Artificial intelligence can draw cat pictures and write emails. A research team in California says it used AI to propose new genetic codes for viruses--and managed to get several of them to replicate and kill bacteria. The work, described in a preprint paper, has the potential to create new treatments and accelerate research into artificially engineered cells. But experts believe it is also an "impressive first step" toward AI-designed life forms. Hydrogen is sometimes held up as a master key for the energy transition. It can be made using several low-emissions methods and could play a role in cleaning up industries ranging from agriculture to aviation to shipping.

Top AI CEOs like DeepMind's Demis Hassabis and OpenAI's Sam Altman have recently been urging academics and governments to grapple with this issue more deeply, to better prepare the world for what they expect will be a highly disruptive economic shock. So, every day for a week--in breakout rooms and in a nightly communal sauna--these 18 experts hashed out a picture of what economic shocks might be coming down the track… and what to do about them. Bad news -- One outcome of the so-called "AGI social contract summit" was a list of four consensus statements, according to the summit's organizers. These statements have not previously been reported. They paint a grim picture of where the world could be headed, absent significant interventions by governments and societies.

Judge Vince Chhabria sided with Meta but appeared to do so regretfully, stating that Meta's use of the writers' work to train its bots isn't necessarily legal but that the plaintiffs "made the wrong arguments."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, July 4th was a quiet day for news, but we've still got editorials on e-ink writing, the most-delayed video game ever and more bad news from the makers of ChatGPT. Earlier this week, engineer and Swift developer Pedro José Pereira Vieito dug into OpenAI's Mac ChatGPT app and found that it was storing user conversations locally in plain text, rather than encrypting them. Because that app is only available from OpenAI's website, and since it's not available on the App Store, it doesn't have to follow Apple's sandboxing requirements. OpenAI released an update that added encryption to locally stored chats. Then, more bad news stemmed from issues in 2023. Last spring, a hacker obtained information about OpenAI after illicitly accessing the company's internal messaging systems.

A friend recently got duped by a scam text purporting to be from his middle daughter, and transferred 100 to an account to cover some baffling yet, according to the text, extremely time-sensitive untoward event. You can imagine how the scammer pulled that off. Think of everyday, low-level parental anxiety, expecting bad news when kids are anywhere farther away than the kitchen table; add the sheer believability of any bad news that starts with a 19-year-old texting: "I smashed my phone"; all a scammer has to do is lean in. Still, the story wasn't watertight and we all called him stupid for ages afterwards, for failing to ask basic questions such as: "But if it's your phone that's broken, why does the money need to go into someone else's bank account?" He didn't even call the number to check that he could speak to her – arguably, 100 lighter was a good place to land.

When it comes to curating a dating profile, singletons may spend countless hours deciding which photographs show their best angles. But experts now suggest that attraction really is just about the animals you're shot with, as 76 per cent of daters would be tempted to swipe right if a feline featured. Dating app, FindingTheOne, polled 2,000 of its users on their preferences and pet peeves when it comes to furry friends online. While dogs are usually deemed a man's best friend, results show they're certainly not the best wingmen, as just 41 per cent of users were tempted to date a pup's parent. Meanwhile, a startling 62 per cent wouldn't mind falling for a snake or lizard owner - and 23 per cent even find them'sexy'.

The first thing Geoffrey Hinton says when we start talking, and the last thing he repeats before I turn off my recorder, is that he left Google, his employer of the past decade, on good terms. "I have no objection to what Google has done or is doing, but obviously the media would love to spin me as'a disgruntled Google employee'. It's an important clarification to make, because it's easy to conclude the opposite. After all, when most people calmly describe their former employer as being one of a small group of companies charting a course that is alarmingly likely to wipe out humanity itself, they do so with a sense of opprobrium. But to listen to Hinton, we're about to sleepwalk towards an existential threat to civilisation without anyone involved acting maliciously at all. Known as one of three "godfathers of AI", in 2018 Hinton won the ACM Turing award – the Nobel prize of computer scientists for his work on "deep learning". A cognitive psychologist and computer scientist by training, he wasn't motivated by a desire to radically improve technology: instead, it was to understand more about ourselves. "For the last 50 years, I've been trying to make computer models that can learn stuff a bit like the way the brain learns it, in order to understand better how the brain is learning things," he tells me when we meet in his sister's house in north London, where he is staying (he usually resides in Canada). Looming slightly over me – he prefers to talk standing up, he says – the tone is uncannily reminiscent of a university tutorial, as the 75-year-old former professor explains his research history, and how it has inescapably led him to the conclusion that we may be doomed. In trying to model how the human brain works, Hinton found himself one of the leaders in the field of "neural networking", an approach to building computer systems that can learn from data and experience. Until recently, neural nets were a curiosity, requiring vast computer power to perform simple tasks worse than other approaches. But in the last decade, as the availability of processing power and vast datasets has exploded, the approach Hinton pioneered has ended up at the centre of a technological revolution. "In trying to think about how the brain could implement the algorithm behind all these models, I decided that maybe it can't – and maybe these big models are actually much better than the brain," he says. A "biological intelligence" such as ours, he says, has advantages. It runs at low power, "just 30 watts, even when you're thinking", and "every brain is a bit different". That means we learn by mimicking others. But that approach is "very inefficient" in terms of information transfer. Digital intelligences, by contrast, have an enormous advantage: it's trivial to share information between multiple copies. "You pay an enormous cost in terms of energy, but when one of them learns something, all of them know it, and you can easily store more copies.

The popular Dall-E 2, created by OpenAI and named after painter Salvador Dali and Disney Pixar's WALL-E, shook the internet when it launched last July. In August, the start-up Stable Diffusion released its own version, essentially an anti-DALL-E with fewer restrictions on how it could be used. Research lab Midjourney debuted its own version during the summer, which created the picture that sparked a controversy in August when it won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair.

No, I really hope that the companies that are doing this kind of integration are thinking really hard about not just putting 100 words in the Do Not Say bucket for the chatbot, but in trying to steer these conversations in a positive direction. I can imagine myself as a teenager asking questions about identity and body image and friends and social life and school and stress. And I just -- I hope that these products are ready or can be made ready for that kind of interaction because, let's face it, they're going to be using it as a proxy friend. And for that reason, I think it's really, really important that the right safety work go into these products. Is another big tech company that is also throwing its hat into the ring when it comes to generative AI.

Artificial Intelligence has been taking the world by storm since the launch of ChatGPT.