We are approaching the Gregorian New Year, and it's a great time to ponder what's coming next. Are we about to use CRISPR to grow wings? Will we all be uploading our brains to the Amazon cloud? Should we wrap the sun in a Dyson sphere? If, like me, you are a nerd who loves science and engineering, sci-fi is the place you turn to imagine the answers.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. From Iceland's spectacular fire and ice landscapes to Yemen's otherworldly Socotra dragon trees, our home planet hosts a diverse lineup of jaw-dropping scenery. The 12th annual International Landscape Photographer of the Year award honor professional and amateur photographers who venture far and wide to capture nature's beauty. Why do we have five fingers and toes? Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday.

ChatGPT's annual summary shows, among other things, how many long lines of thought your chats generated during the year.

Speaking with popular AI content creators convinces me that "slop" isn't just the internet rotting in real time, but the early draft of a new kind of pop culture. Lately, everywhere I scroll, I keep seeing the same fish-eyed CCTV view: a grainy wide shot from the corner of a living room, a driveway at night, an empty grocery store. JD Vance shows up at the doorstep in a crazy outfit. A car folds into itself like paper and drives away. A cat comes in and starts hanging out with capybaras and bears, as if in some weird modern fairy tale. This fake-surveillance look has become one of the signature flavors of what people now call AI slop. For those of us who spend time online watching short videos, slop feels inescapable: a flood of repetitive, often nonsensical AI-generated clips that washes across TikTok, Instagram, and beyond. For that, you can thank new tools like OpenAI's Sora (which exploded in popularity after launching in app form in September), Google's Veo series, and AI models built by Runway. Now anyone can make videos, with just a few taps on a screen.

The government at a Cabinet meeting Tuesday adopted its first basic plan on the development and utilization of artificial intelligence. The basic plan stipulates that Japan will create reliable AI while balancing technological innovation and risk management, with an aim to become a country that offers the best environment for AI development and utilization. Japan lags behind not only other advanced nations but also countries with smaller economies in terms of AI development, and the gap is becoming wider year by year, it warns. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Ting Cai, head of Rakuten Group's artificial intelligence team, has the task of creating AI systems that would augment the company's many businesses at a minimal cost. Rakuten Group is expanding its AI team under the stewardship of a Google veteran and building models with a focus on cost efficiency. Ting Cai, now three years into his tenure at the head of the e-commerce pioneer's artificial intelligence team, has the task of creating AI systems that would augment the company's many businesses and support the handling of commercial transactions at a minimal cost. He oversees a team that's grown to 1,000 this year and has a battery of "thousands" of Nvidia chips to work with. Tokyo-based Rakuten is wrestling with a struggling mobile business and constant competition in online shopping, both of which could get a significant boost from effective deployment of new AI tools.

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Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Self-driving vehicles charge at the Waymo station in Santa Monica. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Waymo is taking the city of Santa Monica to court after the city ordered the company to cease charging its autonomous vehicles at two facilities overnight, claiming the lights and beeping at the lots were a nuisance to residents.

A campaigner said: 'This stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models.' A campaigner said: 'This stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models.' Platform with 700m users says it is investigating after Anna's Archive claims to have scraped tracks and metadata An activist group has claimed to have scraped millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them online. Observers said the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for material to develop their technology. A group called Anna's Archive said it had scraped 86m music files from Spotify and 256m rows of metadata such as artist and album names.

The critically endangered chicks, Oscar and Duffy, were born at a New Jersey aquarium. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. An aquarium in New Jersey welcomed two new residents, just in time for the holidays. On December 20, staff at Adventure Aquarium in Camden revealed the recent births of Duffy and Oscar, a pair of African penguins () and some much needed good news in light of ongoing conservation concerns . "These milestones are incredibly important for the critically endangered African penguin population, and we couldn't be more proud to play a role in their future," the aquarium just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania wrote in a social media post .