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'Heroes of Kharkiv': How 48 children were saved from kindergarten hit by Russian drone

BBC News

'Heroes of Kharkiv': How 48 children were saved from kindergarten hit by Russian drone Although moving forward, Oleksandr Volobuev's body is angled slightly away from the camera, as if bracing against the deadly air still swirling with falling debris and smoke. His face in careful concentration, the Major-General from Ukraine's Civil Protection Service clings tightly to a precious bundle, wrapped for protection in his coat - and out of which two small pink shoes protrude. It is a striking image of a dramatic rescue from a nursery school in the eastern city of Kharkiv, following a devastating, direct hit by a Russian drone. Unsurprisingly it has gone viral, capturing both the Ukrainian and the wider global public's imagination. With 48 children trapped in a shelter in the burning building, it was not the only act of bravery that day, not by a long way.


Trump's week in Asia: BBC correspondents on the wins and potential losses

BBC News

US President Donald Trump is arriving in Asia for a whirlwind week of diplomacy, which includes a much-anticipated meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Top of the agenda between the two will be trade - an area where tensions between the world's two biggest economies have once again been ramping up. Trump lands in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, as a summit for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, begins on Sunday. He will then visit Japan and finally South Korea, where the White House says he will meet Xi. So what are the wins Trump and other leaders are hoping for, and what are the pitfalls?


AI models may be developing their own 'survival drive', researchers say

The Guardian

'I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.' HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. 'I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.' HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. AI models may be developing their own'survival drive', researchers say Like 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000, some AIs seem to resist being turned off and will even sabotage shutdown When HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, works out that the astronauts onboard a mission to Jupiter are planning to shut it down, it plots to kill them in an attempt to survive. Now, in a somewhat less deadly case (so far) of life imitating art, an AI safety research company has said that AI models may be developing their own "survival drive". After Palisade Research released a paper last month which found that certain advanced AI models appear resistant to being turned off, at times even sabotaging shutdown mechanisms, it wrote an update attempting to clarify why this is - and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed.


'Sycophantic' AI chatbots tell users what they want to hear, study shows

The Guardian

Stanford University researchers found that AI chatbots reinforced existing beliefs, assumptions and decisions. Stanford University researchers found that AI chatbots reinforced existing beliefs, assumptions and decisions. 'Sycophantic' AI chatbots tell users what they want to hear, study shows Scientists warn of'insidious risks' of increasingly popular technology that affirms even harmful behaviour Turning to AI chatbots for personal advice poses "insidious risks", according to a study showing the technology consistently affirms a user's actions and opinions even when harmful. Scientists said the findings raised urgent concerns over the power of chatbots to distort people's self-perceptions and make them less willing to patch things up after a row. With chatbots becoming a major source of advice on relationships and other personal issues, they could "reshape social interactions at scale", the researchers added, calling on developers to address this risk.


Armed police in US handcuff teen after AI mistakes crisp packet for gun

BBC News

A US teenager was handcuffed by armed police after an artificial intelligence (AI) system mistakenly said he was carrying a gun - when really he was holding a packet of crisps. Police showed up, like eight cop cars, and then they all came out with guns pointed at me talking about getting on the ground, 16-year-old Baltimore pupil Taki Allen told local outlet WMAR-2 News . Baltimore County Police Department said their officers responded appropriately and proportionally based on the information provided at the time. It said the AI alert was sent to human reviewers who found no threat - but the principal missed this and contacted the school's safety team, who ultimately called the police. But the incident has prompted calls by some for the schools' procedures around the use of such technology to be reviewed.



The Download: carbon removal's future, and measuring pain using an app

MIT Technology Review

Plus: Meta's lawyers advised staff to remove parts of their research After years of growth that spawned hundreds of startups, the nascent carbon removal sector appears to be facing a reckoning. Running Tide, a promising aquaculture company, shut down its operations last summer, and a handful of other companies have shuttered, downsized, or pivoted in recent months as well. And the collective industry hasn't made a whole lot more progress toward Running Tide's ambitious plans to sequester a billion tons of carbon dioxide by this year. The hype phase is over and the sector is sliding into the turbulent business trough that follows, experts warn. And the open question is: If the carbon removal sector is heading into a painful if inevitable clearing-out cycle, where will it go from there? This story is part of MIT Technology Review's What's Next series, which looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future.


US student handcuffed after AI system apparently mistook bag of chips for firearm

The Guardian

Taki Allen said law enforcement made him get on his knees, handcuffed and searched him, finding nothing. Taki Allen said law enforcement made him get on his knees, handcuffed and searched him, finding nothing. An artificial intelligence system (AI) apparently mistook a high school student's bag of Doritos for a firearm and called local police to tell them the pupil was armed. Taki Allen was sitting with friends on Monday night outside Kenwood high school in Baltimore and eating a snack when police officers with guns approached him. "At first, I didn't know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, 'Get on the ground,' and I was like, 'What?'"


Virtual Monopoly, Uno and Yahtzee over the real thing? No thanks Dominik Diamond

The Guardian

One not to remember video game Uno. One not to remember video game Uno. Are digital board games as fun as the real thing? When our family board game night got cancelled, I sampled digital spins on the classics instead. I'm not sure I should have bothered - with one exception The whole point of video games is to be faster, more visually arresting, and less reliant on other humans than old games played with dice and cards. But a recent family board game night was derailed by clashing schedules and family civil war, so I spent a Saturday night trying them out on the iPhone instead.


Evolution of Cooperation in LLM-Agent Societies: A Preliminary Study Using Different Punishment Strategies

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The evolution of cooperation has been extensively studied using abstract mathematical models and simulations. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and the rise of LLM agents have demonstrated their ability to perform social reasoning, thus providing an opportunity to test the emergence of norms in more realistic agent-based simulations with human-like reasoning using natural language. In this research, we investigate whether the cooperation dynamics presented in Boyd and Richerson's model persist in a more realistic simulation of the Diner's Dilemma using LLM agents compared to the abstract mathematical nature in the work of Boyd and Richerson. Our findings indicate that agents follow the strategies defined in the Boyd and Richerson model, and explicit punishment mechanisms drive norm emergence, reinforcing cooperative behaviour even when the agent strategy configuration varies. Our results suggest that LLM-based Multi-Agent System simulations, in fact, can replicate the evolution of cooperation predicted by the traditional mathematical models. Moreover, our simulations extend beyond the mathematical models by integrating natural language-driven reasoning and a pairwise imitation method for strategy adoption, making them a more realistic testbed for cooperative behaviour in MASs.