Kim Jong Un praises troops who'self-blasted' to avoid capture by Ukraine Kim Jong Un has praised North Korean soldiers who killed themselves by detonating their grenades while fighting for Russia against Ukraine, confirming a long-suspected battlefield policy. In a speech this week, the North Korean leader said those who unhesitatingly opted for self-blasting, suicide attack, in order to defend the great honour were heroes. South Korea estimates at least 15,000 North Koreans have been sent to help Russia recapture parts of western Kursk, and more than 6,000 have been killed so far. Neither Pyongyang nor Moscow have confirmed the numbers. Intelligence agencies and defectors have said the soldiers were under Pyongyang's orders to kill themselves rather than be taken prisoner by Ukraine.

Whether or not a country is at war, or experiencing escalating or deescalating levels of conflict, has massive ramifications on a country's national and foreign policy. Given a country's history of conflict, or lack thereof, future predictions about the war-status of a country are valuable information. In this paper, we present the use of conformal prediction on temporally-dependent data to obtain prediction sets of possible future conflict state-sequences. More specifically, we compare the results of conformal prediction to a likelihood-based prediction strategy when the data are assumed to come from a discrete-state Markov process. A point-prediction may not supply sufficient information because the penalty for a wrong prediction is extreme, and so we consider a machine learning alternative that gives valid uncertainty quantification and is robust to model misspecification. In the data analysis, we present real forecasts of conflict dynamics across multiple countries. Lastly, we comment on the possible limitations of existing approaches for applying conformal prediction to Markovian data, where the exchangeability assumption is violated.

"Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant," reads OpenAI's coding agent instructions. OpenAI has a goblin problem. Instructions designed to guide the behavior of the company's latest model as it writes code have been revealed to include a line, repeated several times, that specifically forbids it from randomly mentioning an assortment of mythical and real creatures. "Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query," read instructions in Codex CLI, a command-line tool for using AI to generate code. It is unclear why OpenAI felt compelled to spell this out for Codex --or indeed why its models might want to discuss goblins or pigeons in the first place.

Musk testifies at OpenAI trial it's not OK to'loot a charity' Elon Musk has taken the stand at a high-stakes trial over the future of OpenAI, casting his lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker as a defence of charitable giving. The world's richest person is suing OpenAI, its cofounder and chief executive officer, Sam Altman, and its president, Greg Brockman, and said on the stand on Tuesday that they betrayed him and the public by abandoning OpenAI's mission to be a benevolent steward of AI for humanity and transforming the nonprofit into a profit-seeking juggernaut. Musk, who founded carmaker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX, also said he is committed to serving the public by working 80-to 100-hour weeks and generally not taking vacations. "I like working and solving problems that make people's lives better," he said. Before Musk began testifying, Bill Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI and Altman, told jurors during his opening statement it was Musk who saw dollar signs as he helped finance OpenAI's early growth and pushed it to become a for-profit business, one he might eventually lead as CEO.

Global military spending is up again, according to SIPRI's latest report showing the 11th consecutive year of growth. But it's based on open data and not everything makes the list. Ukrainian drones strike Russia's Tuapse refinery for third time

US lawmakers gave King Charles III a standing ovation upon mentioning the importance of "checks and balances" on executive power during his historic speech to Congress. Ukrainian drones strike Russia's Tuapse refinery for third time

Runway-to-Space Spaceplane Challenge lets teams fly payloads on Dawn Aerospace's reusable Aurora spaceplane from Oklahoma, with flights expected to begin in 2027.

Why is Israel still in southern Lebanon? A war to shape Lebanon's future Video captured massive explosions in southern Lebanon in what the Israeli military called strikes on a Hezbollah tunnel. Other attacks happened nearby, as Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz vowed that southern Lebanon's fate will be like Gaza's. Ukrainian drones strike Russia's Tuapse refinery for third time Qatar says using Hormuz Strait as political weapon is'unacceptable' Australia's top diplomat visits China to talk energy security

We introduce AbDiffuser, an equivariant and physics-informed diffusion model for the joint generation of antibody 3D structures and sequences. AbDiffuser is built on top of a new representation of protein structure, relies on a novel architecture for aligned proteins, and utilizes strong diffusion priors to improve the denoising process. Our approach improves protein diffusion by taking advantage of domain knowledge and physics-based constraints; handles sequence-length changes; and reduces memory complexity by an order of magnitude, enabling backbone and side chain generation.

'It's Undignified': Hundreds of Workers Training Meta's AI Could Be Laid Off More than 700 people working for a Meta contractor in Ireland are at risk of losing their jobs, documents show. Hundreds of workers in Ireland tasked with refining Meta's AI models have been told that their jobs are at risk as the company embarks on a sweeping new round of layoffs, according to documents obtained by WIRED. The affected workers are employed by the Dublin-based firm Covalen, which handles various content moderation and labeling services for Meta. The workers were informed of the layoffs over a brief video meeting on Monday afternoon and were not allowed to ask questions, according to Nick Bennett, one of the employees on the call. "We had a pretty bad feeling [before the meeting]," he says.