The chief executive of the American chip maker Nvidia visited Beijing on Thursday, days after the US issued fresh restrictions on sales of the only AI chip it was still allowed to sell to China. Jensen Huang's surprise visit was on the invitation of a trade organisation, according to a social media account affiliated with state media. The official broadcaster China Central Television said Huang met Ren Hongbin, the head of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, where he said he hopes "to continue to cooperate with China". China Daily, the ruling Communist party's official English-language outlet, published a photo of Huang in the capital, saying the trip came "three months after pledging to continue cooperation with #China during his last visit". It added the hashtag #OpportunityChina, which it has previously used in posts promoting US-China exports.

In a'transformational' discovery, scientists have discovered the strongest evidence of life on a distant alien planet. Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found huge quantities of chemicals produced by life on Earth in the atmosphere of the planet K2-18b. According to scientists from the University of Cambridge, an'ocean that is teeming with life' is the best explanation for this stunning discovery. MailOnline has used AI to take scientists' best predictions and imagine what life might be like on K2-18b. The most likely scenario is that K2-18b's oceans are filled with something like phytoplankton - microscopic organisms that feed on the energy from the nearby star.

American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on "college protesters," "radicalized" political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications that 404 Media obtained via public records requests. This article is copublished in partnership with 404 Media. Massive Blue, the New York–based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an "AI-powered force multiplier for public safety" that "deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels." According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media. The technology--which as of last summer had not led to any known arrests--demonstrates the types of social media monitoring and undercover tools private companies are pitching to police and border agents.

Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. The last column covered how to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border. If you'd like to skip to a section about a particular tip, click the "Jump to" menu at the top of this article. At the press of a button, your Tesla pulls itself out of parking spot with no one behind the wheel using a feature called Summon. It drives itself on highways using Autopilot. When you arrive at your destination, it can record nearby activity while parked with a feature called Sentry Mode.

Anyone who played with this toy will also remember the sound it made. Once you slid the power button to the On position, you heard a constant whirring sound of plastic gears turning and twisting. And if you tried to push it past its boundaries, it twitched and protested with a jarring "CLICK … CLICK … CLICK." It wasn't just kids who found the Armatron so special. It was featured on the cover of the November/December 1982 issue of Robotics Age magazine, which noted that the 31.95

A new report from the International Energy Agency digs into the details of energy and AI, and I think it's worth looking at some of the data to help clear things up. Here are four charts from the report that sum up the crucial points about AI and energy demand. This point is the most obvious, but it bears repeating: AI is exploding, and it's going to lead to higher energy demand from data centers. "AI has gone from an academic pursuit to an industry with trillions of dollars at stake," as the IEA report's executive summary puts it. Data centers used less than 300 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2020.

As a retiree, I want to stay close to my grandkids. I worry that not learning how to use AI will leave me behind. What's the easiest tool for me to learn, and should I be worried? I promise that you do not need to learn how to use a generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude to ensure your grandkids see you as a relevant, informed person. If anything, I would say that our culture has tipped over the past year to generally oppose the use of generative AI tools due to their outsize environmental impact, ethical concerns over their data scraping, and general sludginess of the outputs.

This highly scalable approach may finally open the skies to a host of commercial drone applications that have yet to materialize. Amazon Prime Air launched in 2022 but was put on hold after crashes at a testing facility, for example. On any given day, only 8,500 or so unmanned aircraft fly in US airspace, the vast majority of which are used for recreational purposes rather than for services like search and rescue missions, real estate inspections, video surveillance, or farmland surveys. One obstacle to wider use has been concern over possible midair drone-to-drone collisions. This prevents most collisions but also most use cases, such as delivering medication to a patient's doorstep or dispatching a police drone to an active crime scene so first responders can better prepare before arriving.

Ukraine has reported dozens of civilian deaths from Russian attacks over the past week, including three killed in a late-night assault on Wednesday in the southeastern city of Dnipro. A child was among the victims of the drone attack, which came hours before high-stakes meetings in Paris due to take place later on Thursday, during which United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff are to meet French President Emmanuel Macron and other European officials to discuss the conflict. Ukraine's defence and foreign ministers, as well as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's chief of staff, are also in the French capital for talks with US and European Union delegations, though Kyiv's delegation has not specified who it plans to meet. But as Moscow's self-imposed 30-day ceasefire on energy infrastructure approached its close, talks to achieve a broader ceasefire so far have showed little sign of progress. Russia has stuck to its hardline positions while accusing Ukraine of violating the energy ceasefire, to which Kyiv never agreed.

South Korean actor Simon Lee was stunned when he saw his likeness -- at times as a gynecologist or a surgeon -- being used to promote questionable health cures on TikTok and Instagram. He is one of scores of people who have licensed their image to artificial intelligence marketing companies, and then ended up with the unpleasant surprise of seeing themselves feature in deepfakes, dubious adverts or even political propaganda. "If it was a nice advertisement, it would've been fine to me. But obviously it is such a scam," he said, adding that the terms of his contract prevented him from getting the videos removed.