from companies tapping its data, part of a broader generative AI strategy, has not been previously reported. It follows an announcement by Reddit this week that it will begin charging some AI developers to access its own content starting in June.