A robotic chemist working autonomously in a lab has developed an oxygen-producing catalyst from minerals found in Martian meteorites. The same procedure could one day be used to provide oxygen for astronauts on Mars. Sending supplies to a future Martian colony by spacecraft would be extremely expensive, which makes producing materials with Mars's natural resources an appealing option. But this can be difficult because there are fewer available elements on Mars than on Earth. Yi Luo at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and his colleagues have developed a fully automated robot chemist.

Automotive bosses could face up to two years in prison for overstating the ability of autonomous cars under new legislation proposed by the UK government last week. The Automated Vehicles Bill (AVB) is intended to provide a foundation for the regulation and enforcement of autonomous car safety in England, Scotland and Wales. Some small parts of the law would also apply to Northern Ireland.

Do you ever find yourself captivated by a song but struggling to put into words what makes it so special? Have you ever wanted to identify the instrument or genre of a piece of music but found yourself at a loss? Perhaps you've tried to search for a particular song through text, only to hit a dead end in your quest. In the world of music information retrieval, the tasks of transcribing music scores and retrieving music based on its characteristics are critical areas of research and advanced techniques may help you sometimes. However, for everyday music enthusiasts without formal training, achieving these goals in pre-defined scientific terms can often feel elusive.

In this PWC study, 59% of leaders said they will invest in new technologies, and 46% say they will invest in generative AI specifically in the next 12 to 18 months. The most significant hurdle is adequate cloud bandwidth/computing power to accommodate usage and enable scalability. That means coming to terms with how much money can be spent on new generative AI systems and generative AI enablement. Try reading any tech or business article these days without finding a mention. However, the computing and infrastructure costs of running generative AI models in the cloud are a barrier for many businesses.

Extremist groups have begun to experiment with artificial intelligence, and in particular generative AI, in order to create a flood of new propaganda. Experts now fear the growing use of generative AI tools by these groups will overturn the work Big Tech has done in recent years to keep their content off the internet. "Our biggest concern is that if terrorists start using gen AI to manipulate imagery at scale, this could well destroy hash-sharing as a solution," Adam Hadley, the executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, tells WIRED. "This is a massive risk." For years, Big Tech platforms have worked hard to create databases of known violent extremist content, known as hashing databases, which are shared across platforms to quickly and automatically remove such content from the internet.

In August 2016, WIRED visited the San Francisco offices of a young startup recently snapped up by a surprising buyer. General Motors acquired three-year-old Cruise for a reported $1 billion in hopes the straitlaced Detroit automaker could coopt the self-driving technology tipped to disrupt the auto industry. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt--a scrappy Twitch cofounder who competed as a teen in BattleBots--said he intended to stick around, but to keep running the driverless-car tech developer like a startup. He'd be out of a job, he predicted, if he couldn't hack the self-driving thing in 10 to 15 years. GM's financial reports show it losing $8.2 billion on Cruise since the start of 2017, and it has sunk at least $1.9 billion into the company this year.

A Beyoncé gig, the coronation of King Charles, and the British Formula One Grand Prix all have one thing in common: Thousands of people at the events, which all took place earlier this year, had their faces scanned by police-operated face recognition tech. Backed by the Conservative government, police forces across England and Wales are being told to rapidly expand their use of the highly controversial technology, which globally has led to false arrests, misidentifications, and lives derailed. Police have been told to double their use of face searches against databases by early next year--45 million passport photos could be opened up to searches--and police are increasingly working with stores to try to identify shoplifters. Simultaneously, more regional police forces are testing real-time systems in public places. The rapid expansion of face recognition comes at a time when trust in policing levels are at record lows, following a series of high-profile scandals.

A robot crushed a man to death in South Korea after the machine apparently failed to differentiate him from the boxes of produce it was handling, the Yonhap news agency reported on Wednesday. The man, a robotics company worker in his 40s, was inspecting the robot's sensor operations at a distribution centre for agricultural produce in South Gyeongsang province. The industrial robot, which was lifting boxes filled with bell peppers and placing them on a pallet, appears to have malfunctioned and identified the man as a box, Yonhap reported, citing the police. The robotic arm pushed the man's upper body down against the conveyor belt, crushing his face and chest, according to Yonhap. He was transferred to the hospital but died later, the report said.

Is few-shot learning the gateway to integrating AI into medicine for good? Let's explore the current state of the art. Not too long ago, the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) resided primarily within the realm of academics and the fantastical landscapes of science fiction movies, often linked to the idea of humanoid robots. In recent years, the advancement in computing power and speed has catalyzed an unprecedented surge in AI development, making it part of our daily lives. With the advent of innovative technologies such as text-to-image models like Dall-E and chatbot-type models like ChatGPT, AI is now part of our everyday jargon.

OpenAI, the company whose ChatGPT brought AI chatbots to mainstream awareness, said Monday that it'll let you build special-purpose AI apps using its technology. And with a new app store coming that'll let you find or share these GPTs, as the company is calling these customized artificial intelligence tools, OpenAI looks like it's hoping to have something an iPhone moment. You don't need to know how to program to make a new GPT. You have to give it plain-language instructions, upload some of your own knowledge in the form of PDFs, videos or other files, then steer the bot's purpose in a direction like creating images or searching the web. "GPTs are tailored versions of ChatGPT for a specific purpose," OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said at the OpenAI DevDay conference in San Francisco.