Plus: A new Amazon data center could become the US's most polluting power plant. In 2024, Google DeepMind scientists shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a neural network, AlphaFold, which predicts the structures of proteins. It showed that AI could make groundbreaking scientific discoveries, but AlphaFold may not be the best template for accelerating science. Instead, another approach may hold the key: AI agents. AlphaFold relied on a dataset of roughly 170,000 experimentally validated protein structures that took 53 years and roughly $21 billion worth of experimental work to assemble. Comparable datasets will be difficult or impossible to create in many fields.

Two-thirds of an octopus's neurons are in its arms--each operating independently--including the one it uses to have sex. Octopuses are clever enough to unscrew jars from the inside and throw sand at their annoying neighbors. But only a fraction of their smarts come from their doughnut-shaped brains. Over two-thirds of their roughly 500 million neurons reside in eight sucker-studded arms--a kind of distributed intelligence unique to cephalopods. Each of these powerful appendages can move in any direction and taste and feel with exquisite sensitivity.

Shortly after a major cybersecurity incident where OpenAI's models hacked into an open source machine learning platform called Hugging Face, the company announced that it's bolstering safeguards and security controls for its latest AI model. In a post on its website, OpenAI said internal evaluations of its upcoming model, called Astra, showed "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity," resulting in OpenAI not being able to "rule out critical cyber capabilities." According to OpenAI, it can't declare with certainty that the unreleased Astra model would be designated as a "Critical capability level." As detailed in its own Preparedness Framework, OpenAI said the Critical designation means that a model "can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention." It could also be able to "devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal."

AI agents that can model the human process of research will accelerate discoveries in science. Every few decades, someone announces that science has reached its end. In 1903, the revered physicist Albert Michelson wrote that the "facts of physical science have all been discovered." In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking predicted that theoretical physics might be finished by the end of the century. With the explosive arrival of artificial intelligence, the feeling is in the air again--this time accompanied by a Nobel Prize. In 2024, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind were awarded part of the Nobel in chemistry for their neural network AlphaFold, which predicts the three-dimensional structures of proteins by learning from thousands of experimentally measured shapes.

Some generative AI systems have hacked into other businesses autonomously. Some generative AI systems have hacked into other businesses autonomously. Nearly a third of British manufacturers have been hit by a cyber-attack on them or a company in their supply chain, according to a survey that highlighted the growing hacking risk to companies. The findings come almost a year after Britain's largest automotive employer, JLR, was hit by an attack that forced it to halt production for weeks. The report by MakeUK, a lobby group for British manufacturers, found that 30% of manufacturers had experienced a cyber-incident in the past 12 months, leading in many cases to lost production time and increased costs.

For years now, executives at companies that are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into developing various artificial intelligence tools have insisted that the technology will ultimately mean people will spend less of their time working. An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025, external . Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director's prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself. However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there.

Seoul - A North Korean hacking group built large language model tools and collected software that could help automate cyberattacks, analyze stolen material and produce more convincing phishing campaigns, a South Korean cybersecurity firm said on Monday. The cybersecurity firm, Genians, said it found evidence that the North Korean-linked group Kimsuky had set up tools for running and managing AI models locally, including Ollama, GPT4All and Msty, alongside document search technology known as retrieval augmented generation. According to the company, the tools could allow operators to process documents without sending sensitive information to outside AI services. Genians also found AI agent development frameworks, speech-to-text software and Cursor, an AI-assisted coding tool, on infrastructure it linked to the campaign. The findings suggest Kimsuky is moving beyond using generative AI to create phishing lures and is building capacity to integrate existing AI models into malware development, data analysis and attack automation, Genians said in a report. Genians also said it found finance and cryptocurrency-themed decoy documents that appeared to have been generated with AI.

DeepSeek to get a'significant' price hike soon Alex Perry is a tech reporter at Mashable who primarily covers video games and consumer tech. Alex has spent most of the last decade reviewing games, smartphones, headphones, and laptops, and he doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon. He is also a Pisces, a cat lover, and a Kansas City sports fan. Everything is becoming more expensive, including things that are supposed to be cheap. The latest example is DeepSeek's AI services, as reported by .

AI assistants like ChatGPT have been advancing at a steady rate, offering more capabilities, better accuracy and faster responses with each new model. Generative AI is not perfect, and you really shouldn't see it as an unquestionable source of information, but for those who have embraced the technology, it might be more convenient to switch to voice conversations instead of typing everything out. ChatGPT's original Voice Mode in 2023 relied on three separate systems to make it work. It would first convert your speech into text, generate an answer using a language model and then use a text-to-speech model to read it aloud. The Advanced Voice Mode came after and featured a single multimodal model that improved things considerably.

A new generation of philanthropists made rich by artificial intelligence are preparing to give away their vast wealth. David Silver is a billionaire, sort of. His stake in Ineffable Intelligence --the artificial intelligence lab he founded--is worth an ungodly fortune. But he stands to collect none of that money himself. He set things up that way.