David DePape, the man accused of attempting to kidnap former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and attacking her husband last year after breaking into the couple's home, detailed his descent into political extremism and belief in conspiracy theories during his testimony Tuesday in the federal trial against him. DePape, 43, explained that long before he broke into the Pelosis' San Francisco home in the early morning of Oct. 28, 2022, with plans to get the lawmaker to fess up to corruption within the Democratic Party, he considered himself to be left-leaning politically. He thought Sept. 11 was an "inside job" during former President George W. Bush's tenure in the White House, he said, and at one point he maintained a "very strong anti-Trump bias," believing the former president was a puppet of the ruling class and Wall Street. That all changed as DePape spent entire days on the internet watching YouTube and listening to right-leaning political podcasts while playing video games in a garage he called home in Richmond, north of Oakland. His favorite podcasters included right-wing pundit Tim Pool and James Lindsay, a conservative influencer that the nonprofit advocacy organization Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a promoter of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and "conspiracy theories about the supposed communist takeover of the world."

This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. Shortly after ChatGPT's release last year, a cadre of critics captured headlines and made noise on social media claiming that A.I. would soon kill us. As wondrous as a computer speaking in natural language might be, it could use that intelligence to level the planet. The thinking went mainstream via letters calling for research pauses and 60 Minutes interviews amplifying existential concerns. Leaders like Barack Obama publicly worried about A.I. autonomously hacking the financial system--or worse.

Leonid Tymchenko spent the first month of Russia's invasion sitting in his dark government office after curfew. Unable to go home, Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs scrolled through Telegram, looking at thousands of videos and images of advancing Russian soldiers. When Tymchenko was offered a chance to test a new facial-recognition tool, he uploaded some of the photos to try it out. He could not believe the results. Every time Tymchenko added a photo of a Russian soldier, the software, made by the American facial-recognition company Clearview AI, seemed to come back with an exact hit, linking to pages that revealed the soldier's name, hometown, and social-media profile.

Last month, a 120-page United States executive order laid out the Biden administration's plans to oversee companies that develop artificial intelligence technologies and directives for how the federal government should expand its adoption of AI. At its core, though, the document focused heavily on AI-related security issues--both finding and fixing vulnerabilities in AI products and developing defenses against potential cybersecurity attacks fueled by AI. As with any executive order, the rub is in how a sprawling and abstract document will be turned into concrete action. Today, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) will announce a "Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence" that lays out its plan for implementing the order. CISA divides its plans to tackle AI cybersecurity and critical infrastructure-related topics into five buckets.

Record companies can request the removal of songs that use artificial intelligence-generated versions of artists' voices under new guidelines issued by YouTube. The video platform is introducing a tool that will allow music labels and distributors to flag content that mimics an artist's "unique singing or rapping voice". Fake AI-generated music has been one of the side-effects of leaps forward this year in generative AI – the term for technology that can produce highly convincing text, images and voice from human prompts. One of the most high-profile examples is Heart on My Sleeve, a song featuring AI-made vocals purporting to be Drake and the Weeknd. It was pulled from streaming services after Universal Music Group, the record company for both artists, criticised the song for "infringing content created with generative AI".

Two things have happened, Li explains. Generative AI has caused the public to wake up to AI technology, she says, because it's behind concrete tools, such as ChatGPT, that people can try out for themselves. And as a result, businesses have realized that AI technology such as text generation can make them money, and they have started rolling these technologies out in more products for the real world. "Because of that, it impacts our world in a more profound way," Li says. Li is one of the tech leaders we interviewed for the latest issue of MIT Technology Review, dedicated to the biggest questions and hardest problems facing the world.

Nearly a year to the date since their last meeting, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping will sit down Wednesday in the San Francisco Bay Area to try and put a floor under ties that have plummeted to fresh lows in recent months. When Biden and Xi meet on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in San Francisco, both will have a laundry list of concerns to discuss. From military-to-military lines of communication, Taiwan, and the South and East China Seas to tough U.S. semiconductor export controls, the manufacture and export of fentanyl, and artificial intelligence threats -- all will be on the table during several hours of discussions. But don't expect the talks -- the pair's seventh interaction since the start of the Biden administration but just the second in-person meeting -- to yield any dramatic breakthroughs.

Rep. Nancy Mace spoke with Fox News Digital on Friday to preview her upcoming House Oversight subcommittee hearing on AI deepfakes. One of the sad truths of American life is that sexual material tends to be on the cutting edge of technology. This probably dates back to Gutenberg, but more recently we've seen it with VCRs and then streaming video. And now, artificial intelligence images called deepfakes are hitting the news the same way but are sure to become an issue in all future conflicts and elections. In the latest case, New Jersey teen girls were victimized by artificially created, sexualized images.

With artificial intelligence being used in a growing number of defense systems, Japan and 44 other countries have endorsed a U.S.-led initiative aimed at setting guardrails around the military use of this cutting-edge technology. Amid concerns that the unregulated use of AI could result in unintended consequences, the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo said Tuesday that it shares Washington's objective of "reducing the potential risks and uncertainties posed by the introduction of AI into the military field." Tokyo, which has been following the U.S. initiative since its launch in February, also said it welcomes efforts to strengthen the compliance of military AI applications with international humanitarian law.

With more than 32% of the global energy used by commercial and residential buildings, there is an urgent need to revisit traditional approaches to Building Energy Management (BEM). With HVAC systems accounting for about 40% of the total energy cost in the commercial sector, we propose a low-complexity DRL-based model with multi-input multi-output architecture for the HVAC energy optimization of open-plan offices, which uses only a handful of controllable and accessible factors. The efficacy of our solution is evaluated through extensive analysis of the overall energy consumption and thermal comfort levels compared to a baseline system based on the existing HVAC schedule in a real building. This comparison shows that our method achieves 37% savings in energy consumption with minimum violation (<1%) of the desired temperature range during work hours. It takes only a total of 40 minutes for 5 epochs (about 7.75 minutes per epoch) to train a network with superior performance and covering diverse conditions for its low-complexity architecture; therefore, it easily adapts to changes in the building setups, weather conditions, occupancy rate, etc. Moreover, by enforcing smoothness on the control strategy, we suppress the frequent and unpleasant on/off transitions on HVAC units to avoid occupant discomfort and potential damage to the system. The generalizability of our model is verified by applying it to different building models and under various weather conditions.