A new artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by the Chinese company behind TikTok rocked Hollywood this week - not just because of what it can do, but what it could mean for creative industries. Created by tech giant ByteDance, Seedance 2.0 can generate cinema-quality video, complete with sound effects and dialogue, from just a few written prompts. Many of the clips said to have been made using Seedance, and featuring popular characters like Spider-Man and Deadpool, went viral. What is Seedance - and why the stir? Seedance was launched to little fanfare in June 2025 but it is the second version that came eight months later that has caused a major stir.

Visualising AI spending: How does it compare with history's mega projects? World leaders and tech executives are convening in New Delhi for the India-AI Impact Summit 2026, focusing on the role of artificial intelligence in governance, job disruption and global collaboration. However, behind these discussions lies the financial reality. Over the past decade, AI has drawn one of the largest waves of private investment in modern history, totalling trillions of dollars. According to Gartner, a United States-based business and technology insights company, worldwide spending on AI is forecast to total $2.5 trillion in 2026, a 44 percent increase over 2025.

Reinforcement Learning agent and a configurator that can modify some environmental parameters to improve the agent's performance.

Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen is a leader of THORChain, a blockchain that is not supposed to have any leaders--and is reeling from a series of expensive controversies. We can do whatever we want," Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen tells me from the pilot's seat of his Aston Martin helicopter. As we fly over suburbs outside Melbourne, Australia, it's becoming clear that doing whatever he wants is Thorbjornsen's MO. Upper-middle-class homes give way to vineyards, and Thorbjornsen points out our landing spot outside a winery. "They're going to ask for a shot now," he says, used to the attention drawn by his luxury helicopter, emblazoned with the tail letters "BTC" for bitcoin (the price tag of $5 million in Australian dollars--$3.5 million in US dollars today--was perhaps reasonable for someone who claims a previous crypto project made more than AU$400 million, although he also says those funds were tied up in the company). Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap ...

Lego's next release is a digital brick loaded with sensors that add new layers of interactivity to its play sets. WIRED got exclusive access to the Lego labs where the Smart Brick was born. The secretive division of 237 staff based here and in London, Boston, and Singapore is dedicated to thinking up what comes next for the world's largest toy brand. In front of me, on a plain white table, is a batch of prototypes of Lego's new Smart Brick, the final version of which is a small, sensor-laden 2-by-4 black brick with a big brain. No outsider has seen these prototypes, all of which represent stages of a journey Lego has been charting over the past eight years. Lego hopes this innovation, which lands in stores March 1, will safeguard the future of its plastic empire. The diminutive proportions of the finished Smart Brick belie the fact that the thing is exceedingly clever. Inside is a tiny custom chip running bespoke software that can communicate with onboard sensors to monitor and react to motion, orientation, and magnetic fields. It's also likely no exaggeration that the Smart Brick could represent the most radical product Lego has produced since Jens Nygaard Knudsen, the company's former longtime chief designer, created the minifigure nearly 50 years ago.

In this work, we investigate the task of text-to-image (T2I) synthesis under the abstract-to-intricate setting, i.e., generating intricate visual content from simple

Our data and benchmarking results are available at: http://lmexam.xlore.cn.

For instance, patients' diagnosis varies substantially across medical centers but collaboratively form long-tailed distributions for