This post contains a list of the AI-related seminars that are scheduled to take place between 3 November and 31 December 2025. All events detailed here are free and open for anyone to attend virtually. Agni Orfanoudaki (University of Oxford) Association of European Operational Research Societies To receive the seminar link, sign up to the mailing list . Nicholas Barbara (University of Sydney) EPFL Zoom link is here . Jose Carrillo (University of Oxford) University of Minnesota Zoom registration is here .

The Case That A.I. Is Thinking ChatGPT does not have an inner life. Yet it seems to know what it's talking about. How convincing does the illusion of understanding have to be before you stop calling it an illusion? Dario Amodei, the C.E.O. of the artificial-intelligence company Anthropic, has been predicting that an A.I. "smarter than a Nobel Prize winner" in such fields as biology, math, engineering, and writing might come online by 2027. He envisions millions of copies of a model whirring away, each conducting its own research: a "country of geniuses in a datacenter." In June, Sam Altman, of OpenAI, wrote that the industry was on the cusp of building "digital superintelligence." "The 2030s are likely going to be wildly different from any time that has come before," he asserted. Meanwhile, the A.I. tools that most people currently interact with on a day-to-day basis are reminiscent of Clippy, the onetime Microsoft Office "assistant" that was actually more of a gadfly. A Zoom A.I. tool suggests that you ask it "What are some meeting icebreakers?" or instruct it to "Write a short message to share gratitude." Siri is good at setting reminders but not much else. A friend of mine saw a button in Gmail that said "Thank and tell anecdote." When he clicked it, Google's A.I. invented a funny story about a trip to Turkey that he never took. The rushed and uneven rollout of A.I. has created a fog in which it is tempting to conclude that there is nothing to see here--that it's all hype. There is, to be sure, plenty of hype: Amodei's timeline is science-fictional.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. KitKat was friendly with many customers of Randa's Market in San Francisco's Mission District. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . San Francisco has been mourning the death of KitKat, a beloved corner-store cat who died after being struck by a Waymo robotaxi last week.

Devastating impact of Mamdani's election will be FAR WORSE than first thought: Exclusive poll finds America's greatest city facing'historic' population wipeout Trump reveals devastating plan for NYC if'communist' Mamdani gets elected while rejecting comparisons: 'I'm a much better looking person' I won't ever forget what I saw at Andy Cohen's party. He may admit he's hooking up with guys on every dating app but this is the truth about men like him: KENNEDY So many single men are taking this new drug cocktail before dates. The results in the bedroom are startling... as I discovered during one marathon session: JANA HOCKING Putin unveils terrifying new nuclear submarine built to carry'doomsday' weapon capable of unleashing radioactive tidal wave'Trump has lost it with Steve Bannon': Insiders claim third term'plan' has sparked furious MAGA rift... and name group of'irritants' wreaking havoc How Jennifer Aniston found her happy ever after with Hollywood hypnotist and'love guru' Jim Curtis after string of failed romances, 'love triangle' scandal and IVF struggles Meghan Markle'wants to become a billionaire', says royal expert, after Duchess was seen cosying up to brains behind Kardashian brands amid speculation she'could launch a beauty empire' William and Kate throw party for builders and staff who helped them leave'cursed' cottage early Deborra-Lee Furness' bold move after split from Hugh Jackman - and why the actor is not happy about it Trump responds after Dilbert creator makes last-ditch plea to save his life as he'declines rapidly' from cancer Kimberly Guilfoyle's steamy Greek debut sparks envious whispers of a'storm' coming for Trump We've never been so sure of an imminent financial crash: Industry leaders across ALL sectors come together to say these signs of US economic meltdown are undeniable Now THAT'S what you call a cold one! A rare bottle of Arctic beer will be opened to revive the ancient ale, 150 years after it was bottled. Douglas Gunn Sharp, founder of Edinburgh's Innis & Gunn brewery, will open his precious bottle of Allsopp's Arctic Ale - after splashing out £3,000 for it.

Tony Blair: 'As we have seen with AI, it is the countries that have the infrastructure and capital for scale that capture technology's economic and strategic benefits.' Tony Blair: 'As we have seen with AI, it is the countries that have the infrastructure and capital for scale that capture technology's economic and strategic benefits.' 'History won't forgive us' if UK falls behind in quantum computing race, says Tony Blair Tony Blair has said "history won't forgive us" if the UK falls behind in the race to harness quantum computing, a frontier technology predicted to trigger the next wave of breakthroughs in everything from drug design to climate modelling. The former British Labour prime minister, whose thinktank and consultancy, the Tony Blair Institute, is backed by tech industry leaders including the Oracle founder, Larry Ellison, warned: "The country risks failing to convert its leadership in quantum research." In a report calling for a national strategy for quantum computing, Blair and William Hague, a former Conservative party leader, compared the situation to the recent history of artificial intelligence, where the UK was responsible for important research breakthroughs but then ceded power to other countries, including the US, leading to a scramble to build "sovereign" AI capacity.

Evaluating the reasoning ability of language models (LMs) is complicated by their extensive parametric world knowledge, where benchmark performance often reflects factual recall rather than genuine reasoning. Existing datasets and approaches (e.g., temporal filtering, paraphrasing, adversarial substitution) cannot cleanly separate the two. We present SynthWorlds, a framework that disentangles task reasoning complexity from factual knowledge. In SynthWorlds, we construct parallel corpora representing two worlds with identical interconnected structure: a real-mapped world, where models may exploit parametric knowledge, and a synthetic-mapped world, where such knowledge is meaningless. On top of these corpora, we design two mirrored tasks as case studies: multi-hop question answering and page navigation, which maintain equal reasoning difficulty across worlds. Experiments in parametric-only (e.g., closed-book QA) and knowledge-augmented (e.g., retrieval-augmented) LM settings reveal a persistent knowledge advantage gap, defined as the performance boost models gain from memorized parametric world knowledge. Knowledge acquisition and integration mechanisms reduce but do not eliminate this gap, highlighting opportunities for system improvements. Fully automatic and scalable, SynthWorlds provides a controlled environment for evaluating LMs in ways that were previously challenging, enabling precise and testable comparisons of reasoning and memorization.

Guillermo del Toro Hopes He's Dead Before AI Art Goes Mainstream The director tells WIRED the real Victor Frankensteins are tyrannical politicians and Silicon Valley tech bros. Guillermo del Toro attends the Headline Gala screening of Netflix's during the 69th BFI London Film Festival. Guillermo del Toro loves a challenge. Nothing the 61-year-old director does could be termed "half-assed," and each of his movies is planned, scripted, and storyboarded with immense attention to detail. Such discipline is evident in, his adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. It's a movie del Toro has been trying to make for years, and it shows. The elaborate sets and costumes--as well as some embellishing of Shelley's story--could only be the work of someone as connected as he is with his source material.

The 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2025) took place in Bologna, Italy, from 25-30 October 2025. On the first two days of the event, the workshops, tutorials and doctoral consortium took place, with the main conference running from 27-30 October. We've collected some social media posts from attendees to give a flavour of the happenings from the past week. So many great presentations, it's hard to choose. If you're around and open to connecting, I'd love to chat.

Kids everywhere know her voice--if not her name. WIRED talks to the former SM trainee about her rise to global superstardom with her hit song "Golden." EJAE, the voice and the writing talent behind "Golden," has gone platinum. The night before our interview, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter found out that record sales from the soundtrack had surged past a million units. Jimmy Fallon, of all people, delivered the news alongside a glimmering framed record when she was appearing on with Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami for the first full live performance of "Golden." Together the trio make up the singing voices of girl group -Huntr/x in Netflix's animated musical turned bona fide phenomenon. If you have a kid, you probably don't need a refresher, but the movie follows Huntr/x's Rumi, Mira, and Zoey as they juggle being astronomically famous while moonlighting as demon hunters. That Fallon appearance, and the appearance that predated it, might have been the first times that American audiences actually saw (and heard) the human being behind that inescapable song.

Character.AI bans users under 18 after being sued over child's suicide Move comes as lawmakers move to bar minors from using AI companions and require companies to verify users' age The chatbot company Character.AI will ban users 18 and under from conversing with its virtual companions beginning in late November after months of legal scrutiny. The announced change comes after the company, which enables its users to create characters with which they can have open-ended conversations, faced tough questions over how these AI companions can affect teen and general mental health, including a lawsuit over a child's suicide and a proposed bill that would ban minors from conversing with AI companions. "We're making these changes to our under-18 platform in light of the evolving landscape around AI and teens," the company wrote in its announcement. "We have seen recent news reports raising questions, and have received questions from regulators, about the content teens may encounter when chatting with AI and about how open-ended AI chat in general might affect teens, even when content controls work perfectly." Last year, the company was sued by the family of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, who took his own life after allegedly developing an emotional attachment to a character he created on Character.AI.