EU investigates Elon Musk's X over Grok AI sexual deepfakes The European Commission has launched an investigation into Elon Musk's X over concerns its AI tool Grok was used to create sexualised images of real people. It follows a similar announcement in January from the UK watchdog Ofcom. Regina Doherty, a member of the European parliament representing Ireland, said the Commission would assess whether manipulated sexually explicit images have been shown to users in the EU. A previous statement from X's Safety account said the social media platform had stopped Grok from digitally altering pictures of people to remove their clothing in jurisdictions where such content is illegal. But campaigners and victims said the ability to generate sexually explicit pictures using the tool should have never happened in the first place, and Ofcom said its investigation would remain ongoing.

We present MA-RAG, a Multi-Agent framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that addresses the inherent ambiguities and reasoning challenges in complex information-seeking tasks. Unlike conventional RAG methods that rely on end-to-end fine-tuning or isolated component enhancements, MA-RAG orchestrates a collaborative set of specialized AI agents: Planner, Step Definer, Extractor, and QA Agents, each responsible for a distinct stage of the RAG pipeline. By decomposing tasks into subtasks such as query disambiguation, evidence extraction, and answer synthesis, and enabling agents to communicate intermediate reasoning via chain-of-thought prompting, MA-RAG progressively refines retrieval and synthesis while maintaining modular interpretability. Extensive experiments on multi-hop and ambiguous QA benchmarks, including NQ, HotpotQA, 2WikimQA, and TriviaQA, demonstrate that MA-RAG significantly outperforms standalone LLMs and existing RAG methods across all model scales. Notably, even a small LLaMA3-8B model equipped with MA-RAG surpasses larger standalone LLMs, while larger variants (LLaMA3-70B and GPT-4o-mini) set new state-of-the-art results on challenging multi-hop datasets. Ablation studies reveal that both the planner and extractor agents are critical for multi-hop reasoning, and that high-capacity models are especially important for the QA agent to synthesize answers effectively. Beyond general-domain QA, MA-RAG generalizes to specialized domains such as medical QA, achieving competitive performance against domain-specific models without any domain-specific fine-tuning. Our results highlight the effectiveness of collaborative, modular reasoning in retrieval-augmented systems: MA-RAG not only improves answer accuracy and robustness but also provides interpretable intermediate reasoning steps, establishing a new paradigm for efficient and reliable multi-agent RAG.

In 2023, a Belgian man reportedly ended his life after developing eco-anxiety and confiding in an AI chatbot over six weeks about the future of the planet. Without those conversations, his widow reportedly told the Belgian outlet La Libre, "he would still be here". In April this year, a 35-year-old Florida man was shot and killed by police in another chatbot-related incident: his father later told media that the man had come to believe an entity named Juliet was trapped inside ChatGPT, and then killed by OpenAI. When the man, who reportedly struggled with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, was confronted by police, he allegedly charged at them with a knife. The wide availability of chatbots in the past few years has apparently led some to believe there is a ghost in the machine – one that is conscious, capable of loving and being loved.

Complex mission or task specification languages play a fundamentally important role in human/robotic interaction. In realistic scenarios such as emergency response, specifying temporal, resource and other constraints on a mission is an essential component due to the dynamic and contingent nature of the operational environments. It is also desirable that in addition to having a formal semantics, the language should be sufficiently expressive, pragmatic and abstract. The main goal of this paper is to propose a mission specification language that meets these requirements. It is based on extending both the syntax and semantics of a well-established formalism for reasoning about action and change, Temporal Action Logic (TAL), in order to represent temporal composite actions with constraints. Fixpoints are required to specify loops and recursion in the extended language. The results include a sound and complete proof theory for this extension. To ensure that the composite language constructs are adequately grounded in the pragmatic operation of robotic systems, Task Specification Trees (TSTs) and their mapping to these constructs are proposed. The expressive and pragmatic adequacy of this approach is demonstrated using an emergency response scenario.

From towering, color-blocked Rothkos, to the soft brushstroke of Monet's landscapes, one's taste in art seems like a deeply personal choice. What moves you is a purely human reaction. A recent study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior has shown it's possible to accurately predict art preferences, using a deep-learning neural network that did not include any previous art training. And while you might think of your own personal art style as boundary-defying and genre-bending, the study found that most participants' art preferences can be grouped into just three categories. If you aren't sure which group you fall into, this new A.I. just might, Kiyohito Iigaya, a postdoctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology and first author on the study, tells Inverse.

In recent years the customer experience landscape has seen the emergence of chatbots, virtual digital assistants, and AI. By automating repetitive tasks these tools have saved costs, allowing humans to focus on more complex issues. The long term impact of AI and machine learning applications, however, is potentially tremendous and far reaching. Machine learning refers to the ability of information systems or computer programs to learn and improve from experience, without being programmed. Essentially, the machine interprets existing data using algorithms allowing the computer program or information system to find hidden insights without being explicitly programed where to look.

How did TALPLANNER come about? TAL serves as a reference formalism for We use a simple gripper domain as an example. ROBBY only has a single gripper. For many domains, the process is intuitive and straightforward. We imagine that for other domains, the process will be quite complex, and finding a means of automatically generating at least some of the control statements is highly desirable and a challenging research issue.

Highly-trained surgeons armed with a scalpel perform procedures faster than machines, at a lower cost - and do not make more mistakes. Two studies - one by Leeds University and the other by Stanford University in the US - last night independently found robots did not reduce side effects or improve the patient's health when compared to manual operations. But they both found that robotic surgery took longer and was more expensive. For the last 15 years robots have been increasingly used in the NHS, replacing the surgeon's hand with the arm of a machine. The NHS has about 60 surgical robots, often bought for about £1.5million each by hospitals' charitable trusts after local fundraising campaigns.

Tennis - Wimbledon - London, Britain - July 16, 2017 Switzerland's Roger Federer celebrates winning the final against Croatia's Marin Cilic REUTERS/Toby Melville Reuters From 1877 to 1921 the men's singles was decided on a challenge-round system with the previous year's winner automatically qualifying for the final (British unless stated): Winner of all-comers' final declared champion. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO urged governors to regulate artificial intelligence before it's too late. Administration officials traveled to Providence to gain support from key players like Gov. Brian Sandoval. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other foreign leaders reached out to U.S. governors ahead of slated talks.

Larry Doherty was in good hands, steady hands, like the metal ones you can find on an automaker's assembly line. The 64-year-old bean salesman from Bow Island, Alta., had come to the University of Calgary's Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Hotchkiss Brain Institute to undergo arteriovenous malformation surgery – to untie the tangled blood vessels in his brain. When everyone in the operating room was ready, the operating surgeon began his work sitting in a whole other room surrounded by computer monitors, including one with a 3-D image of Mr. Doherty's brain. Using specially designed hand controls, Dr. Garnette Sutherland manoeuvred the robot to its ready position. For Mr. Doherty, it was the first time in his life he had undergone surgery.