BERLIN - German technology firm DeepL, known for its artificial intelligence-powered translation software, plans to release a Japanese-language version of its real-time interpretation software by the end of this year, a senior company official has said. The age of machine interpretation has arrived, said Leonardo Doin, head of engineering and research for real-time voice translation service DeepL Voice, in a recent interview. You can just wear an earpiece and ... you can just hear it (foreign-language speech) in your language anytime, Doin said. The interpretation software will integrate DeepL's speech recognition and machine translation technologies, and speech synthesis technology that mimics the tones of the speakers' voices. It will be able to handle multiple languages and speakers, he said, with the software's use in online meetings of multinational companies in mind. DeepL plans to roll out the software on smartphones as well.

The USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, is seen at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego last August. President Donald Trump reiterated that the U.S. and Iran are maintaining diplomatic talks, even after an earlier skirmish in the Arabian Sea spooked oil markets amid heightened tensions between the two countries. We are negotiating with them right now" and they'd like to do something," Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday. They had a chance to do something a while ago and it didn't work out, and we did Midnight Hammer," he said, referring to the June U.S. military strike in Iran. Earlier Tuesday, a U.S. F-35C warplane shot down a drone in self-defense as the unmanned aircraft aggressively approached" the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier with unclear intent," U.S. Central Command said in a statement. The command said no American service members were harmed and no U.S. equipment was damaged.

Elon Musk attends the 56th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22. PARIS - French police raided the offices of Elon Musk's social media network X on Tuesday, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in a widening investigation, amid growing scrutiny of the platform by authorities across Europe. The raid by the Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit and Musk's summoning -- which could further increase tensions between Europe and the U.S. over Big Tech and free speech -- are linked to a yearlong investigation into suspected abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction by X or its executives. Britain's privacy watchdog, meanwhile, also kicked off a formal investigation into Musk's artificial-intelligence chatbot Grok over the processing of personal data and its potential to produce harmful sexual images and video content. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Despite new curbs, Elon Musk's Grok at times produces sexualized images A photorealistic image generated by the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok of a journalist is shown on a phone's screen on Jan. 22 | REUTERS NEW YORK - Elon Musk's flagship artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, continues to generate sexualized images of people even when users explicitly warn that the subjects do not consent. After Musk's social media company X announced new curbs on Grok's public output, nine reporters gave it a series of prompts to determine whether and under what circumstances the chatbot would generate nonconsensual sexualized images. While Grok's public X account is no longer producing the same flood of sexualized imagery, the Grok chatbot continues to do so when prompted, even after being warned that the subjects were vulnerable or would be humiliated by the pictures, the reporters found. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.

Nintendo's Switch 2 became the world's fastest-selling gaming console after launching to a fan frenzy last summer. The runaway success of the Switch 2 console drove up Nintendo's net profit by more than 50% in the nine months to December, the Japanese video game giant said Tuesday. But a global memory chip shortage, created by frenzied demand for artificial intelligence hardware, could push up manufacturing costs. The Switch 2 became the world's fastest-selling gaming console after launching to a fan frenzy last summer. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Japan's bear-related casualties hit record on escalating attacks Bear bells are displayed for sale at a souvenir shop at Shirakawa-go, a popular tourist spot and one of Japan's UNESCO World Heritage sites, in the village of Shirakawa, Gifu Prefecture, on Nov. 15. A record 230 were killed or injured by bears in Japan since April, putting more pressure on the government to intervene as the animals push deeper into areas where people live. Thirteen have died and 217 were injured as a result of bear attacks in the eight months through end-November, according to data released Friday by the environment ministry. The total already exceeds the previous record of 219 for the fiscal year through March 2024. Roughly two-thirds of casualties occurred in the sparsely-populated northern Tohoku region.

A bear warning sign is displayed in Shirakawa-go, a popular tourist spot in Gifu Prefecture. A town in Miyagi Prefecture has retracted its social media post warning of a bear sighting after discovering an image submitted to it had been generated using artificial intelligence. A Japanese town has deleted a social media post warning of a bear sighting after discovering that a picture it had received showing the fearsome creature was generated using artificial intelligence. Similar fake images have been circulating online as fear of bears runs high in the country, where the animals have killed a record 13 people this year. "The town prioritized informing residents to avoid danger, but we apologize for causing any anxiety or confusion," the town of Onagawa, Miyagi Prefecture, said on its official X social media account on Wednesday.

This study investigates ChatGPT for Japanese-English translation, exploring simple and enhanced prompts and comparing against commercially available translation engines. Performing both automatic and MQM-based human evaluations, we found that document-level translation outperforms sentence-level translation for ChatGPT. On the other hand, we were not able to determine if enhanced prompts performed better than simple prompts in our experiments. We also discovered that ChatGPT-3.5 was preferred by automatic evaluation, but a tradeoff exists between accuracy (ChatGPT-3.5) and fluency (ChatGPT-4). Lastly, ChatGPT yields competitive results against two widely-known translation systems.

Tokyo police have arrested three teenage boys on suspicion of fraudulently subscribing to Rakuten Mobile's phone service via a self-made program using artificial intelligence. The Metropolitan Police Department's cybercrime unit believes that the boys obtained at least about 2,500 mobile phone subscriptions in about six months from December 2023 and sold them for a total of about 7.5 million in crypto assets. The arrests were made for allegedly obtaining 105 mobile phone subscriptions between May and August last year by logging into the Rakuten Mobile system with other people's IDs and passwords. The boys -- a 14-year-old third-year junior high school student in Tokyo, a 16-year-old first-year high school student in Gifu Prefecture and a 15-year-old third-year junior high school student in Shiga Prefecture -- have admitted to the allegations, according to police sources. One of the three was quoted as saying that he wanted to attract attention on social media by devising and carrying out a sophisticated criminal scheme.

Ibiden, the dominant supplier of chip package substrates used in Nvidia's cutting-edge semiconductors, may need to dial up the pace of production capacity increases to keep up with demand, according to its chief executive officer. Sales of the 112-year-old company's AI-use substrates are robust with customers buying up all that Ibiden can sell, CEO Koji Kawashima said in an interview, adding that that demand is likely to last at least through next year. Ibiden is building a new substrate factory in Gifu Prefecture, expected to go online at 25% production capacity around the last quarter of 2025 before reaching 50% by March 2026. But that may not be enough, Kawashima said. The company is in talks about when to get the remaining 50% capacity online.