Facial recognition technology could be used more often by UK police forces, according to new plans announced by the Home Office. Policing and crime minister Sarah Jones said a widespread rollout of the equipment could mark the biggest breakthrough in catching criminals since DNA matching. People are being asked for their views on its use, as part of a 10-week consultation launched on Thursday, possibly paving the way for new laws. Jones credited the technology for helping to arrest thousands of criminals, but campaign group Big Brother Watch said increased use would make George Orwell roll in his grave. Facial recognition is used to locate wanted suspects and find vulnerable people.

When ChatGPT first took the world by storm in 2022, its capabilities were so impressive that people happily looked past its awkward name. Yet hidden within those initials lies a key breakthrough responsible for sending artificial intelligence rocketing these past few years – and potentially a limitation that could see it crashing back to Earth. GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer, and it is the last word that matters most.

More than 150,000 adults and children with type 1 diabetes are now eligible to get an'artificial pancreas'. NHS regulators have today approved hybrid closed-loop system technology, which experts say is the'biggest breakthrough since insulin'. The high-tech device continuously tracks blood sugar levels through a sensor stuck to the body. Readings are fed straight back to a body-worn insulin pump, with an algorithm then calculating how much of the hormone needs to be released. An artificial pancreas to manage type 1 diabetes could soon be offered to NHS patients after a major trial produced'blisteringly brilliant' early results.

In a fair world, technology should be accessible to all and used for humanity's betterment. However, there is a growing concern that AI could be monopolised for vested interests by large corporations. This is why open sourcing is paramount. ChatGPT, the popular chatbot by OpenAI, has been one of the biggest breakthroughs in AI. In just five days since its launch, approximately one million individuals engaged with the bot and it is expected that the number will soon reach the billion mark.

Scientists in many fields got little attention over the last two years as the world focused on the emergency push to develop vaccines and treatments for COVID-19. But labs and researchers remained busy, and this year they've reported a dizzying series of major discoveries and achievements. Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced in December that they had produced the first fusion reaction that created more energy than was used to start it. The long-elusive achievement marked a major breakthrough in harnessing the process that fuels the sun. "This milestone moves us one significant step closer" to "powering our society" with zero-carbon fusion energy, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said.

GPT-1 was released on June 11, 2018. When this model was released by OpenAI, there was much excitement. It was the transformer structure combined with unsupervised pre-training with promising results. The key difference between GPT-1 and the other language-based models before it, is that it was fine-tuned, or trained for specific tasks. GPT-2 was introduced in February 2019.

This year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) celebrates 50 years of the ACM Turing Award, the most prestigious technical award in the computing industry. The Turing Award, generally regarded as the'Nobel Prize of computing', is an annual prize awarded to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". In celebration of the 50 year milestone, renowned computer scientist Melanie Mitchell spoke to CBR's Ellie Burns about artificial intelligence (AI) – the biggest breakthroughs, hurdles and myths surrounding the technology. EB: What are the most important examples of Artificial Intelligence in mainstream society today? MM: There are many important examples of AI in the mainstream; some very visible, others blended in so well with other methods that the AI part is nearly invisible.

This year, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) celebrates 50 years of the ACM Turing Award, the most prestigious technical award in the computing industry. The Turing Award, generally regarded as the'Nobel Prize of computing', is an annual prize awarded to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community". In celebration of the 50 year milestone, renowned computer scientist Melanie Mitchell spoke to CBR's Ellie Burns about artificial intelligence (AI) – the biggest breakthroughs, hurdles and myths surrounding the technology. EB: What are the most important examples of Artificial Intelligence in mainstream society today? MM: There are many important examples of AI in the mainstream; some very visible, others blended in so well with other methods that the AI part is nearly invisible.