As people increasingly rely on AI chatbots for guidance, even on financial matters, a healthy dose of skepticism is critical. I've used ChatGPT to help me build a budget before, and it was genuinely helpful. After I input my monthly salary as well as my standard utilities and recurring expenses, the chatbot drafted a few solid options, and I tweaked them into penny-pinching perfection. "Millions of people turn to ChatGPT with money-related questions, from understanding debt to building budgets and learning financial concepts," says Niko Felix, an OpenAI spokesperson, when reached for comment. "ChatGPT can be a helpful tool for exploring options, preparing questions, and making financial topics easier to understand, but it is not a substitute for licensed financial professionals." OpenAI's Terms of Use state that the AI tool is not meant to replace professional financial advice.

Visual Counterfactual Explanations (VCEs) are an important tool to understand the decisions of an image classifier. They are "small" but "realistic" semantic changes of the image changing the classifier decision. Current approaches for the generation of VCEs are restricted to adversarially robust models and often contain non-realistic artefacts, or are limited to image classification problems with few classes. In this paper, we overcome this by generating Diffusion Visual Counterfactual Explanations (DVCEs) for arbitrary ImageNet classifiers via a diffusion process. Two modifications to the diffusion process are key for our DVCEs: first, an adaptive parameterization, whose hyperparameters generalize across images and models, together with distance regularization and late start of the diffusion process, allow us to generate images with minimal semantic changes to the original ones but different classification. Second, our cone regularization via an adversarially robust model ensures that the diffusion process does not converge to trivial non-semantic changes, but instead produces realistic images of the target class which achieve high confidence by the classifier.

What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' A Ukrainian married couple, both aged 75, were killed in a Russian attack on Odesa, Ukrainian officials said. Russia launched a series of drone attacks on and near Ukraine's southern port city. The assault destroyed residential buildings and hit a foreign merchant ship, according to Ukrainian authorities. A separate attack killed the married couple and wounded another, reported Ukraine's State Emergency Service. Serhiy Lysak, head of the local military administration, shared images of a building engulfed in flames and another torn open along one side, as emergency crews worked inside.

What does the data tell us about immigration in Wales? Like many countries, Wales sees a steady flow of people arriving and leaving for other countries each year. The difference between those arriving and those leaving is known as net migration. Focusing on people moving from abroad, latest estimates say Wales' population - which was 3.2 million in June 2024 - had increased by about 23,000 over the previous year as a result of net international migration. A recent YouGov poll found a quarter of people surveyed in Wales believed that immigration, alongside the economy, should be among the issues prioritised by the Welsh government, even though immigration is controlled by the UK government.

Andon Market in San Francisco represents a vision, however flawed, of a future when more sophisticated AI agents take over work traditionally done by humans. In San Francisco's upscale Cow Hollow district, the introduction of a boutique selling coffee table games, tote bags and other household items would be pretty unremarkable. However, Andon Market has one key differentiator: It's run by AI. At this store, an artificial intelligence agent named Luna effectively acts as the chief executive officer of the operation. It decides what products to offer and how much to charge for them.

China's DeepSeek unveils latest models a year after upending global tech China's DeepSeek has unveiled the latest versions of its signature artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, a year after its flagship model sent shockwaves through the global tech scene. The Chinese start-up launched preview versions of DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash on Friday as it touted its ability to go toe-to-toe with US rivals such as OpenAI and Google. The "flash" model has similar reasoning abilities to the "pro" version, while offering faster response times and more cost-effective pricing, the Hangzhou-based startup said. Like DeepSeek's previous chatbots, V4-Pro and V4-Flash follow an open-source model, meaning developers are free to use and modify them at will. The release comes after DeepSeek-R1 stunned the tech sector upon its launch in January last year with capabilities broadly comparable with those of ChatGPT and Gemini.