Critics though say the decision is linked to the changed political environment the CMA is now operating in. The government has instructed the country's regulators to suggest ways of stimulating economic growth. In January, the government removed the then chair of the CMA, Marcus Bokkerink, because it was unhappy with his response to that call. He was replaced on an interim basis by Doug Gurr, former boss of Amazon UK. "The CMA has sat on this decision for over a year, yet within just a few weeks of a former Amazon boss being installed as chair, it has decided everything was absolutely fine all along, nothing to see here," said Foxglove co-executive director Rosa Curling. "This is a bad sign that Big Tech has successfully convinced the prime minister to defang our competition regulator and let Big Tech gobble up the current generation of cutting-edge tech – just like they did the last one," she told the BBC.

Gladstone A.I. co-founders and CEOs Edouard Harris and Jeremie Harris explain the major role that A.I will play in national security and warfare on'The Will Cain Show.' Elon Musk met with members of the Senate DOGE caucus at the White House. MUSK'S MOVE BLOCKED: A California judge denied Elon Musk's move to halt OpenAI's efforts to convert it into a for-profit entity, saying in a ruling that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO hadn't met "the high burden required for a preliminary injunction." 'DOWNFALLS' OF AI: A federal judge has declined to impose sanctions on an attorney who submitted a brief that contained incorrect case citations and quotes generated by artificial intelligence. DEFEND YOUR DATA: Windows has always been a favorite target for hackers, but it seems they have now figured out how to actively target Macs as well. We've seen an alarming rise in malware affecting Mac computers, stealing personal data and cryptocurrency.

Chatbots are now a routine part of everyday life, even if artificial intelligence researchers are not always sure how the programs will behave. A new study shows that the large language models (LLMs) deliberately change their behavior when being probed--responding to questions designed to gauge personality traits with answers meant to appear as likeable or socially desirable as possible. Johannes Eichstaedt, an assistant professor at Stanford University who led the work, says his group became interested in probing AI models using techniques borrowed from psychology after learning that LLMs can often become morose and mean after prolonged conversation. "We realized we need some mechanism to measure the'parameter headspace' of these models," he says. Eichstaedt and his collaborators then asked questions to measure five personality traits that are commonly used in psychology--openness to experience or imagination, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism--to several widely used LLMs including GPT-4, Claude 3, and Llama 3. The work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science in December.

The UK's competition watchdog will not hold a formal investigation into Microsoft's partnership with the startup behind the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, stating that while the 2.9tn ( 2.3tn) tech company has "material influence" over OpenAI it does not control it. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest financial backer with a 13bn investment, acquired material influence over the San Francisco-based business in 2019 but did not exercise de facto control over it – and therefore did not meet the threshold for an official inquiry. The decision follows expressions of disquiet over the appointment of the former boss of Amazon UK, Doug Gurr, as the CMA's interim chair. The organisation's chief executive, Sarah Cardell, has also said the CMA does not want to create a "chilling effect" on business confidence, amid pressure from the UK government on regulators to produce pro-growth proposals. The CMA's executive director for mergers, Joel Bamford, said: "We have found that there has not been a change of control by Microsoft from material influence to de facto control over OpenAI. Because this change of control has not happened, the partnership in its current form does not qualify for review under the UK's merger control regime."

A US judge on Tuesday denied Elon Musk's request for a preliminary injunction to pause OpenAI's transition to a for-profit model but agreed to hear a trial in the fall of this year, the latest turn in the high-stakes legal fight. The tech billionaire does not have "the high burden required for a preliminary injunction" to block the conversion of OpenAI, said Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a US district judge in Oakland, California. But Rogers wrote in the order that she wanted to resolve the lawsuit quickly given "the public interest at stake and potential for harm if a conversion contrary to law occurred". Musk and OpenAI, which he co-founded as a non-profit in 2015 but left before it took off, have been embroiled in a yearlong legal battle. The CEO of Tesla and X, formerly Twitter, accuses OpenAI of straying from its founding mission to develop artificial intelligence for the good of humanity, not corporate profit.

US federal judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has denied Elon Musk's request for an injunction that would have immediately stopped OpenAI's conversion into a for-profit entity. Musk filed for an injunction late last year after suing OpenAI and Microsoft and accusing them of telling investors not to fund rival AI companies, such as his own xAI. According to the Financial Times, the judge dismissed his request based on that claim of anticompetitive behavior. Gonzalez Rogers cited a previous statement by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, saying that the company only warned certain investors who were granted access to sensitive information that their rights would be terminated if they made a non-passive investment in rival companies. The judge also reportedly rejected the request based on Musk's claim that OpenAI and Altman broke their contract with him and violated the company's founding mission of building AI "for the benefit of humanity."

Researchers from the AI research organization Palisade Research instructed seven large language models to play hundreds of games of chess against Stockfish, a powerful open-source chess engine. The group included OpenAI's o1-preview and DeepSeek's R1 reasoning models, both of which are trained to solve complex problems by breaking them down into stages. The research suggests that the more sophisticated the AI model, the more likely it is to spontaneously try to "hack" the game in an attempt to beat its opponent. For example, it might run another copy of Stockfish to steal its moves, try to replace the chess engine with a much less proficient chess program, or overwrite the chess board to take control and delete its opponent's pieces. Older, less powerful models such as GPT-4o would do this kind of thing only after explicit nudging from the team.

In the 1980s, Andrew Barto and Rich Sutton were considered eccentric devotees to an elegant but ultimately doomed idea--having machines learn, as humans and animals do, from experience. Decades on, with the technique they pioneered now increasingly critical to modern artificial intelligence and programs like ChatGPT, Barto and Sutton have been awarded the Turing Award, the highest honor in the field of computer science. Barto, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Sutton, a professor at the University of Alberta, trailblazed a technique known as reinforcement learning, which involves coaxing a computer to perform tasks through experimentation combined with either positive or negative feedback. "When this work started for me, it was extremely unfashionable," Barto recalls with a smile, speaking over Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. "It's been remarkable that [it has] achieved some influence and some attention," Barto adds.

Some companies are "stuck in neutral" in their approach to artificial intelligence, according to Microsoft's UK boss, who said a significant number of private and public sector organisations lack any formal AI strategy. A Microsoft survey of nearly 1,500 UK senior leaders across public and private sectors, as well as 1,440 employees, found that more than half of executives feel their organisation has no official AI plan. Roughly the same proportion report a growing gap in productivity – a measure of economic efficiency – between employees who use AI and those who do not. "Some organisations appear to be stuck in neutral, caught in the experimentation phase, rather than in the deployment [of AI]," said Darren Hardman, the tech company's UK chief executive. Microsoft, the biggest financial backer of the ChatGPT developer, OpenAI, has been pushing AI's deployment in the workplace through autonomous AI agents – tools that can carry out tasks without human intervention.

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is significantly affected by the quality and composition of their pre-training data, which is inherently diverse, spanning various domains, sources, and topics. Effectively integrating these heterogeneous data sources is crucial for optimizing LLM performance. Previous research has predominantly concentrated on domain-based data mixing, often neglecting the nuanced topic-level characteristics of the data. To address this gap, we propose a simple yet effective topic-based data mixing strategy that utilizes fine-grained topics generated through our topic modeling method, DataWeave. DataWeave employs a multi-stage clustering process to group semantically similar documents and utilizes LLMs to generate detailed topics, thereby facilitating a more nuanced understanding of dataset composition. Our strategy employs heuristic methods to upsample or downsample specific topics, which significantly enhances LLM performance on downstream tasks, achieving superior results compared to previous, more complex data mixing approaches. Furthermore, we confirm that the topics Science and Relationships are particularly effective, yielding the most substantial performance improvements. We will make our code and datasets publicly available.