Over the weekend, the Federal Aviation Administration officially designated the airspace above the Caesars Superdome as a "No Drone Zone" during and ahead of the big game. Drone operators who do fly their devices into the restricted area, accidentally or otherwise, could have their drones confiscated or receive hefty fines up to 75,000. The decision comes just weeks after a hobbyist drone collided with a plane helping combat wildfires in California and amid an uptick in drone sightings around the country. Starting at 1:30 p.m. CST on game day (Sunday, February 9) the FAA will prohibit drones from flying within a 1.5 nautical miles radius and 2,000 feet in altitude of the Caesars Superdome. The restricted area space will expand to a 30 nautical-mile radius and 18,000 feet in altitude between 4:30 and 10:30 p.m CST that same day.

So long as we can say'This is the worst,' " go the lines from King Lear quoted in Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel Station Eleven. Any stories we tell about the end of the world will have to be fictional, since once the real thing occurs, no one will be around to describe it. As the British journalist Dorian Lynskey relates in his erudite, delightfully witty, and strangely cheering new book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, the fact that we can only ever speculate on the subject makes us speculate all the more frantically. "There is simply no end of ends," Lynskey writes of the books, movies, TV shows, pop songs, and video games we've created to depict the apocalypse--or its near misses and the aftermaths thereof. Station Eleven is often described as "postapocalyptic," but as Lynskey points out, the more accurate term would be "postcatastrophic." That's a better label for stories in which "the world has not ended, but a world has, creating a blank ...

DeepSeek has said that its most recent model was trained on Nvidia H800s. This is an A.I. chip that Nvidia developed specifically for the Chinese market after export controls were first imposed, and that caused a fair amount of drama in Washington. When the United States put restrictions on Nvidia's most advanced chips in 2022, Nvidia quickly adapted by creating slightly downgraded chips that fell just under the threshold the government had set. These chips were technically legal for Chinese companies to use, but allowed them to achieve practically the same results. This angered Biden officials, and they moved to restrict the new chips as well. But the government moved slowly, and it took them about a year to ban the H800 and other downgraded chips.

The AAAI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity recognizes positive impacts of artificial intelligence to protect, enhance, and improve human life in meaningful ways with long-lived effects. The award is given annually at the conference for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). This year, the AAAI Awards Committee has announced that the 2025 recipient of the award and 25,000 prize is Stuart J. Russell, "for his work on the conceptual and theoretical foundations of provably beneficial AI and his leadership in creating the field of AI safety". Stuart will give an invited talk at AAAI 2025 entitled "Can AI Benefit Humanity?" Stuart J. Russell is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the Michael H. Smith and Lotfi A. Zadeh Chair in Engineering.

American stock markets shuddered on Monday, prompted by China's announcement that it has created a capable, cheap, artificial intelligence machine. It's the biggest cloud yet to darken the West's blue-sky enthusiasm over AI, calling into question the efficacy of America's export controls and the billions of dollars the United States is pouring into the technology's expensive cutting edge. China startup DeepSeek says its AI assistant uses less advanced chips than its rivals' models do, and it costs less to train. Unlike the West's billions, the Chinese model was developed for just 5.6 million, by one estimate. "Are we going to spend 500 billion to get to the frontier so that China can find a way to copy our homework for pennies on the dollar?"

The US Navy has released stunning images showing its incredible new drone-destroying laser weapon in action for the first time. The HELIOS system was tested aboard the USS Preble, with photos capturing its bright beam shooting an unmanned aerial vehicle out of the sky. HELIOS, which stands for High Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance, was developed by Lockheed Martin in 2021 and delivered to the Navy a year later. The system blasts more than 60 kilowatts of directed energy, enough to power up to 60 homes, at the speed of light and can hit targets up to five miles away. It is designed to counter a range of threats, including drones, small boats, and potentially incoming missiles.

Rep. Carlos Gimenez grilled FBI Director Chris Wray on AI and China during a hearing held by the House select committee on China. U.S. Vice President JD Vance will attend a two-day high-level summit focusing on artificial intelligence in Paris next week, his first scheduled trip abroad since taking office, a French diplomatic official said Tuesday. The AI Action Summit on Feb. 10-11 will gather heads of state and top government officials, CEOs and other actors involved in the tech sector, which has been shaken up by galloping advances. Vance has not made any official foreign trips since his inauguration last month. The White House had no immediate comment.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul spoke to CNN's Jim Acosta on Monday about daytime tv talk show host Dr. Phil joining an ICE deportation operation. Talk show host Dr. Phil called out multiple media outlets for expressing outrage over his ride-along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as it apprehended illegal immigrants. Phil McGraw, known as "Dr. Phil," joined border czar Tom Homan and a team of agents as they took various illegal immigrants into custody in Chicago. As part of his show on Merit TV, Dr. Phil filmed a variety of arrests and even interviewed a convicted sex offender and internet predator from Thailand who was being taken into custody.

It's been another wild few days in Elon Musk news. Stay tuned for our coverage. In personal news, I deleted Instagram from my phone to try out a month without it there. Instead of scrolling, I've been listening to Shygirl and Lady Gaga's new music. DeepSeek roiled the US stock market last week by proposing that AI shouldn't really be all that expensive. The suggestion was so stunning it wiped about 600bn off of Nvidia's market cap in one day.

After President Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on nearly all Canadian imported goods (and Canada announced its own 25 percent tariff on American imported goods), Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario -- and a former supporter of President Trump -- announced the Canadian territory would be "ripping up" a 100 million contract with Elon Musk's Starlink. The contract was signed in November last year. Musk, boss of Starlink and the richest man in the world, is a close confidant of Trump and has control over the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE (urgh), tasked with cost-cutting and deregulation in government. Ford believed this was enough to link Musk (and his businesses) to Trump's tariffs. He said Ontario "won't do business with people hellbent on destroying our economy" and that Musk wants to "take food off the table" of hard-working Canadians.