Back-to-school season always feels like a reset moment. However, the big topic this time around seems to be the same thing that defined the end of last year: ChatGPT and other large language models. Last winter and spring brought so many headlines about AI in the classroom, with some panicked schools going as far as to ban ChatGPT altogether. Now, with the summer months having offered a bit of time for reflection, some schools seem to be reconsidering their approach. Tate Ryan-Mosley, our senior tech policy reporter, spoke to the associate provost at Yale University to find out why the prestigious school never considered banning ChatGPT--and instead wants to work with it.

The US has expanded the restriction of exports of Nvidia artificial intelligence chips beyond China to some countries in the Middle East. Nvidia, which is one of the world's most valuable companies at $1.2tn, said in a regulatory filing this week the curbs affected its A100 and H100 chips, which are used to accelerate machine-learning tasks on major artificial intelligence apps, such as ChatGPT. The firm said the controls would not have an "immediate material impact" on its results. It did not say which countries in the Middle East were affected by these restrictions. Nvidia's rival in the sector, AMD, had also received an informed letter with similar restrictions, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

ChatGPT doesn't come with an instruction manual. Only a quarter of Americans who have heard of the AI chatbot say they have used it, Pew Research Center reported this week. "The hardest lesson" for new AI chatbot users to learn, says Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and chatbot enthusiast, "is that they're really difficult to use." Or at least, to use well. The Washington Post talked with Mollick and other experts about how to get the most out of AI chatbots -- from OpenAI's ChatGPT to Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing -- and how to avoid common pitfalls.

The report follows a warning on Wednesday from the National Cyber Security Centre, which said that large language models - a type of AI that powers popular chatbots - could not be protected from certain types of attacks designed to persuade them to do malicious things. There were at present "no failsafe measures" that would remove the risk, the centre wrote.

An artificial intelligence has consistently beaten champion drone pilots in races for the first time, achieving lap times no human was able to match. The technology could be used to speed up drones carrying out everyday tasks. The sport of drone racing involves humans piloting small quadcopters around a course at speeds of more than 100 kilometres per hour, with the vehicles subject to g-forces of up to 5 g.

Europe wants its own Open AI. The bloc's politicians are sick of regulating American tech giants from afar. They want Europe to build its own generative AI, which is why so many people are rooting for Jonas Andrulis, an easy-going German with a carefully pruned goatee. Ask people within Europe's tech bubble which AI companies they're excited about and the names that come up most are Mistral, a French startup that has raised $100 million without releasing any products, and the company Andrulis founded, Aleph Alpha, which sells generative AI as a service to companies and governments and already has thousands of paying customers. Skeptics in the industry question whether the company can really compete in the same league as Google and OpenAI, whose ChatGPT launched the current boom in generative AI.

Russian transport aircraft have been reported damaged in a drone attack on an airport in Russia's western city of Pskov – located near the borders of Latvia and Estonia – where explosions, a large blaze and gunfire were reported, a local official and state media said. Russia's state-run TASS news agency, quoting emergency services, said early on Wednesday morning that four Il-76 heavy transport aircraft, which have long been the workhorse of the Russian military, were damaged at the airfield in Pskov, located roughly 800km (some 500 miles) from the border with Ukraine. "The defence ministry is repelling a drone attack in Pskov's airport," the regional Governor Mikhail Vedernikov said on the Telegram messaging app, posting a video of a large fire, with sounds of explosions and sirens in the background. Vedernikov, who was at the scene of the attack, said that "according to preliminary information, there are no victims". The scale of the damage to the airport was being assessed, he said.

The UK's cybersecurity agency has warned that chatbots can be manipulated by hackers to cause scary real-world consequences. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has said there are growing cybersecurity risks of individuals manipulating the prompts through "prompt injection" attacks. This is where a user creates an input or a prompt that is designed to make a language model – the technology behind chatbots – behave in an unintended manner. A chatbot runs on artificial intelligence and is able to give answers to prompted questions by users. They mimic human-like conversations, which they have been trained to do through scraping large amounts of data.

A robotic laboratory that can produce and test mechanical structures without human supervision has discovered the most energy-absorbing one measured so far, beating the previous record held by balsa wood. There are many ways to test how tough or resilient a structure is, but one common measure is the energy absorbing efficiency, or the amount of mechanical energy something can absorb without failing.