Quantum computers could crack a common data encryption technique once they have a million qubits, or quantum bits. While this is still well beyond the capabilities of existing quantum computers, this new estimate is 20 times lower than previously thought, suggesting the day encryption is cracked is closer than we think.

Footage reportedly shot at an undisclosed Chinese factory appears to show a robot violently "lashing out" at workers in a clip that's since gone viral. The security camera video shows a robot, which resembles a Unitree H1, initially sitting dormant as it hangs from a crane-like mechanism. Two men are seen conversing in its vicinity. Suddenly, the robot begins flailing its limbs around as the men attempt to get out of its way. It appears to knock a computer monitor, among other objects, to the floor during its rampage.

Samsung's Ballie will go on sale in the US and South Korea this summer, the company announced today. What's more, through a partnership with Google Cloud, the diminutive robot will ship with a Gemini AI model. Samsung didn't state the specific system that powers Ballie, but in combination with the company's own proprietary language models, it says the robot has multimodal capabilities, meaning Ballie can process voice, audio and visual data from its sensors. According to Samsung, Ballie can also manage your smart home devices and even offer health and styling recommendations, if you're inclined to seek that type of advice from a robot. Samsung has yet to announce pricing for Ballie, though with the uncertainty around the Trump administration's recently announced tariffs, you can't blame Samsung, can you?

Africa is still early in the process of adopting AI technologies. But researchers say the continent is uniquely hospitable to it for several reasons, including a relatively young and increasingly well-educated population, a rapidly growing ecosystem of AI startups, and lots of potential consumers. However, ambitious efforts to develop AI tools that answer the needs of Africans face numerous hurdles. The biggest are inadequate funding and poor infrastructure. Limited internet access and a scarcity of domestic data centers also mean that developers might not be able to deploy cutting-edge AI capabilities.

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville said that he is so frustrated by Republican support for tariffs that he has contemplated punching his computer in rage. Veteran Democratic Party strategist James Carville said that the Republican response to the consequences of tariffs has him contemplating smashing his own computer in rage. CNN host Wolf Blitzer asked Carville what he makes of President Donald Trump's tariffs on goods from Mexico, Canada and China and the fallout. "I've come to think maybe Donald Trump hates the United States," Carville suggested, arguing that Trump's economic and foreign policy strategies are otherwise nonsensical. "I just can't get it out of my mind that I think this man – there's some possibility - we have to consider the possibility that our president hates our country."

We investigate the power of voting among diverse, randomized software agents. With teams of computer Go agents in mind, we develop a novel theoretical model of two-stage noisy voting that builds on recent work in machine learning. This model allows us to reason about a collection of agents with different biases (determined by the first-stage noise models), which, furthermore, apply randomized algorithms to evaluate alternatives and produce votes (captured by the second-stage noise models). We analytically demonstrate that a uniform team, consisting of multiple instances of any single agent, must make a significant number of mistakes, whereas a diverse team converges to perfection as the number of agents grows. Our experiments, which pit teams of computer Go agents against strong agents, provide evidence for the effectiveness of voting when agents are diverse.

At its CES 2025 press conference, Samsung just announced that the Ballie home robot it showed off last year will actually be available for sale in the first half of year. This cute yellow rolling device has a built-in projector that allows it to beam images and videos on your walls and floors, so you can interact with it. No further information on pricing and a more specific window of time has been shared, though. When it was first announced, Samsung told The Washington Post that Ballie would actually be available at some point in 2024. Alas, here we are six days into 2025 with no actual date or price yet.

The idea of two robots going on a date might sound like the start of a cringeworthy Dad joke. But is has become a reality in a hilarious new video, posted by Engineered Arts. In the video, Ameca and Azi - two humanoid robots dubbed the'most advanced in the world' - can be seen'having a chat', while demonstrating their wide range of facial expressions. The interaction has delighted many fans, with one joking that the bots deserve their own full-length movie. 'They have great chemistry I want a movie now,' the fan commented on the video.

Although AlphaZero has achieved superhuman levels in Go, recent research has highlighted its vulnerability in particular situations requiring a more comprehensive understanding of the entire board. To address this challenge, this paper introduces ResTNet, a network that interleaves residual networks and Transformer. Our empirical experiments demonstrate several advantages of using ResTNet. First, it not only improves playing strength but also enhances the ability of global information. Second, it defends against an adversary Go program, called cyclic-adversary, tailor-made for attacking AlphaZero algorithms, significantly reducing the average probability of being attacked rate from 70.44% to 23.91%. Third, it improves the accuracy from 59.15% to 80.01% in correctly recognizing ladder patterns, which are one of the challenging patterns for Go AIs. Finally, ResTNet offers a potential explanation of the decision-making process and can also be applied to other games like Hex. To the best of our knowledge, ResTNet is the first to integrate residual networks and Transformer in the context of AlphaZero for board games, suggesting a promising direction for enhancing AlphaZero's global understanding.

Mustafa Suleyman was at the center of an artificial intelligence revolution once before. As a cofounder of DeepMind, a British company acquired by Google in 2014, he helped devise a new way for computers to tackle seemingly impossible problems by combining practice with positive and negative feedback. DeepMind demonstrated the approach by developing a superhuman Go-playing program, AlphaGo, which defeated the world's best Go player in 2016. Now the CEO of Microsoft AI, Suleyman is talking up a new kind of AI breakthrough. As CEO of Microsoft AI, Suleyman oversees efforts to integrate the same AI that powers ChatGPT into software--including the Windows operating system--that runs most of the world's personal computers.