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UK departments at odds over energy demands of AI datacentres

The Guardian

Datacentres could require at least 6GW of capacity by 2030 under government plans to expand AI infrastructure. Datacentres could require at least 6GW of capacity by 2030 under government plans to expand AI infrastructure. Sun 26 Apr 2026 03.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 26 Apr 2026 03.01 EDT One vision of the UKâ s future involves a decarbonised economy powered by clean, renewable energy. Another involves making the UK an AI superpower. The government departments responsible for these two visions do not appear to have agreed on their numbers.


I own 20 axolotls - people need to know they're not easy to look after

BBC News

I own 20 axolotls - people need to know they're not easy to look after When Emma Honeyfield's daughter Amber asked for an axolotl for her birthday, Emma never imagined it would lead to a collection of 20. The 37-year-old bought her daughter's first axolotl, Stitch, in September and has since fallen in love with their calming nature. Emma said Amber, eight, had always been difficult to buy for, so when she asked for one for her birthday, she couldn't say no. And the family, from Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent, are far from alone in seeking out the amphibians, which are critically endangered and only found in lakes and wetlands in southern Mexico City . The animal's cute, smiling face and appearance in the hugely popular Minecraft and Roblox games has seen an increase in the number of people keeping them as pets.


Cannes AI film festival raises eyebrows – and questions about future

The Guardian

A still from animated film La Sélection Mécanique, directed by Jules Blachier. A still from animated film La Sélection Mécanique, directed by Jules Blachier. While emerging technology is banned from the Palme d'Or, an upstart movement is gaining investment and attention I n Cannes' darkened screening rooms, the supposed future of cinema flickered into life this week and it was strange. The first edition of the World AI film festival (WAIFF) showcased visions of men with fish scales erupting from their necks and seaweed from their mouths, a heroine with a heart beating outside her body and so many massed armies of AI-generated tanned men sweeping across battlefields that David Lean would have blushed. Last week the Cannes film festival, entering its 76th year, banned the emerging technology from its Palme d'Or competition, insisting "AI imitates very well but it will never feel deep emotions".








Curriculum Design for Teaching via Demonstrations: Theory and Applications

Neural Information Processing Systems

We consider the problem of teaching via demonstrations in sequential decisionmaking settings. In particular, we study how to design a personalized curriculum over demonstrations to speed up the learner's convergence. We provide a unified curriculum strategy for two popular learner models: Maximum Causal Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt-IRL) and Cross-Entropy Behavioral Cloning (CrossEnt-BC). Our unified strategy induces a ranking over demonstrations based on a notion of difficulty scores computed w.r.t. the teacher's optimal policy and the learner's current policy. Compared to the state of the art, our strategy doesn't require access to the learner's internal dynamics and still enjoys similar convergence guarantees under mild technical conditions. Furthermore, we adapt our curriculum strategy to the setting where no teacher agent is present using task-specific difficulty scores. Experiments on a synthetic car driving environment and navigation-based environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our curriculum strategy.