Government
Elon Musk's Grok AI tells users he is fitter than LeBron James and smarter than da Vinci
Elon Musk's AI, Grok, has been telling users the world's richest person is smarter and more fit than anyone in the world, in a raft of recently deleted posts. Elon Musk's AI, Grok, has been telling users the world's richest person is smarter and more fit than anyone in the world, in a raft of recently deleted posts. Elon Musk's Grok AI tells users he is fitter than LeBron James and smarter than da Vinci Thu 20 Nov 2025 23.25 ESTLast modified on Thu 20 Nov 2025 23.27 EST Elon Musk's AI, Grok, has been telling users the world's richest person is smarter and more fit than anyone in the world, in a raft of recently deleted posts that have called into question the bot's objectivity. Users on X using the artificial intelligence chatbot in the past week have noted that whatever the comparison - from questions of athleticism to intelligence and even divinity - Musk would frequently come out on top. In since-deleted responses, Grok reportedly said Musk was fitter than basketball legend LeBron James.
Graduate jobs under threat from AI, PwC boss says
The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) may eventually lead to fewer entry-level graduates being hired, the boss of accountancy giant PwC has told the BBC. However, global chairman Mohamed Kande said AI was not behind recent job cuts at the firm, adding that the company actually needed to hire hundreds of new AI engineers but was struggling to find them. But some observers say the technology itself threatens thousands of junior jobs across the professional services industry. Speaking on the sidelines of a business summit in Singapore, Mr Kande also said big changes in the global economy, such as US President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs, had been good for the firm's consulting business. He also addressed the company's suspension in China last year over its work on the collapsed property giant Evergrande, promising that the same mistakes would not happen again.
Hands On With Google's Nano Banana Pro Image Generator
Google's latest AI image model is vastly better than the previous release at generating text in images. You can expect companies to go buck wild with this update. Nano Banana Pro generated this image, assembling a crowd of standalone characters into one scene. Corporate AI slop feels inescapable in 2025. From website banner ads to outdoor billboards, images generated by businesses using AI tools surround me.
Paws-itively terrifying! Lions produce not just one, but TWO distinct types of roar, study finds
Defiant Dems receive 24/7 protection from Capitol Police after Trump accused them of'seditious behavior' and threatened them with execution What Meghan's announcements in her pseudo-Royal court get wrong and why they'speak volumes', revealed by experts Presidential hopeful is dragged into criminal probe... as shock texts emerge: 'It will open Pandora's Box' Multiple cast members speak to Daily Mail and hurl ugly allegations at each other... and reveal co-stars they can't stand Family panic as Britney Spears takes'disturbing' measures... after world was shocked by her unrecognizable new look Everybody Loves Raymond stars now unrecognizable as they reunite for sitcom's 30th anniversary Democratic candidate gives bizarre defense after comments that she'hates' Nashville resurface Private school where teacher'had sex with five students as soon as they turned 16' - and it was LEGAL Kansas City Chiefs coach slams Donald Trump in brutal putdown: 'He has no idea what's going on' Anna Kepner's ex-boyfriend claims stepbrother'climbed on top of her' months before cheerleader was found dead on cruise Bruce Willis' daughter Rumer makes heartbreaking confession about famous father's dementia battle Truth about Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo's'secret marriage'... and the depressing reason insiders say their friendship could soon be OVER America's most forgiving wife lists enormous $6m NYC apartment she shares with disgraced CEO caught with woman on Coldplay kisscam Kessler twins who worked with Frank Sinatra and wowed Elvis Presley'paid a lot of money' to die together at 89 A lion's roar is undeniably one of the most fearsome sounds across the entire animal kingdom. Now, it turns out these majestic creatures produce not just one, but two distinct types of roar. That's according to researchers from the University of Exeter, who have identified a brand new type of growl in African lions. The animals - often referred to as the'King of the Jungle' - are best known for their full-throated roar, an immensely powerful vocalization that can be heard up to five miles away. However, using AI, the researchers were able to identify a second type of roar, which they've called the'intermediary roar'.
A Primer on Quantum Machine Learning
Quantum machine learning (QML) is a computational paradigm that seeks to apply quantum-mechanical resources to solve learning problems. As such, the goal of this framework is to leverage quantum processors to tackle optimization, supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, and generative modeling-among other tasks-more efficiently than classical models. Here we offer a high level overview of QML, focusing on settings where the quantum device is the primary learning or data generating unit. We outline the field's tensions between practicality and guarantees, access models and speedups, and classical baselines and claimed quantum advantages-flagging where evidence is strong, where it is conditional or still lacking, and where open questions remain. By shedding light on these nuances and debates, we aim to provide a friendly map of the QML landscape so that the reader can judge when-and under what assumptions-quantum approaches may offer real benefits.
A Crowdsourced Study of ChatBot Influence in Value-Driven Decision Making Scenarios
Wise, Anthony, Zhou, Xinyi, Reimann, Martin, Dey, Anind, Battle, Leilani
Similar to social media bots that shape public opinion, healthcare and financial decisions, LLM-based ChatBots like ChatGPT can persuade users to alter their behavior. Unlike prior work that persuades via overt-partisan bias or misinformation, we test whether framing alone suffices. We conducted a crowdsourced study, where 336 participants interacted with a neutral or one of two value-framed ChatBots while deciding to alter US defense spending. In this single policy domain with controlled content, participants exposed to value-framed ChatBots significantly changed their budget choices relative to the neutral control. When the frame misaligned with their values, some participants reinforced their original preference, revealing a potentially replicable backfire effect, originally considered rare in the literature. These findings suggest that value-framing alone lowers the barrier for manipulative uses of LLMs, revealing risks distinct from overt bias or misinformation, and clarifying risks to countering misinformation.
Large Language Model-Based Reward Design for Deep Reinforcement Learning-Driven Autonomous Cyber Defense
Mukherjee, Sayak, Chatterjee, Samrat, Purvine, Emilie, Fujimoto, Ted, Emerson, Tegan
Designing rewards for autonomous cyber attack and defense learning agents in a complex, dynamic environment is a challenging task for subject matter experts. We propose a large language model (LLM)-based reward design approach to generate autonomous cyber defense policies in a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-driven experimental simulation environment. Multiple attack and defense agent personas were crafted, reflecting heterogeneity in agent actions, to generate LLM-guided reward designs where the LLM was first provided with contextual cyber simulation environment information. These reward structures were then utilized within a DRL-driven attack-defense simulation environment to learn an ensemble of cyber defense policies. Our results suggest that LLM-guided reward designs can lead to effective defense strategies against diverse adversarial behaviors.
Q-MLLM: Vector Quantization for Robust Multimodal Large Language Model Security
Zhao, Wei, Li, Zhe, Li, Yige, Sun, Jun
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in cross-modal understanding, but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks through visual inputs despite robust textual safety mechanisms. These vulnerabilities arise from two core weaknesses: the continuous nature of visual representations, which allows for gradient-based attacks, and the inadequate transfer of text-based safety mechanisms to visual content. We introduce Q-MLLM, a novel architecture that integrates two-level vector quantization to create a discrete bottleneck against adversarial attacks while preserving multimodal reasoning capabilities. By discretizing visual representations at both pixel-patch and semantic levels, Q-MLLM blocks attack pathways and bridges the cross-modal safety alignment gap. Our two-stage training methodology ensures robust learning while maintaining model utility. Experiments demonstrate that Q-MLLM achieves significantly better defense success rate against both jailbreak attacks and toxic image attacks than existing approaches. Notably, Q-MLLM achieves perfect defense success rate (100\%) against jailbreak attacks except in one arguable case, while maintaining competitive performance on multiple utility benchmarks with minimal inference overhead. This work establishes vector quantization as an effective defense mechanism for secure multimodal AI systems without requiring expensive safety-specific fine-tuning or detection overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/Amadeuszhao/QMLLM.