As AI companies work furiously to improve the intelligence and usefulness of their products, their demand for cheap, plentiful energy has skyrocketed. This gold rush has been extremely profitable for an unlikely beneficiary: Bitcoin miners. In recent months, major Bitcoin mining companies have started to swap out some of their mining equipment in favor of rigs used to run and train AI systems. These companies believe that AI training could provide a safer and more consistent source of revenue than the volatile crypto industry. And so far, these pivots have been warmly received by investors, leading to the market cap of 14 major bitcoin mining companies jumping in value by 22%, or 4 billion, since the beginning of June, J.P. Morgan reported on June 24. This transition reflects several trends of the moment: the roaring hype cycle of AI; the dwindling access to power, and a tenuous bitcoin mining landscape following the bitcoin halving.

There has been an audible buzz about Jack Draper in tennis circles for a while. But in 2023 expect the 21-year-old from Sutton in south-west London, who also has a contract with IMG Models, to crash into the mainstream. He certainly has enough of the right stuff, including the whiplash serve and punishing groundstrokes on the court, and the looks and personality off it. Draper first advertised his talents by taking a set off Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon in 2021, but it was in 2022 that he really made his mark – shooting from No 265 in the world rankings at the start of the year to a career-high 42nd by the end. Along the way, he has taken several high-profile scalps, including the 2020 US Open winner Dominic Thiem and world No 4 Stefanos Tsitsipas. He still needs to improve his fitness and ability to see out big games, but when he does, anything is possible. His fellow Brit Cameron Norrie says he is "sure" Draper "can easily get into the top 10". Expect Draper to make bounding strides towards that goal in the coming months. It may feel as if footballer Beth Mead has already made her mark.

The Department of Defense's (DoD) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the launch of its Guaranteeing AI Robustness Against Deception (GARD) program, which is designed to develop new defenses against adversarial attacks on machine learning (ML) models. The program aims to respond to adversarial AI by developing a testbed to characterize different ML defenses and assess their applicability. Researchers on the program have created resources and virtual tools for the community to be able to test and verify the effectiveness of existing and emerging ML defense models. "Other technical communities – like cryptography – have embraced transparency and found that if you are open to letting people take a run at things, the technology will improve," GARD program manager Bruce Draper said in the announcement. "With GARD, we are taking a page from cryptography and are striving to create a community to facilitate the open exchange of ideas, tools, and technologies that can help researchers test and evaluate their ML defenses. Our goal is to raise the bar on existing evaluation efforts, bringing more sophistication and maturation to the field."

Lord of the Trees has developed a system using precision drone technology, AI and proprietary seed pods to restore ecosystems. Up to 400,000 seed pods can be planted in 12 hours, improving the chance of success. US billionaire Tim Draper – founder and managing partner of Draper Associates – was an investor in PayPal and also backed Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, Skype and Hotmail. "For ages I had been wanting to invest in a company that's truly committed to planet regeneration, and then I found Lord of the Trees! I was thrilled by their simple technological solution and innovative business model, plus their commitment to meet the growing needs of carbon reduction across the globe," said Draper.

Over the last decade, deep learning systems have shown an astonishing ability to classify images, translate languages, and perform other tasks that once seemed uniquely human. However, these systems work opaquely and sometimes make elementary mistakes, and this fragility could be intentionally exploited to threaten security or safety. In 2018, for example, a group of undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) three-dimensionally (3D) printed a toy turtle that Google's Cloud Vision system consistently classified as a rifle, even when viewed from various directions. Other researchers have tweaked an ordinary-sounding speech segment to direct a smart speaker to a malicious website. These misclassifications sound amusing, but they could also represent a serious vulnerability as machine learning is widely deployed in medical, legal, and financial systems.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) is worried that artificial intelligence programs might have serious and unknown vulnerabilities that adversaries could exploit. In particular, the Pentagon is worried that the technology could not only be hacked, but could be "spoofed". That is, it could be intentionally deceived into thinking that it sees objects – or military targets – that do not exist. The opposite is true as well: military targets could be erroneously ignored. That is one reason the US Air Force (USAF) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded the "MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator" in 2019.

There's literally a lot more stuff in space than there was last week – or at least, the number of active human-made satellites in Earth's orbit has gone up quite a bit, thanks to the launch of SpaceX's first 60 production Starlink satellites. This week also saw movement in other key areas of commercial space, and some continued activity in early-stage space startup ecosystem encouragement. Some of the'New Space' companies are flexing the advantages that are helping them shake up an industry typically reserved for just a few deep-pocketed defence contractors, and NASA is getting ready for planetary space exploration in more ways than one. The 60 Starlink satellites that SpaceX launched this week are the first that aren't specifically designated as tester vehicles, even though it launched a batch of 60 earlier this year, too. These ones will form the cornerstone of between 300-400 or so that will provide the first commercial service to customers in the U.S. and Canada next year, if everything goes to SpaceX's plan for its new global broadband service.

A wobbly leg emerges from under a blanket and makes a tentative search for the polished floor below. The movement catches the eye of Lupita Rodriguez, who's responsible for keeping this patient safe. Rodriguez leans forward to talk to her patient, who immediately stops at the sound of the authoritative voice. Please call your nurse before you get up. Mrs. Smith, a bit confused and definitely unsteady on her feet amid her hospital stay, nods and sits back.

Applying AI know-how to the giant pool of data gathered from the world's leading and most powerful scientific instruments could accelerate the process of scientific discovery. Powerful machine-learning approaches offer new ways to extract scientific meaning from the raw experimental data, which ultimately could help funders to unlock more value from their investment in research. Large-scale experimental facilities such as neutron and synchrotron sources have become an essential element of modern scientific research, allowing visiting researchers to probe the structure and properties of many different types of materials. They also generate huge amounts of experimental data, which can make it difficult for visiting scientists without specialist knowledge of the experiment to extract meaningful information from the raw datasets. As a result, some of the data collected during their valuable beamtime is never properly analysed.

Large retailers have found that the quickest way to get access to new products and technologies is to invest – and in some cases to accelerate or incubate – in the startups that are creating them. Some of the startups are focused on technology, and others on product. This is H&M's second such investment this month, following the $20 million it paid for a 1% stake in fintech startup Klarna last week. Target has been prominent among other retailers cultivating startups, first with its Target Techstars accelerator, which recently ran its third annual program. It has expanded into wellness and beauty mini accelerators, and just announced a new accelerator for Gen Z entrepreneurs and creators.