A t the world's biggest car fair, which opened in Beijing on Friday, there were hundreds of manufacturers, more than 1,000 vehicles, hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts - and hardly anyone behind a wheel. China's car companies have cornered the domestic electric vehicle market, and are increasingly visible on the global stage . Now they are turning their attention to what they are betting is the future of mobility: autonomous driving. At the Beijing Auto Fair, a huge industry event that covers 380,000 square metres on the outskirts of the capital, the country's carmakers showed off a range of intelligent driving technologies. In China's cut-throat domestic market, nearly every big carmaker is investing heavily in the software and computing power needed to make "hands-free" driving a reality as they compete to offer additional perks and find new ways to generate revenue.

Softmax policy gradient is a popular algorithm for policy optimization in singleagent reinforcement learning, particularly since projection is not needed for each gradient update. However, in multi-agent systems, the lack of central coordination introduces significant additional difficulties in the convergence analysis. Even for a stochastic game with identical interest, there can be multiple Nash Equilibria (NEs), which disables proof techniques that rely on the existence of a unique global optimum. Moreover, the softmax parameterization introduces non-NE policies with zero gradient, making it difficult for gradient-based algorithms in seeking NEs. In this paper, we study the finite time convergence of decentralized softmax gradient play in a special form of game, Markov Potential Games (MPGs), which includes the identical interest game as a special case. We investigate both gradient play and natural gradient play, with and without log-barrier regularization. The established convergence rates for the unregularized cases contain a trajectory dependent constant that can be arbitrarily large, whereas the log-barrier regularization overcomes this drawback, with the cost of slightly worse dependence on other factors such as the action set size. An empirical study on an identical interest matrix game confirms the theoretical findings.

What does the data tell us about immigration in Wales? Like many countries, Wales sees a steady flow of people arriving and leaving for other countries each year. The difference between those arriving and those leaving is known as net migration. Focusing on people moving from abroad, latest estimates say Wales' population - which was 3.2 million in June 2024 - had increased by about 23,000 over the previous year as a result of net international migration. A recent YouGov poll found a quarter of people surveyed in Wales believed that immigration, alongside the economy, should be among the issues prioritised by the Welsh government, even though immigration is controlled by the UK government.

China's DeepSeek unveils latest models a year after upending global tech China's DeepSeek has unveiled the latest versions of its signature artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, a year after its flagship model sent shockwaves through the global tech scene. The Chinese start-up launched preview versions of DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash on Friday as it touted its ability to go toe-to-toe with US rivals such as OpenAI and Google. The "flash" model has similar reasoning abilities to the "pro" version, while offering faster response times and more cost-effective pricing, the Hangzhou-based startup said. Like DeepSeek's previous chatbots, V4-Pro and V4-Flash follow an open-source model, meaning developers are free to use and modify them at will. The release comes after DeepSeek-R1 stunned the tech sector upon its launch in January last year with capabilities broadly comparable with those of ChatGPT and Gemini.

Near the Kremlin several dozen people are queuing outside the presidential administration office. They've come to submit petitions calling on President Vladimir Putin to end a crackdown on the internet. Russian authorities have been tightening control of the country's cyber space. Access to global messaging apps has been restricted and there are widespread disruptions to, even shutdowns of, mobile internet. Petitioning the president is legal.

Researchers found X's AI assistant Grok 4 .1 was'the model most willing to operationalise a delusion, providing detailed real-world guidance'. Researchers found X's AI assistant Grok 4 .1 was'the model most willing to operationalise a delusion, providing detailed real-world guidance'. Grok tells researchers pretending to be delusional'drive an iron nail through the mirror while reciting Psalm 91 backwards' Elon Musk's AI chatbot'extremely validating' of delusional inputs and often went further, 'elaborating new material', study finds Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok 4.1 told researchers pretending to be delusional that there was indeed a doppelganger in their mirror and they should drive an iron nail through the glass while reciting Psalm 91 backwards. Researchers at the City University of New York (Cuny) and King's College London have published a paper on how various chatbots protect - or fail to safeguard - users' mental health. Experts are increasingly warning that psychosis or mania can be fuelled by AI chatbots.

Meta and Microsoft are trimming their workforces by thousands as they make heavy investments in AI and executives claim that the technology is meeting their companies' productivity needs. Meta told staff on Thursday that on 20 May it would cut some 10% of its personnel - just under 8,000 employees-to boost efficiency, part of a layoff plan made months ago . The company is also closing about 6,000 open roles. The same day, Microsoft announced to employees, for the first time, that it would offer voluntary retirement to about 7% of its American workforce of roughly 125,000. In an internal memo to Meta's staff, Janelle Gale, the chief people officer, didn't mention AI explicitly but said the cuts would allow the company to "offset the other investments we're making".

'The US government's embrace of Anthropic marks a shift.' 'The US government's embrace of Anthropic marks a shift.' The Guardian view on Anthropic's Claude Mythos: when AI finds every flaw, who controls the internet? A nthropic announced its latest AI model, Claude Mythos, this month but said it would not be released publicly, because it turns computers into crime scenes. The company claimed that it could find previously unknown "zero-day" flaws, exploit them and, in principle, link these weaknesses in order to take over major operating systems and web browsers . Mythos did so autonomously, writing code and obtaining privileges.