Sony is halting sales of its Aibo robotic dog in Japan, ending an era for the interactive pet that became an instant hit and developed its own personality. Sony is halting sales of its Aibo robotic puppy in Japan, the company has said, eight years after the latest model of its interactive android pet became an instant hit. The Thursday announcement marks the end of an era for loyal fans of the high-tech toy, which develops its own personality and can perform tricks like waving and mimicking its owner. It was also a big comeback for Sony's robot dog. The first iteration of Aibo came out in 1999, followed by numerous models over the years -- from angular metallic-silver bots to more cuddly round-faced versions -- with more than 150,000 units sold. But by 2006, Sony, facing a tough business environment, pulled the plug on Aibo, seen as something of a frivolous luxury.

Takeda Pharmaceutical is targeting a return on equity of at least 5% over that time, the company's newly appointed Chief Executive Officer Julie Kim said at her first news conference after assuming the top job this week. Takeda Pharmaceutical's newly appointed Chief Executive Officer Julie Kim says the company will return to growth in two to three years as it gears up for a wave of product launches. The company is targeting a return on equity of at least 5% over that time, Kim said at her first news conference after assuming the top job this week. Takeda is planning three major launches, including narcolepsy drug Oveporexton and psoriasis medication Zasocitinib in the next 12 months, while advancing a pipeline of five additional late-stage assets. It will ensure resiliency of its core therapeutic and business areas, which makes up more than half of its revenue. The company is also looking to leverage artificial intelligence, particularly in research and development, where it can accelerate the time it takes to run through pre-clinical work and improve decision making, according to Kim.

Incomplete multi-view data, where certain views are entirely missing for some samples, poses significant challenges for traditional multi-view clustering methods. Existing deep incomplete multi-view clustering approaches often rely on static fusion strategies or two-stage pipelines, leading to suboptimal fusion results and error propagation issues. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel incomplete multi-view clustering framework based on Hierarchical Semantic Alignment and Cooperative Completion (HSACC). HSACC achieves robust cross-view fusion through a dual-level semantic space design. In the low-level semantic space, consistency alignment is ensured by maximizing mutual information across views. In the high-level semantic space, adaptive view weights are dynamically assigned based on the distributional affinity between individual views and an initial fused representation, followed by weighted fusion to generate a unified global representation. Additionally, HSACC implicitly recovers missing views by projecting aligned latent representations into high-dimensional semantic spaces and jointly optimizes reconstruction and clustering objectives, enabling cooperative learning of completion and clustering. Experimental results demonstrate that HSACC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on five benchmark datasets. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the hierarchical alignment and dynamic weighting mechanisms, while parameter analysis confirms the model's robustness to hyperparameter variations.

Who will control Africa's AI infrastructure, and at what cost? In April, African Union ministers gathered in Tangier, Morocco, to discuss artificial intelligence at a moment when governments across the continent are racing to develop AI strategies, attract investment and expand digital infrastructure. Beneath the enthusiasm, however, sits a more fundamental question. As foreign technology companies invest in data centres, cloud services and AI systems across Africa, how much control will African countries ultimately have over the infrastructure on which those technologies depend? The debate reflects a broader shift in how policymakers are thinking about AI.

Anthropic's critics argue it's rapidly accumulating power. The company says that's what responsible AI development looks like. Anthropic has spent the last five years warning the world about how advanced artificial intelligence could enable mass destruction, destabilize society, and cause a litany of other grave harms. But simultaneously, it has become one of the most powerful forces pushing AI capabilities forward. The company is now among the top developers and distributors of cutting-edge AI models and courts customers like the US military.

Apple has dramatically jacked up the price of MacBooks, making the current Prime Day pricing that much more enticing. The company called price increases on its products "inevitable" just a couple of weeks ago. On Thursday afternoon, they became official on Apple's website. Its flashy new MacBook Neo is up $100, now at $699. Meanwhile, the MacBook Air gets a $200 price hike, now starting at $1,299.

Smoke rises from Crimea Bridge on Monday. The Ukrainian army is pounding supply routes and striking energy facilities across Crimea. Warsaw - For Yulia, a 23-year-old resident of Crimea, nights have become sleepless due to increased Ukrainian drone attacks on the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014. Kyiv's army is pounding supply routes and striking energy facilities across the Black Sea territory -- a campaign it sees as fair retribution for Moscow's daily barrages of Ukrainian cities, and one that it hopes will turn the tide of the four-year war in its favor. On Thursday, the Moscow-installed governor of Crimea announced power cuts across the peninsula, which despite the war had been a popular holiday destination for Russians. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Amazon-owned MGM Studios' decision to drop the OpenAI movie is just part of AI and film industries becoming increasingly intertwined. On, we take a look at where this is all headed. This week on Uncanny Valley, our hosts discuss Amazon's controversial decision to drop Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI's Sam Altman--which reportedly did not paint him in a favorable light. Alongside Google DeepMind's $75 million brand new partnership with indie film studio A24, how much of a dent is AI actually having in the films we see? They also dive into the recent upheaval of workers--from electricians to software engineers--against data centers. Plus: Meta's program to track employees' data gets paused after a massive leak, and Anthropic is now getting along with the government thanks to CEO Dario Amodei no longer being in the room. Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoë, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to [email protected] . It doesn't matter how big or how small, we want to hear from you and get you answers. We're discussing Amazon's MGM Studios' sudden decision to drop the OpenAI biographical movie just as they were wrapping up production.

OpenAI will initially only release ChatGPT 5.6 to government-approved customers OpenAI will initially only release ChatGPT 5.6 to government-approved customers You may not be able to use the new ChatGPT 5.6 as soon as it's finished. According to a report in, OpenAI plans to stagger the release of its new AI model, and the first users will only be parties that are approved by the federal government. The publication's sources said that, according to a staff memo from CEO Sam Altman, federal leaders will be approving access customer by customer during this preview period, hopefully followed a couple of weeks later by a more general release of the 5.6 model. We've made clear to the US government that this is not our preferred long term model, and will work with them and others in industry to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases, Altman reportedly told employees in the memo. Several agencies appear to be involved in directing the change in course from OpenAI.

NSFW uses account for well over half of traffic, a new report says. We've seen that play out in some disastrous ways over the last year, but we're now gaining some insight into why the company has leaned so hard into that strategy despite some veritable PR disasters. It turns out that NSFW activities account for well over half of Grok's traffic, according to a new report in that cites two former employees of the SpaceX-owned company. That includes using Grok to generate actual porn, as well as adult role-play chats and huge volumes of requests for erotica. Grok's users have even apparently discovered that it's cheaper to channel such requests through the company's models intended for writing code because those are cheaper to use.