In its early days, the AI initiative known as Project Maven had its fair share of skeptics at the Pentagon. Today, many of them are true believers. The rise of AI warfare speaks to the biggest moral and practical question there is: Who--or what--gets to decide to take a human life? And who bears that cost? In 2018, more than 3,000 Google workers protested the company's involvement in "the business of war" after finding out the company was part of Project Maven, then a nascent Pentagon effort to use computer vision to rifle through copious video footage taken in America's overseas drone wars. They feared Project Maven's AI could one day be used for lethal targeting. In my yearslong effort to uncover the full story of Project Maven for my book,, I learned that is exactly what happened, and that the undertaking was just as controversial inside the Pentagon. Today, the tool known as Maven Smart System is being used in US operations against Iran . How the US military's top brass moved from skepticism about the use of AI in war to true believers has a lot to do with a Marine colonel named Drew Cukor. In early September 2024, during the cocktail hour at a private retreat for tech investors and defense leaders, Vice Admiral Frank "Trey" Whitworth found his way to Drew Cukor. Now Project Maven's founding leader and his skeptical successor were standing face-to-face. Three years earlier, Whitworth had been the Pentagon's top military official for intelligence, advising the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and running one of the most sensitive and potentially lethal parts of any military process: targeting.

How the artists in this year's survey do or, more often, don't acknowledge those who paved the way for them. Machado makes pieces that one might call documents of reverence, excavated burial grounds. If nothing else, the 2026 Whitney Biennial, curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer (at the Whitney Museum through August 23rd), introduces viewers to what I call ChatGPT art--facsimiles of facsimiles by makers who have little if any relationship to what they're putting out there, aside from its being a product in service of a career. Indeed, it's difficult to think of the people who grew up with and apparently condone the use of A.I. sources in the creation of "art" as artists themselves, especially if you define art as a creative expression of thoughts or feelings that have changed, and contributed to the vision of, the artists who made it. It's true that, nearly from the beginning, postmodern art challenged the notion of originality, or, more specifically, the weight of originality--often with great joy and wit and not a little fear.

This easy-to-use, Wi-Fi-enabled bean-to-cup brewer is good, but not quite great. App is simple and works well. "Smart" features only work with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Integrating with HomeKit via third-party apps is not worth the effort. Pricey for what's essentially an auto-drip machine that works with an app, which is no longer novel or futuristic.

Our information estimator uses only these noisy measurements and a noise model to quantify how well measurements distinguish objects. Many imaging systems produce measurements that humans never see or cannot interpret directly. Your smartphone processes raw sensor data through algorithms before producing the final photo. MRI scanners collect frequency-space measurements that require reconstruction before doctors can view them. Self-driving cars process camera and LiDAR data directly with neural networks.

The AI Race Is Pressuring Utilities to Squeeze More From Europe's Power Grids As data center developers queue up to connect to power grids across Europe, network operators are experimenting with novel ways of clearing room for them. European countries are racing to bring new data centers online as AI labs across the globe continue to demand more compute. The primary limiting factor is energy--and specifically, the ability to move it. Though Europe is on track to generate enough energy, utilities experts say, grid operators broadly lack the infrastructure needed to transport it to where it needs to go. That's throttling grid capacity and, by extension, the number of new power-hungry data centers that can connect without risking blackouts.

This paper introduces stochastic recurrent neural networks which glue a deterministic recurrent neural network and a state space model together to form a stochastic and sequential neural generative model. The clear separation of deterministic and stochastic layers allows a structured variational inference network to track the factorization of the model's posterior distribution. By retaining both the nonlinear recursive structure of a recurrent neural network and averaging over the uncertainty in a latent path, like a state space model, we improve the state of the art results on the Blizzard and TIMIT speech modeling data sets by a large margin, while achieving comparable performances to competing methods on polyphonic music modeling.

Patriot missile involved in Bahrain blast likely U.S.-operated, analysis finds Smoke rises following a strike on the Bapco Oil Refinery, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, on Sitra Island Bahrain, on March 9. | REUTERS An American-operated Patriot air defense battery likely fired the interceptor missile involved in a pre-dawn explosion that injured dozens of civilians and tore through homes in U.S.-ally Bahrain 10 days into the war on Iran, according to an analysis by academic researchers examined by Reuters. Both Bahrain and Washington have blamed an Iranian drone attack for the March 9 blast, which the Gulf kingdom said injured 32 people including children, some seriously. Commenting on the day of the attack, U.S. Central Command said on X that an Iranian drone struck a residential neighborhood in Bahrain. In response to questions, Bahrain on Saturday acknowledged for the first time that a Patriot missile was involved in the explosion over the Mahazza neighborhood on Sitra island, offshore from the capital Manama and also home to an oil refinery. In a statement, a Bahraini government spokesperson said the missile successfully intercepted an Iranian drone mid-air, saving lives. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG .

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG .

Pearl Abyss, the game's developer, issued a lengthy apology on X and detailed its corrective actions. The developer behind the open-world RPG Crimson Desert has issued an official apology after players discovered several instances of AI-generated art in the game. Pearl Abyss posted on X that it released the game with some 2D visual props that were made with experimental AI generative tools and forgot to replace them before launch. We would like to address questions regarding the use of AI in Crimson Desert. During development, some 2D visual props were created as part of early-stage iteration using experimental AI generative tools.