In the late 19th century, Georg Cantor believed his new theory could help the Church understand the infinite nature of the divine. It might have escaped lay people at the time, but for some observers the ascension of Leo XIV as head of the Catholic Church this year was a reminder that the last time a Pope Leo sat in St. Peter's Chair in the Vatican, from 1878 to 1903, the modern view of infinity was born. Georg Cantor's completely original "naïve" set theory caused both revolution and revolt in mathematical circles, with some embracing his ideas and others rejecting them. Cantor was deeply disappointed with the negative reactions, of course, but never with his own ideas. Because he held firm to the belief that he had a main line to the absolute--that his ideas came direct from (the divine intellect).

Leaders from across the world of business, technology, policy, and entertainment gathered at the TIME100 Davos Dinner as the World Economic Forum's 55th annual meeting kicked off on Jan. 20. In keeping with this year's annual meeting theme "Collaboration for the Intelligent Age," Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of AI company Anthropic, joined TIME editor-in-chief Sam Jacobs on stage to talk about the future of AI. Discussing what Amodei calls powerful AI, which he prefers over Artificial General Intelligence because of the latter's connotations with science fiction, the CEO emphasized the importance of understanding the reality of the technology's potential. "We have to be very serious about when this actually happens, what is possible and what exists. What are the bounds that are provided by physics, by the limits in human institutions, what's left after we consider those," he said.

Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), they still exhibit a limited capability to align their outputs to the user instructions. In this work, we introduce a simple and effective method, which we name GUIDE, that mechanistically increases attention scores in instruction tokens. To support this operation, we present Influence, a novel metric that highlights how the user's instructions propagate through the transformer layers and impact the LLM output. Our results show that GUIDE improves the accuracy of following instructions 29.4 % to 60.4%, outperforming natural prompting alternatives and Supervised Fine-Tuning up to 1M tokens.

Authenticating works of art is far from an exact science, but a madonna and child painting has sparked a furious row, being dubbed "the battle of the AIs", after two separate scientific studies arrived at contradictory conclusions. Both studies used state-of-the art AI technology. Months after one study proclaimed that the so-called de Brécy Tondo, currently on display at Bradford council's Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, is "undoubtedly" by Raphael, another has found that it cannot be by the Renaissance master. In January, research teams from the universities of Nottingham and Bradford announced the findings of facial recognition technology, which compared the faces in the Tondo with those in Raphael's Sistine Madonna altarpiece, commissioned in 1512. Having used "millions of faces to train an algorithm to recognise and compare facial features", they stated: "The similarity between the madonnas was found to be 97%, while comparison of the child in both paintings produced an 86% similarity."

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made remarkable progress creating images that are not only breathtaking, but astonishingly diverse in style. Ten years ago, such an achievement would have been deemed unlikely by experts. Today, AI can create images using specific artistic styles, such as Van Gogh's unique approach, with an infinite range of variations. This raises an intriguing question. A very accurate, detailed, and faithful reproduction of a scene, where realism is aimed for: Ave Caesar!

There's a hilarious illustration from Paris in late 1839, mere months after an early type of photograph called a daguerreotype was announced to the world, that warned what this tiny picture portended. In Théodore Maurisset's imagination, the daguerreotype would bring about a collective hysteria, La Daguerréotypomanie, in which crazed masses arrive from the ends of the earth and overrun a small photo studio. Some in the crowd want pictures of themselves, but, mon Dieu, others demand cameras to take their own pictures--Maurisset shows them loading the machines like contraband onto steamships bound for foreign ports--and still others throng simply to ogle at this newfangled thing and all the lunatic proceedings surrounding it. The clamor is so feverish that it brings about a mass hallucination, in which nearly everything else in the landscape around the studio, including railroad cars, a clock tower, a basket for a hot air balloon, indeed anything remotely boxy in shape, morphs into cameras. As they march to the studio, the crowds pass by half a dozen gallows, where in response to the daguerreotype's appearance artists have hung themselves.

Long before former Google engineer Blake Lemoine publicly wondered if the LaMDA AI he was supposed to test for discriminatory speech was, in fact, a sentient being, the world wondered about the sentience of a chess-playing automaton called the Mechanical Turk. In the late 18th century, Wolfgang von Kempelen was an advisor of the Austrian-Hungary court. A self-trained expert ahead of his time in physics, science and machinery, he was also a close confidant of Empress Maria Theresa and, one day, had her ear while a French magician performed for the court. Asked his opinion of the Frenchman, Wolfgang dismissed him as a hack. His tricks were too easy to explain, and Wolfgang boasted he could easily build a machine that would be much more impressive and defy any explanation.

The face of a Connecticut farmer thought to be a vampire when he died of tuberculosis in the 19th century has been seen for the first time since his corpse was mutilated and tossed into a grave. The disease turns people's skin a pale yellow, their eyes become red and swollen and they sometimes have bloodstains around their mouth from coughing, which was believed to be signs of the undead about 200 years ago. The man's skeleton, buried in a casket with'JB55' engraved on it, was used to performed a DNA analysis that was fed to a machine learning system to predict what he may have looked like before being riddled with the disease. The results showed he had fair skin, brown or hazel eyes, brown or black hair and some freckles. The man, a farmer who lived in Connecticut, died of tuberculosis in the 19th century, which led people to believe he was a vampire.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous. It provides directions while we drive, answers our questions, offers music recommendations and powers a growing number of business processes in the workplace. In fact, AI is working its way into so many aspects of our personal and professional lives that my company has begun to refer to it as "everyday AI." Soon, I'd argue, it will become as ubiquitous -- and necessary -- as electricity. Yet, despite the progress, we've only scratched the surface in the potential ways that AI can, and no doubt will, change business and the world. Gartner has forecast that it will take until 2025 for half of organizations worldwide to reach what Gartner's AI maturity model describes as the "stabilization stage" of AI maturity or beyond.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous. It provides directions while we drive, answers our questions, offers music recommendations and powers a growing number of business processes in the workplace. In fact, AI is working its way into so many aspects of our personal and professional lives that my company has begun to refer to it as "everyday AI." Soon, I'd argue, it will become as ubiquitous -- and necessary -- as electricity. Yet, despite the progress, we've only scratched the surface in the potential ways that AI can, and no doubt will, change business and the world. Gartner has forecast that it will take until 2025 for half of organizations worldwide to reach what Gartner's AI maturity model describes as the "stabilization stage" of AI maturity or beyond.