Tech entrepreneur Yossi Tsuria wanted to find out. He asked the AI chatbot to generate a prayer. If Joe was praying for his son's health, Mr. Tsuria asked in 2023, how should he pray? The machine responded, "Heavenly Father, In this trying time, I come before you with a heavy heart." Could your next spiritual guide be artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence gets tons of press – and for good reason. But AI's fast-rising expertise lies not just within the matrix of its own nifty algorithms, but also in its wider connections. It's about "intelligent connectivity" that relies on raw data – lots and lots of it – and on the communication networks that carry it. This blend of technologies may be surrounding you at a large store like Walmart. Retailers fight for their target audience using sensors galore, stationed in their aisles and checkout lines.

American stock markets shuddered on Monday, prompted by China's announcement that it has created a capable, cheap, artificial intelligence machine. It's the biggest cloud yet to darken the West's blue-sky enthusiasm over AI, calling into question the efficacy of America's export controls and the billions of dollars the United States is pouring into the technology's expensive cutting edge. China startup DeepSeek says its AI assistant uses less advanced chips than its rivals' models do, and it costs less to train. Unlike the West's billions, the Chinese model was developed for just 5.6 million, by one estimate. "Are we going to spend 500 billion to get to the frontier so that China can find a way to copy our homework for pennies on the dollar?"

In a packed Las Vegas arena, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang stood on stage and marveled over the crisp real-time computer graphics displayed on the screen behind him. He watched as a dark-haired woman walked through ornate gilded double doors and took in the rays of light that poured in through stained glass windows. "The amount of geometry that you saw was absolutely insane," Mr. Huang told an audience of thousands at CES 2025 the night of Jan. 6. "It would have been impossible without artificial intelligence." The chipmaker and AI darling unveiled its GeForce RTX 50 Series desktop and laptop GPUs – its most advanced consumer graphics processor units for gamers, creators, and developers.

The United States government's road safety agency is again investigating Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" system, this time after getting reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says in documents that it opened the probe on Oct. 17 with the company reporting four crashes after Teslas entered areas of low visibility, including sun glare, fog, and airborne dust. In addition to the pedestrian's death, another crash involved an injury, the agency said. Investigators will look into the ability of "Full Self-Driving" to "detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions, and if so, the contributing circumstances for these crashes." The investigation covers roughly 2.4 million Teslas from the 2016 through 2024 model years.

Two pioneers of artificial intelligence – John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – won the Nobel Prize in physics Oct. 8 for helping create the building blocks of machine learning that is revolutionizing the way we work and live but also creates new threats to humanity, one of the winners said. Mr. Hinton, who is known as the Godfather of artificial intelligence, is a citizen of Canada and Britain who works at the University of Toronto, and Mr. Hopfield is an American working at Princeton. "This year's two Nobel Laureates in physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today's powerful machine learning," the Nobel committee said in a press release. Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates "used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets." She said that such networks have been used to advance research in physics and "have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation. Mr. Hinton predicted that AI will end up having a "huge influence" on civilization, bringing improvements in productivity and health care. "It would be comparable with the Industrial Revolution," he said in the open call with reporters and the officials from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. "Instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it's going to exceed people in intellectual ability.

In rebranding artificial intelligence as Apple Intelligence, Apple Inc is banking on the idea that people by and large won't buy the powerful A.I. software that its rivals are developing. Instead, they'll want really cool hardware that incorporates A.I. It's a compelling but risky strategy for a company that specializes in seamlessly integrating hardware and software into must-have products. "It's the next big step for Apple," Apple CEO Tim Cook said Monday in unveiling Apple Intelligence at the company's developers conference. Apple is diving into artificial intelligence – focused on the idea of a "virtual personal assistant" - as a potential must-have app for consumers. Since it lacks its own cutting-edge version of the predictive, sounds-like-a-human technology known as generative A.I., Apple will license that technology from other companies, starting with OpenAI.

When I was 6, I found independence in journeys to my grandfather's house, two blocks away. I would hop on my bike and head over for a mini Horizon chocolate milk.My brothers and I called him Dad-dad, and so did our friends. We knew we could stop by anytime for a treat, or for tea and cookies at 4 p.m. An accomplished woodworker, he finished an eave in his attic, intuiting correctly that it was a perfect space for forts."We "And a lot of goodies."Sam and a friend, Olivia, said nearly identical things when I asked about memories of neighborliness in Silver Spring, Maryland: "I was always being sent to a neighbor's to borrow ingredients" and "there was not a day that we were not outside."I

Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit departed Earth in 2003. Upon successfully touching down on the red planet, they were only expected to last about 90 days. The scientists and engineers at NASA were flabbergasted that the pair survived for many years. In his latest documentary, "Good Night Oppy," director Ryan White examines the doting relationship between the control room crew members – people from across the globe – and their robotic progeny. It's a story of gumption: When a machine gets mired in quicksand 140 million miles away, how do you rescue it?

Chinese technicians were making final preparations Monday for a mission to bring back material from the moon's surface for the first time in more than four decades – an undertaking that could boost human understanding of the moon and of the solar system more generally. Chang'e 5 – named for the Chinese moon goddess – is the country's most ambitious lunar mission yet. If successful, it would be a major advance for China's space program, and some experts say it could pave the way for bringing samples back from Mars or even a crewed lunar mission. The China National Space Administration said in a statement that the Long March-5Y rocket began fueling up on Monday, ahead of a launch scheduled for between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. EST Monday at the Wenchang launch center on the southern island province of Hainan. The typically secretive administration had previously only confirmed the launch would be in late November.