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This story appears in the August 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst believe the future doesn't have to belong to slop. The art was way too heavy. In mid-March, the artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst were preparing an installation to coincide with the Venice Biennale, the prestigious international art festival, but the execution was becoming tricky. They wanted to suspend sculptures of a trippy cityscape upside down from the ceiling of an 18th-century palazzo. But the construction material they envisioned-- 3-D-printed sand--would weigh tons, which was more than the antique building could bear. The sculptures, they realized, might fall and crush someone. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. This was a rather analog problem for a married couple widely seen as technological prophets. Herndon, 46, and Dryhurst, 41, have reached the upper echelons of the art world thanks to a media-spanning output--music, images, software, and reams of commentary--with a cybernetic bent. They are high culture's most influential exponents of artificial intelligence, an invention that many people believe spells doom for the arts but that they think could lead to a renaissance. I met them on a cold, bright Tuesday in Berlin.

The industry ministry announced ¥387.3 billion in funding to develop a domestic foundation model for physical AI that controls robots, aiming to strengthen the country's competitiveness against the United States and China. The industry ministry said Tuesday that it would provide ¥387.3 billion in aid for a project to develop a domestic model that serves as the foundation of a physical artificial intelligence system that controls robots. The ministry aims to make the multimodal foundation model widely available to Japanese companies to help the country catch up with the United States and China in the technology. The project is led by Noetra, a Japanese company founded by firms including telecommunications operator SoftBank, to develop AI models domestically. Engineers from SoftBank and Japanese AI startup Preferred Networks will join the project.

Taiwan's debate over drone procurement is being closely watched because the successful use of unmanned systems by Ukraine and Iran have underscored the ways in which the technology can be used to defend territory against larger adversaries. Taiwan's main opposition party has outlined plans to develop the drone industry just days after stalling a similar proposal from Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te's government, amid a debate on unmanned systems with crucial implications for the island's defense. The Kuomintang will submit legislation that could allocate 240 billion New Taiwan dollars (U.S.$7.5 billion) over six years for government procurement and industrial development of unmanned systems, KMT lawmaker Lin Pei-hsiang said during a briefing on Tuesday. Taiwan's debate over drone procurement is being closely watched because the successful use of unmanned systems by Ukraine and Iran have underscored the ways in which the technology can be used to defend territory against larger adversaries. The People's Republic of China has threatened to use force to push its claims of sovereignty over Taiwan, even though it has never controlled the self-governing democracy. Unlike the Cabinet's proposal, which would provide upfront authorization for NT$210 billion for drone procurement over multiple years, the KMT's legislation would fund the program through the annual budget process.

'There's this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?': the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate - and think through - the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference? In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one. Gabriel was a cheerful but intense junior academic with a passion for Vipassana meditation and what his brother calls "enthusiastic" rock climbing. At the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow at St John's College, Gabriel taught courses on political theory and wrote papers on the moral contortions of "yuppie ethics" and the ethical blind spots of effective altruism. When he wasn't there, he did crisis work for the United Nations Development Programme in Sudan and Lebanon. DeepMind, meanwhile, was the world's leading AI research lab. In part, this was because it had the financial and computational backing of Google, which had bought the company in 2014 for $650m. In part, it was because DeepMind had recently shown it could put those resources to stunning use. In Seoul, in 2016, a DeepMind system called AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, a South Korean Go champion, in a five-game match. The victory was significant not least because of Go's legendary complexity; the game has more possible configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Thanks to the fuss around AlphaGo, Gabriel was aware of DeepMind.

The Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) is the canonical local measure of the curvature of a statistical model's log-likelihood surface, and its dominant eigenvalue λmax quantifies the worst-case sensitivity of the model's output distribution to infinitesimal parameter perturbation [1, 2]. The spectral properties of the FIM of neural networks have been studied directly in the random matrix theory literature. Pennington and Worah [4] derive the limiting spectral density of the FIM of a single-hidden-layer network in the high-dimensional asymptotic regime, building on the broader programme of analysing neural network Hessian and kernel spectra via random matrix methods [5, 6], with subsequent work extending these techniques to deeper architectures and non-asymptotic regimes [7, 8]. These results characterize the typical (bulk and edge) spectral behaviour of the FIM for a fixed network and a random or structured input ensemble. This paper studies a complementary question, posed as a perturbation problem rather than an asymptotic-spectrum problem: how does the dominant eigenvalue of a fixed, evaluated empirical FIM change under two specific structured perturbations of the underlying distribution? The first perturbation is a change in the conditioning input away from a reference (in-distribution) ensemble. The second is a structured additive perturbation of the model's own parameters by finite-precision quantization noise -- a perturbation of independent mathematical interest, since it falls outside the i.i.d.-input asymptotic regime treated in the random matrix literature cited above, and instead concerns a fixed network whose parameters, not its input distribution, are perturbed by a noise process with a specific, analytically tractable structure (Definition 4.1). To our knowledge, this parameterperturbation question for the FIM's dominant eigenvalue, under either source of departure, has not been previously formalized.

We study the leading-order fluctuation of stochastic gradient Euler-Maruyama estimators for generalized non-reversible Langevin dynamics. Under structural assumptions tailored to the small-stepsize central limit theorem and under an unbiased stochastic gradient oracle, we prove that the empirical average over a horizon of order the inverse squared stepsize satisfies a central limit theorem in the vanishing-stepsize regime. The limiting variance is characterized through the Poisson equation of the limiting full-gradient diffusion. We then rewrite this constant in an operator form that links it to the continuous-time asymptotic variance and, under standard operator-theoretic assumptions, derive a sufficient condition under which an anti-symmetric perturbation strictly reduces the leading-order fluctuation constant relative to the reversible baseline. We also identify bounded smooth predictive observables that re directly covered by the main theorem. As a separate Gaussian calculation beyond the bounded-test-function regime, we obtain closed-form formulas for quadratic Hamiltonians and linear observables. The framework covers non-reversible Langevin dynamics and augmented-state examples including Hessian-free high-resolution dynamics and a positive-definite subclass of gradient-adjusted underdamped Langevin dynamics that allow stochastic gradients. Numerical experiments on basic examples and Bayesian linear regression using synthetic data, and Bayesian logistic regression using real data support the predicted Gaussian fluctuations and show that the non-reversible schemes consistently reduce the root mean squared error (RMSE) relative to their reversible baselines.

Data valuation quantifies the intrinsic quality of individual samples to enable principled data curation, quality control, and robust learning. For time series in critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and industrial monitoring, effective valuation methods are essential yet fundamentally lacking. Existing approaches are either model-dependent, limiting their generalizability, or designed for i.i.d. data and thus fail to capture temporal dependencies, multi-scale patterns, and non-stationary dynamics inherent to sequential data. We introduce TimeLAVA, a learning-agnostic framework that values temporal segments by their marginal contribution to minimizing distributional discrepancy between evaluated and reference data. At its core is a novel Selective Wavelet-based Wasserstein discrepancy combining multi-scale wavelet transforms for temporal localization with unbalanced optimal transport for robustness to distributional shifts. Segment values are efficiently computed via sensitivity analysis without requiring model training and aggregated into point-wise scores. We provide theoretical guarantees linking valuation to model-agnostic generalization and prove bounded sensitivity to outlier contamination. Extensive experiments across anomaly detection, data pruning, and label noise detection demonstrate that TimeLAVA produces significantly more informative value scores than existing methods on diverse real-world datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, where free-text explanations such as chain-of-thought and post-hoc rationales are used to justify model outputs. Yet it remains unclear whether these explanations are sufficient, i.e., if they contain enough information to explain the model's output-generating process. We generalize classical sufficiency from feature attributions to arbitrary explanations and prove that explanation sufficiency can change depending on the input distribution, which must be explicitly defined for LLM explanations. We propose using the LLM itself to generate alternative inputs conditioned on an explanation, capturing its beliefs about possible inputs. We formalize self-consistent sufficiency as a goal for free-text explanations and introduce an information-theoretic metric, SCSuff, that enables evaluation of free-text explanations without relying on predefined biases or shortcuts. Our experiments show that SCSuff agrees with targeted perturbation tests where applicable and demonstrate that explanation sufficiency can vary with the input distribution. We find LLM explanations are generally insufficient and weakly correlated with model size, accuracy, or output entropy. Analysis of final-token hidden states shows that top and bottom SCSuff scores can be predicted from internal representations, suggesting that SCSuff can guide detection and improvement of sufficient LLM explanations. The code for this paper is available at https://github.com/rajesh-lab/self-consistent-sufficiency .