The Biden administration this week introduced new export restrictions designed to control AI's progress globally and ultimately prevent the most advanced AI from falling into China's hands. The rule is just the latest in a string of measures put in place by Donald Trump and Joe Biden to keep Chinese AI in check. With prominent AI figures including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei warning of the need to "beat China" in AI, the Trump administration may well escalate things further. Paul Triolo is a partner at DGA Group, a global consulting firm, a member of the council of foreign relations, and a senior adviser to the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Project on the Future of US-China Relations. Alvin Graylin is an entrepreneur who previously ran China operations for the Taiwanese electronics firm HPC.

DJI has lifted its geofence that prevents users in the US from flying over restricted areas like nuclear power plants, airports and wildfires, the company wrote in a blog post on Monday. As of January 13th, areas previously called "restricted zones" or no-fly zones will be shown as "enhanced warning zones" that correspond to designated Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) areas. DJI's Fly app will display a warning about those areas but will no longer stop users from flying inside them, the company said. In the article, DJI wrote that the "in-app alerts will notify operators flying near FAA designated controlled airspace, placing control back in the hands of the drone operators, in line with regulatory principles of the operator bearing final responsibility." It added that technologies like Remote ID [introduced after DJI implemented geofencing] gives authorities "the tools needed to enforce existing rules," DJI's global policy chief Adam Welsh told The Verge.

What does it mean for a writer, such as a novelist, to have a unique "voice"? And does artificial intelligence (AI) help or hurt that voice? Microsoft researchers set out to answer that question with a small study using 19 fiction writers, 30 readers, and short passages written with the help of OpenAI's GPT-4. The research takes its title from a comment by one of the writers -- "it was 80% me, 20% AI." What prompted the study are "concerns that vast transformations of the writer economy are likely underway" as a result of generative AI, writes lead author Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang of the University of Southern California, who collaborated with five scholars from Microsoft Research Montréal.

There are many remarkable things about octopuses--they're famously intelligent, they have three hearts, their eyeballs work like prisms, they can change color at will, and they can "see" light with their skin. One of the most striking things about these creatures, however, is the fact that each of their eight arms almost seems to have a mind of its own, allowing an octopus to multitask in a manner that humans can only dream about. At the heart of each arm is a structure known as the axial nervous cord (ANC), and a new study published January 15 in Nature Communications examines how the structure of this cord is fundamental to allowing the arms to act as they do. Cassady Olson, first author on the paper, explains to Popular Science that understanding the ANC is crucial to understanding how an octopus's arms work: "You can think of the ANC as equivalent to a spinal cord running down the center of every single arm." Olson explains that "there are many gross similarities [between the ANC and vertebrates' spinal cords]--there is a cell body region, a neuropil region, and long tracts to connect the arms and brains in each."

Generative AI is rapidly transforming the art world, creating significant tensions not only between artists and model creators but also among artists. These tools are capable of producing almost instantaneous art-like outputs on an unprecedented scale, which is changing the means of production not only for many artists but also for consumers of creative outputs. While some celebrate Generative AI for its potential to enhance their processes and democratize creativity, making artistic expression accessible to more people, others criticize its ethical implications. This tension highlights the interplay between technological innovation and the rights of creators in this complex socio-technical system. A major concern in this context is the exploitation of artists, whose original works are often used as training data without proper credit or compensation and who now have to compete with Generative AI art models that are hyper-efficient, inexpensive digital twins of their past selves.

Asking ChatGPT to write your emails is so two years ago. Generative AI tools are now going beyond the basic text-prompt phase. Take Google's NotebookLM, an experimental "AI research assistant" that lets you upload not just text but also videos, links and PDFs. It will provide a summary of the content, answer questions about it, and even make a podcast-like "AI overview" if you want it to – all while organising your original sources and notes. As AI tools advance, expect more features like this to be baked into everyday software.

With its focus on innovative products and cutting-edge technology, the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has not historically paid much attention to energy companies. But there were signs of a shift at this year's Las Vegas event, as the tech sector begins to confront its substantial energy needs, which are certain to grow as cloud computing and artificial intelligence advance. "If you'd asked me to do CES five years ago, I wouldn't necessarily have seen the point," said Sebastien Fiedorow, chief executive of the French start-up Aerleum, which manufactures synthetic fuel from carbon dioxide.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly prevalent in modern software systems, interfacing between the user and the Internet to assist with tasks that require advanced language understanding. To accomplish these tasks, the LLM often uses external data sources such as user documents, web retrieval, results from API calls, etc. This opens up new avenues for attackers to manipulate the LLM via prompt injection. Adversarial prompts can be injected into external data sources to override the system's intended instruction and instead execute a malicious instruction. To mitigate this vulnerability, we propose a new defense called SecAlign based on the technique of preference optimization. Our defense first constructs a preference dataset with prompt-injected inputs, secure outputs (ones that respond to the legitimate instruction), and insecure outputs (ones that respond to the injection). We then perform preference optimization on this dataset to teach the LLM to prefer the secure output over the insecure one. This provides the first known method that reduces the success rates of various prompt injections to around 0%, even against attacks much more sophisticated than ones seen during training. This indicates our defense generalizes well against unknown and yet-to-come attacks. Also, our defended models are still practical with similar utility to the one before our defensive training. Our code is at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SecAlign

Major Depressive Disorder and anxiety disorders affect millions globally, contributing significantly to the burden of mental health issues. Early screening is crucial for effective intervention, as timely identification of mental health issues can significantly improve treatment outcomes. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be valuable for improving the screening of mental disorders, enabling early intervention and better treatment outcomes. AI-driven screening can leverage the analysis of multiple data sources, including facial features in digital images. However, existing methods often rely on controlled environments or specialized equipment, limiting their broad applicability. This study explores the potential of AI models for ubiquitous depression-anxiety screening given face-centric selfies. The investigation focuses on high-risk pregnant patients, a population that is particularly vulnerable to mental health issues. To cope with limited training data resulting from our clinical setup, pre-trained models were utilized in two different approaches: fine-tuning convolutional neural networks (CNNs) originally designed for facial expression recognition and employing vision-language models (VLMs) for zero-shot analysis of facial expressions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed VLM-based method significantly outperforms CNNs, achieving an accuracy of 77.6%. Although there is significant room for improvement, the results suggest that VLMs can be a promising approach for mental health screening.

'The Biggest Loser' star Jillian Michaels shared her thoughts on why people fall off their diet and fitness routines during the fall and winter seasons and explained how they can get back on track. CES 2025 has once again showcased a remarkable array of health and fitness technology that promises to transform our well-being. From artificial intelligence-powered sleep aids to smart ear-cleaning devices, this year's event highlights cutting-edge solutions designed to enhance our health and fitness routines. These groundbreaking innovations are sure to offer something for everyone. The Frenz Brainband is this cool new AI-powered sleep headband that not only tracks your sleep, but actually helps you sleep better and focus more during the day.