Anthropic is going on the offensive against rival OpenAI by spending millions on commercials during Sunday night's National Football League championship game to criticize the latter's plan to sell ads on its ChatGPT chatbot. Anthropic is spending millions of dollars to air commercials during Sunday night's National Football League championship game to slam rival OpenAI for its plan to sell ads on its ChatGPT chatbot, in one of the biggest public spats between the big artificial-intelligence companies. One 30-second spot expected to air on the NBC television network during Super Bowl LX from Anthropic takes a thinly veiled jab at OpenAI's intentions to introduce ads to its AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. The commercial features a scrawny twenty-something doing pull-ups in the park, and asking a muscular bystander for advice about achieving six-pack abs. The man replies in a robotic way that suggests he is a chatbot, offering to provide a personalized strength-training plan. But first, he slips in a promotion for shoe inserts that help "short kings stand tall" -- prompting a puzzled response from the twenty-something.

Censorship has been a constant in Ai Weiwei's life. The 68-year-old Chinese dissident, whose activist art has made him among Beijing's most prominent critics, has seen his films, sculptures and other works restricted for their criticisms of China as well as his outspoken advocacy for human rights around the world. Speaking in London ahead of the January 29 launch of his new book On Censorship," he discussed returning to China for the first time in a decade, the impact of AI on freedom of expression, and what he sees as the erosion of free speech in the West. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

SINGAPORE - Several U.S. drone firms made their debuts at the Singapore Airshow this week, seeking to expand their business beyond the Pentagon to countries in Asia that are increasingly concerned about the threat posed by China's military buildup. The lethal success of drones on both sides of Russia's war in Ukraine has sparked a surge of Silicon Valley investment in drone and military artificial intelligence startups, boosting the valuations of U.S. firms like California-based Anduril Industries and Shield AI. This wave of interest in the next generation of warfare is reshaping the character of major air shows that have been long-dominated by gleaming commercial airliners, daredevil fighter jets and troop-carrying helicopters. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.

University of Tokyo professor recommended for U.N. panel on AI Yutaka Matsuo, professor of the University of Tokyo's graduate school of engineering, has been named among 40 experts to sit on a U.N. panel on AI. | JIJI NEW YORK - Yutaka Matsuo, professor of the University of Tokyo's graduate school of engineering, has been named among the 40 experts who have been recommended by the United Nations' head to sit on the new Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced on Wednesday the list of the 40 experts recommended for the panel set up under a General Assembly resolution that passed last August. The selection is expected to be approved by the General Assembly soon. Guterres said the panel would be the first global, fully independent scientific body dedicated to helping close the AI knowledge gap and assess the real impacts of AI across economies and societies. At a time of deep geopolitical tension and growing technological rivalry, we urgently need common ground, he said. That is what this panel can help deliver.

A woman walks near the site of an apartment building hit by a Russian drone strike in Kyiv on Tuesday. KYIV - Ukrainian and Russian officials wrapped up a productive first day of new U.S.-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi, Kyiv's lead negotiator said on Wednesday, as fighting in Europe's biggest conflict since World War II raged on. The two-day trilateral meetings come after Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia had exploited a U.S.-backed energy truce last week to stockpile munitions, attacking Ukraine with a record number of ballistic missiles on Tuesday. The work was substantive and productive, focused on concrete steps and practical solutions, Rustem Umerov, the head of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, wrote on X. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Team Mirai leader Takahiro Anno stumps in Tokyo's Shibuya Ward on Jan. 27, the first day of campaigning for the Lower House election slated for Sunday. A small, 9-month-old party that has only one seat in the Upper House may gain as many seats as decadesold peers such as the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in Sunday's Lower House election with its unconventional campaign pledges to change politics and the government through digital technology. A weekend poll conducted by the Asahi Shimbun showed Team Mirai could win up to 10 seats under the proportional representation system, more than the JCP's nine seats and Reiwa Shinsengumi's six. The party didn't have any seats in the Lower House before its dissolution. The party's founder and leader is a 35-year-old artificial intelligence engineer behind two AI startups -- Takahiro Anno. He had been working on societal reform through digital transformation when he pivoted from business to politics with the launch of Team Mirai last May.

BERLIN - German technology firm DeepL, known for its artificial intelligence-powered translation software, plans to release a Japanese-language version of its real-time interpretation software by the end of this year, a senior company official has said. The age of machine interpretation has arrived, said Leonardo Doin, head of engineering and research for real-time voice translation service DeepL Voice, in a recent interview. You can just wear an earpiece and ... you can just hear it (foreign-language speech) in your language anytime, Doin said. The interpretation software will integrate DeepL's speech recognition and machine translation technologies, and speech synthesis technology that mimics the tones of the speakers' voices. It will be able to handle multiple languages and speakers, he said, with the software's use in online meetings of multinational companies in mind. DeepL plans to roll out the software on smartphones as well.

Elon Musk attends the 56th annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 22. PARIS - French police raided the offices of Elon Musk's social media network X on Tuesday, and prosecutors ordered the tech billionaire to face questions in a widening investigation, amid growing scrutiny of the platform by authorities across Europe. The raid by the Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit and Musk's summoning -- which could further increase tensions between Europe and the U.S. over Big Tech and free speech -- are linked to a yearlong investigation into suspected abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction by X or its executives. Britain's privacy watchdog, meanwhile, also kicked off a formal investigation into Musk's artificial-intelligence chatbot Grok over the processing of personal data and its potential to produce harmful sexual images and video content. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Nintendo's Switch 2 became the world's fastest-selling gaming console after launching to a fan frenzy last summer. The runaway success of the Switch 2 console drove up Nintendo's net profit by more than 50% in the nine months to December, the Japanese video game giant said Tuesday. But a global memory chip shortage, created by frenzied demand for artificial intelligence hardware, could push up manufacturing costs. The Switch 2 became the world's fastest-selling gaming console after launching to a fan frenzy last summer. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Abstract--Negative bias refers to the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to excessively generate negative responses in binary decision tasks (e.g., yes-no question answering). Previous research has focused on detecting and addressing negative attention heads that induce negative bias. However, the underlying detailed factors influencing negative bias remain underexplored. In this paper, we demonstrate that LLMs exhibit format-level negative bias, meaning the prompt format more influences their responses than the semantics of the negative response. For the fine-grained study of the negative bias, we introduce a pipeline for constructing the evaluation set, which systematically categorizes the dataset into three subsets based on the model's parametric knowledge: correct, incorrect, and insufficient relevant knowledge. Through analysis of this evaluation set, we identify a shortcut behavior in which models tend to generate negative responses when they lack sufficient knowledge to answer a yes-no question, leading to negative bias. We further examine how negative bias changes under various prompting scenarios related to parametric knowledge. We observe that providing relevant context and offering an "I don't know" option generally reduces negative bias, whereas chain-of-thought prompting tends to amplify the bias. Finally, we demonstrate that the degree of negative bias can vary depending on the type of prompt, which influences the direction of the response. Our work reveals the various factors that influence negative bias, providing critical insights for mitigating it in LLMs. ECENT advances in the capabilities and emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs) have led to rapid improvements in the performance of a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks [1]-[5]. Leveraging their ability to follow instructions, LLMs are able to perform complex, previously unseen tasks, enabling human-like interactions [6]-[9]. One critical issue is the hallucination problem, where the model generates content that contains misleading information, which does not correspond to the given context or real-world knowledge [11]. J. Song was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Seoul National University, South Korea (coms1580@gmail.com).