A Russian drone hit an apartment building in Romania, the country's defence ministry said early on Friday, causing a fire and injuring two people. The drone crashed in the eastern city of Galati as Russia carried out attacks in Ukraine near the border, the ministry said in a statement. The Romanian General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations said the drone's entire explosive payload detonated, causing a fire on the 10th floor of the residential building. Russian drones have strayed across the border of the Nato member country a number of times during the four-year war with Ukraine, but this was the first time citizens from Romania had been hurt. Russia has yet to comment on the incident. This incident represents a serious and irresponsible escalation on the part of the Russian Federation, Romania's foreign ministry said, adding Bucharest had informed the Nato secretary general and requested measures to accelerate the transfer of anti-drone capabilities to Romania.

Anthropic has usurped OpenAI as the world's most valuable artificial intelligence startup, soaring to a $965bn valuation ahead of expected public listings by the rival firms. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude family of chatbots, said on Thursday that it had raised $65bn from private investors after a fundraising round led by Altimeter Capital, Greenoaks, Dragoneer and Sequoia Capital. "This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens," Anthropic's Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said in a statement. Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner hailed the adoption of Claude among the "world's most demanding organisations" as evidence of Anthropic's command in the field. "This momentum positions Anthropic to lead the next phase of AI innovation and capture the enormous opportunity ahead," Gerstner said.

Conformal prediction (CP) and its extension, conformal risk control (CRC), are established frameworks for quantifying uncertainty in supervised machine learning through formal guarantees. However, recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) have been driven by unsupervised generative models, such as large language models (LLMs) and image generators, which are not directly compatible with CP or CRC. In this work we introduce conformal generation (Conf-Gen), a general framework adapting CRC to generative tasks while relaxing its theoretical assumptions. Conf-Gen unifies and generalizes previous attempts to apply CP to LLMs, and extends conformal methodology to entirely new domains. We demonstrate the flexibility of Conf-Gen through some novel applications, including obtaining conformal guarantees on: image generators producing non-memorized images, conversational AI systems having asked enough clarifying questions, and the output of AI agents being correct.

Many applications require statistically valid inference across many related "tasks", while using only a handful of high-quality labels per hypothesis. In AI evaluation, these tasks may correspond to model behaviors across prompts, subgroups, or hypotheses; in social science surveys, they may correspond to related questions, populations, or measurement conditions. Prediction-powered inference (PPI) uses abundant but inexpensive proxy measurements to improve inference from limited, "ground-truth" labels, but commonly used methods treat tasks independently and therefore fail to exploit shared structure across related tasks. This limitation is especially important in settings where only a small number of labels are available per task. To address this issue, we introduce a multi-task prediction-powered inference framework that uses labeled data from related tasks to improve power while preserving task-specific inference. Our methods exploit the shared structure in the proxy-ground-truth relationship through cross-task recalibration, while retaining within-task rectification and power tuning to construct accurate point estimates and confidence intervals. We prove that efficiency gains beyond power-tuned PPI are only possible when the proxy-ground-truth relationship contains nonlinear structure; affine cross-task recalibrations are asymptotically equivalent to using the original proxy. We complement our theoretical findings with experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets, as well as a case study auditing language models on election-related information during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Using a large human-annotation study, we show that cross-task recalibration can substantially reduce confidence interval widths when labels are scarce.

The GOP's Attacks on James Talarico Are Straight Out of the Incel Handbook Claims about low testosterone and false accusations of veganism might play well to the online far right, but will they win an election? Democratic US Senate candidate James Talarico speaks in Houston, Texas. On Tuesday, with Donald Trump's endorsement and the backing of the MAGA faithful, scandal-ridden Texas attorney general Ken Paxton defeated incumbent US senator John Cornyn in a runoff primary to claim the Republican nomination for that seat. He then quickly set about painting his general-election opponent, Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, as insufficiently masculine. "My opponent is the most extreme radical that Democrats have ever nominated," Paxton said in his victory speech.

An AI facial recognition tool that aims to detect adult migrants posing as children will be deployed at the UK's borders next year. A software company has been awarded a contract to develop and test the technology, which will estimate a person's age by analysing photographs of them taken at the border. The Home Office says the technology will make it easier to identify adult migrants attempting to game the system, after initial testing indicated promising performance and accuracy. But Human Rights Watch urged the government to scrap the scheme, describing it as unproven technology that will undermine the protections vulnerable children are entitled to. Unaccompanied child migrants are processed through the care system rather than the asylum system, which can make it easier to stay in the country.

Dan Le Batard, who previously avoided Doug Emhoff abuse allegation, declares journalism'dead' USA Today calls Stephen Colbert, America's least funny comedian, a'gallant comic avenger' Critics reviews for'The Mandalorian and Grogu' are out, and it's yet another bad sign for Disney, Star Wars Can Victor Wembanyama be the true face of the NBA as a European? Audemars Piguet x Swatch'Royal Pop' release sparks mob scenes, pepper spray and arrests at malls Statisticians strangely don't count multiple clear-cut Caitlin Clark assists vs Mystics The best outdoor weekend in Northwest Georgia doesn't require'roughing it' or sleeping on the ground STRAIT OUTTA WAR?: Iran talks enter most critical phase yet as US military remains on standby Strait of Hormuz reopening among core conditions needed for Trump's approval Greg Gutfeld: A good sheep doesn't do that Brian Kilmeade: This should be in the'fiction section' of every library US, Israeli militaries must ensure Iranians'do not cheat,' Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO says OutKick-Analysis'Supergirl' pre-release tracking looks disastrously bad for Hollywood after lead actress' bizarre comments Star Milly Alcock's divisive remarks and underwhelming trailers have tracking estimates far below studio hopes Greg Gutfeld: Will Hollywood take the hint? Fox News host Greg Gutfeld and the'Gutfeld!' panel discuss Hollywood's obsession with inserting politics into movies. Hollywood can't get out of its own way. For most of the last decade, the entertainment industry has worked extremely hard to alienate large numbers of potential customers.

Dan Le Batard, who previously avoided Doug Emhoff abuse allegation, declares journalism'dead' USA Today calls Stephen Colbert, America's least funny comedian, a'gallant comic avenger' Critics reviews for'The Mandalorian and Grogu' are out, and it's yet another bad sign for Disney, Star Wars Can Victor Wembanyama be the true face of the NBA as a European? Audemars Piguet x Swatch'Royal Pop' release sparks mob scenes, pepper spray and arrests at malls Statisticians strangely don't count multiple clear-cut Caitlin Clark assists vs Mystics The best outdoor weekend in Northwest Georgia doesn't require'roughing it' or sleeping on the ground NFL's grossly expanded national schedule is making RedZone and Sunday Ticket less essential Greg Gutfeld: A good sheep doesn't do that Brian Kilmeade: This should be in the'fiction section' of every library US, Israeli militaries must ensure Iranians'do not cheat,' Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO says Scott Bessent reveals three conditions Iran deal must meet for Trump's final sign off Trump won't put'national security' at risk over 2026 midterms, former RNC chairman says President Trump: Democrats are'good salesmen,' but they have no policies While OutKick is trying to enjoy the NBA conference finals, though all the blowouts make that difficult, the fanboys keep demanding we comment on the ratings. Every other day, it seems, NBC or the NBA releases another celebratory graphic touting viewership. The Western Conference Finals are averaging 9.4 million viewers across NBC and Peacock, making it the most-watched Western Conference Finals on record through three games, NBC posted on X on Thursday. The network also said that Thunder-Spurs Game 4 on Sunday delivered a total audience of 10.3 million viewers, making it the most-watched Western Conference Finals Game 4 since 1999.

AI regulation is seen as urgent by nearly 8 in 10 voters in a new poll, with 80% saying protecting public interests should be prioritized over promoting innovation.

Paxton trounces Cornyn in the Texas Senate Republican primary runoff; Trump waffles between a losing "peace deal" and a return to war in Iran; and congressional candidate Alex Bores makes the case for AI regulation. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.