AI may blunt our thinking skills - here's what you can do about it There is growing evidence that our reliance on generative AI tools is reducing our ability to think clearly and critically, but it doesn't have to be that way Socrates wasn't the greatest fan of the written word. Famous for leaving no texts to posterity, the great philosopher is said to have believed that a reliance on writing destroys the memory and weakens the mind . Some 2400 years later, Socrates's fears seem misplaced - particularly in light of evidence that writing things down improves memory formation . A growing number of psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers worry that ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools will chip away at our powers of information recall and blunt our capacity for clear reasoning. What's more, while Socrates relied on clever rhetoric to make his argument, these researchers are grounding theirs in empirical data.

Altman believes the revenue will come from paid-for versions of ChatGPT, other companies using its data centres and people buying the hardware devices it is building. Altman believes the revenue will come from paid-for versions of ChatGPT, other companies using its data centres and people buying the hardware devices it is building. Sam Altman's bet: Can OpenAI's ambitions keep pace with industry's soaring costs? As investor jitters grow, the loss-making ChatGPT firm's vast spending commitments test the limits of Silicon Valley optimism Mon 10 Nov 2025 09.21 ESTFirst published on Mon 10 Nov 2025 09.00 EST It is the $1.4tn (£1.1tn) question. How can a loss-making startup such as OpenAI afford such a staggering spending commitment?

The threat landscape is being shaped by two seismic forces. To future-proof their organizations, security leaders must take a proactive stance with a zero trust approach. AI and quantum technologies are dramatically reconfiguring how cybersecurity functions, redefining the speed and scale with which digital defenders and their adversaries can operate. The weaponization of AI tools for cyberattacks is already proving a worthy opponent to current defenses. This includes using generative AI to create social engineering attacks at scale, churning out tens of thousands of tailored phishing emails in seconds, or accessing widely available voice cloning software capable of bypassing security defenses for as little as a few dollars. And now, agentic AI raises the stakes by introducing autonomous systems that can reason, act, and adapt like human adversaries.

The widespread adoption of generative models such as Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT has made them increasingly attractive targets for malicious exploitation, particularly through data poisoning. Existing poisoning attacks compromising synthesised data typically either cause broad degradation of generated data or require control over the training process, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel data poisoning technique called associative poisoning, which compromises fine-grained features of the generated data without requiring control of the training process. This attack perturbs only the training data to manipulate statistical associations between specific feature pairs in the generated outputs. We provide a formal mathematical formulation of the attack and prove its theoretical feasibility and stealthiness. Empirical evaluations using two state-of-the-art generative models demonstrate that associative poisoning effectively induces or suppresses feature associations while preserving the marginal distributions of the targeted features and maintaining high-quality outputs, thereby evading visual detection. These results suggest that generative systems used in image synthesis, synthetic dataset generation, and natural language processing are susceptible to subtle, stealthy manipulations that compromise their statistical integrity. To address this risk, we examine the limitations of existing defensive strategies and propose a novel countermeasure strategy.

Structure-based drug design has seen significant advancements with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the generation of hit and lead compounds. However, most AI-driven approaches neglect the importance of endogenous protein interactions with peptides, which may result in suboptimal molecule designs. In this work, we present Peptide2Mol, an E(3)-equivariant graph neural network diffusion model that generates small molecules by referencing both the original peptide binders and their surrounding protein pocket environments. Trained on large datasets and leveraging sophisticated modeling techniques, Peptide2Mol not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in non-autoregressive generative tasks, but also produces molecules with similarity to the original peptide binder. Additionally, the model allows for molecule optimization and peptidomimetic design through a partial diffusion process. Our results highlight Peptide2Mol as an effective deep generative model for generating and optimizing bioactive small molecules from protein binding pockets.

Rapid advances in generative AI have led to increasingly realistic deepfakes, posing growing challenges for law enforcement and public trust. Existing passive deepfake detectors struggle to keep pace, largely due to their dependence on specific forgery artifacts, which limits their ability to generalize to new deepfake types. Proactive deepfake detection using watermarks has emerged to address the challenge of identifying high-quality synthetic media. However, these methods often struggle to balance robustness against benign distortions with sensitivity to malicious tampering. This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework that harnesses high-dimensional latent space representations and the Multi-Agent Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (MAARL) paradigm to develop a robust and adaptive watermarking approach. Specifically, we develop a learnable watermark embedder that operates in the latent space, capturing high-level image semantics, while offering precise control over message encoding and extraction. The MAARL paradigm empowers the learnable watermarking agent to pursue an optimal balance between robustness and fragility by interacting with a dynamic curriculum of benign and malicious image manipulations simulated by an adversarial attacker agent. Comprehensive evaluations on the CelebA and CelebA-HQ benchmarks reveal that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving improvements of over 4.5% on CelebA and more than 5.3% on CelebA-HQ under challenging manipulation scenarios.

Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) is critical for regulatory compliance and for building ethical generative AI systems that avoid producing private, toxic, illegal, or copyrighted content. Despite rapid progress, in this work we show that \textit{almost all} existing unlearning methods fail to achieve true forgetting in practice. Specifically, while evaluations of these `unlearned' models under deterministic (greedy) decoding often suggest successful knowledge removal using standard benchmarks (as has been done in the literature), we show that sensitive information reliably resurfaces when models are sampled with standard probabilistic decoding. To rigorously capture this vulnerability, we introduce \texttt{leak@$k$}, a new meta-evaluation metric that quantifies the likelihood of forgotten knowledge reappearing when generating $k$ samples from the model under realistic decoding strategies. Using three widely adopted benchmarks, TOFU, MUSE, and WMDP, we conduct the first large-scale, systematic study of unlearning reliability using our newly defined \texttt{leak@$k$} metric. Our findings demonstrate that knowledge leakage persists across methods and tasks, underscoring that current state-of-the-art unlearning techniques provide only limited forgetting and highlighting the urgent need for more robust approaches to LLM unlearning.

Simulation plays a key role in scaling robot learning and validating policies, but constructing simulations remains a labor-intensive process. This paper introduces ReGen, a generative simulation framework that automates simulation design via inverse design. Given a robot's behavior -- such as a motion trajectory or an objective function -- and its textual description, ReGen infers plausible scenarios and environments that could have caused the behavior. ReGen leverages large language models to synthesize scenarios by expanding a directed graph that encodes cause-and-effect relationships, relevant entities, and their properties. This structured graph is then translated into a symbolic program, which configures and executes a robot simulation environment. Our framework supports (i) augmenting simulations based on ego-agent behaviors, (ii) controllable, counterfactual scenario generation, (iii) reasoning about agent cognition and mental states, and (iv) reasoning with distinct sensing modalities, such as braking due to faulty GPS signals. We demonstrate ReGen in autonomous driving and robot manipulation tasks, generating more diverse, complex simulated environments compared to existing simulations with high success rates, and enabling controllable generation for corner cases. This approach enhances the validation of robot policies and supports data or simulation augmentation, advancing scalable robot learning for improved generalization and robustness. We provide code and example videos at: https://regen-sim.github.io/

Generative AI (GenAI) has recently emerged as a groundbreaking force in Software Engineering, capable of generating code, identifying bugs, recommending fixes, and supporting quality assurance. While its use in coding tasks shows considerable promise, applying GenAI across the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) has not yet been fully explored. Critical uncertainties in areas such as reliability, accountability, security, and data privacy demand deeper investigation and coordinated action. The GENIUS project, comprising over 30 European industrial and academic partners, aims to address these challenges by advancing AI integration across all SDLC phases. It focuses on GenAI's potential, the development of innovative tools, and emerging research challenges, actively shaping the future of software engineering. This vision paper presents a shared perspective on the future of GenAI-driven software engineering, grounded in cross-sector dialogue as well as experiences and findings within the GENIUS consortium. The paper explores four central elements: (1) a structured overview of current challenges in GenAI adoption across the SDLC; (2) a forward-looking vision outlining key technological and methodological advances expected over the next five years; (3) anticipated shifts in the roles and required skill sets of software professionals; and (4) the contribution of GENIUS in realising this transformation through practical tools and industrial validation. This paper focuses on aligning technical innovation with business relevance. It aims to inform both research agendas and industrial strategies, providing a foundation for reliable, scalable, and industry-ready GenAI solutions for software engineering teams.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a popular technique for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). In many real-world scenarios, multiple adapters are loaded simultaneously to enable LLM customization for personalized user experiences or to support a diverse range of tasks. Although each adapter is lightweight in isolation, their aggregate cost becomes substantial at scale. This makes it possible to quantize the important components to higher precision, while quantizing the rest to ultra-low bitwidth. We conduct comprehensive experiments with LLaMA 2-7B, LLaMA 2-13B, and Mistral 7B models on mathematical reasoning, coding, and summarization tasks. Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language tasks (Ouyang et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2022; Zhao et al., 2023), but fine-tuning LLMs for new applications remains computationally and memory intensive. To address this challenge, low-rank adaptation (LoRA; Hu et al., 2022) has emerged as a widely adopted method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. LoRA introduces small, task-specific low-rank matrices, and during the adaptation, only these low-rank matrices are trained while the base model is frozen. An increasingly important use case of LoRA is LLM customization, as LLM providers (e.g., OpenAI and Google) allow users to personalize their own LLMs (OpenAI, 2025; Google Cloud, 2025).