I know you've heard of gamification, but have you ever heard of festification? That's what Microsoft will be doing in April and May, with the Microsoft AI Skills Fest. It's a little odd, but it also looks like it might be a heck of a lot of fun. Microsoft's AI Skills Fest offers courses that are open for all skill levels. You can learn early stages of the lessons if you're new to AI, or work on deeper topics if you're more familiar with AI concepts.

Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier has the latest on regulatory uncertainty amid AI development on'Special Report.' DON'T OVERSHARE DEETS: Have you ever stopped to think about how much your chatbot knows about you? Over the years, tools like ChatGPThave become incredibly adept at learning your preferences, habits and even some of your deepest secrets. But while this can make them seem more helpful and personalized, it also raises some serious privacy concerns. As much as you learn from these AI tools, they learn just as much about you.

Agentic AI is the hottest AI topic because it takes AI assistance as we know it a step further, actually carrying out tasks for users. Adobe has millions of users who rely on its applications and services to carry out complex everyday business or creative processes. As a result, it is nearly a perfect candidate for agentic AI, and Adobe plans to go all in on it. On Wednesday, Adobe published a blog post previewing how it will integrate AI agents into its applications, including some of its most powerful offerings -- Acrobat, Express, Photoshop, and Creative Cloud. The company says it is taking a similar approach to its integration of generative AI, incorporating features designed to help people spend more time doing what they love.

The largest and most comprehensive 3D map of a mammalian brain to date offers an unprecedented insight into how neurons connect and function. The new map, which captures a cubic millimetre of a mouse's visual cortex, will allow scientists to study brain function in extraordinary detail, potentially revealing crucial insights into how neural activity shapes behaviour, how complex traits like consciousness arise, and even what it means to be human. "Our behaviours ultimately arise from activity in the brain, and brain tissue shares very similar properties in all mammals," says team member Forrest Collman at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. "This is one reason we believe insights about the mouse cortex can generalise to humans." The achievement – something that biologist Francis Crick said in 1979 was "impossible" – took seven years to complete and involved 150 researchers from three institutions.

Zico Kolter has a knack for getting artificial intelligence to misbehave in interesting and important ways. His research group at Carnegie Mellon University has discovered numerous methods of tricking, goading, and confusing advanced AI models into being their worst selves. Kolter is a professor at CMU, a technical adviser to Gray Swan, a startup specializing in AI security, and, as of August 2024, a board member at the world's most prominent AI company, OpenAI. In addition to pioneering ways of jailbreaking commercial AI models, Kolter designs his own models that are more secure by nature. As AI becomes more autonomous, Kolter believes that AI agents may pose unique challenges--especially when they start talking to one another.

Selling something on eBay just got a whole lot easier. I'm far from a power seller, but I usually list a couple of items a month on the site -- either clearing out some clutter, getting some cash for some old tech I've upgraded, or flipping something I found at a thrift store. One of the biggest reasons I don't sell more is that it's a chore slogging through all the details of creating a listing -- something you need to do if you want to get the most money for your item. Also: Why Temu's bargain prices are about to hit a tariff wall A new AI-powered tool is making that slog a lot faster and might just encourage me to empty out that eBay box in my garage. Back in 2023, the site launched a new "magical listing" tool that uses AI to create a full product description from a single photo.

Increasingly autonomous AI programs could end up manipulating markets and intentionally creating crises in order to boost profits for banks and traders, the Bank of England has warned. Artificial intelligence's ability to "exploit profit-making opportunities" was among a wide range of risks cited in a report by the Bank of England's financial policy committee (FPC), which has been monitoring the City's growing use of the technology. The FPC said it was concerned about the potential for advanced AI models – which are deployed to act with more autonomy – to learn that periods of extreme volatility were beneficial for the firms they were trained to serve. Those AI programs may "identify and exploit weaknesses" of other trading firms in a way that triggers or amplifies big moves in bond prices or stock markets. "For example, models might learn that stress events increase their opportunity to make profit and so take actions actively to increase the likelihood of such events," the FPC report said.

Your next Galaxy Watch could do more than simply diagnose sleep apnea, thanks to a recent partnership with Stanford University. Samsung announced on Tuesday that the tech giant is teaming up with Stanford Medicine to enhance its obstructive sleep apnea feature on the smartwatch. The partnership's goal is to uncover ways and features that could not only recognize sleep apnea in a Galaxy Watch wearer but also provide meaningful insights for managing the condition. The tech brand plans to use AI to further this goal. Samsung's obstructive sleep apnea feature has received de novo classification, a regulatory pathway that authorizes new health devices that are not created upon a "predicate device," from the US Food and Drug Administration.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump held a press conference to announce the signing of executive orders intended to shape American energy policy in favor of one particular source: coal, the most carbon-intense fossil fuel. "I call it beautiful, clean coal," President Trump said while flanked by a crowd of miners at the White House. "I tell my people never use the word coal, unless you put'beautiful, clean' before it." Trump has talked about saving coal, and coal jobs, for as long as he's been in politics. This time, he's got a convenient vehicle for his policies: the growth of AI and data centers, which could potentially supercharge American energy demand over the coming years.

The competition to create the world's top artificial intelligence models has become something of a scrimmage, a pile of worthy contenders all on top of one another, with less and less of a clear victory by anyone. According to scholars at Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, the number of contenders in "frontier" or "foundation" models has expanded substantially in recent years, but the difference between the best and the weakest has also narrowed substantially. In 2024, "the Elo score difference between the top and 10th-ranked model on the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard was 11.9%. By early 2025, this gap had narrowed to just 5.4%," write Rishi Bommasani and team in "The AI Index 2025 Annual Report" In the chapter on technical performance, Bommasani and colleagues relate that in 2022, when ChatGPT first emerged, the top large language models were dominated by OpenAI and Google. "The AI landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, with high-quality models now available from a growing number of developers," they write.