In 1916, hybrid cars could've changed history. But Ford wouldn't allow it. Henry Ford's monopoly on the automobile industry meant that hybrids wouldn't see the light of day for decades. In 1916, Clinton Edgar Woods, a forgotten automobile inventor, designed the first commercial hybrid cars. But Ford's Model T had already cornered the market.

If a major disaster like Fukushima or Chernobyl ever happens again, the world would know almost straight away, thanks to an array of government and DIY radiation-monitoring programs running globally.

Topic modeling is a key component in unsupervised learning, employed to identify topics within a corpus of textual data. The rapid growth of social media generates an ever-growing volume of textual data daily, making online topic modeling methods essential for managing these data streams that continuously arrive over time. This paper introduces a novel approach to online topic modeling named StreamETM. This approach builds on the Embedded Topic Model (ETM) to handle data streams by merging models learned on consecutive partial document batches using unbalanced optimal transport. Additionally, an online change point detection algorithm is employed to identify shifts in topics over time, enabling the identification of significant changes in the dynamics of text streams. Numerical experiments on simulated and real-world data show StreamETM outperforming competitors.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Last year, Ford CEO Jim Farley commuted in a car that wasn't made by his own company. In an effort to scope out the competition, Farley spent six months driving around in a Xiaomi SU7. The Chinese-made electric sedan is one of the world's most impressive cars: It can accelerate faster than many Porsches, has a giant touch screen that lets you turn off the lights at your house, and comes with a built-in AI assistant--all for roughly 30,000 in China. "It's fantastic," Farley said about the Xiaomi SU7 on a podcast last fall.

The reliability of large language models remains a critical challenge, particularly due to their susceptibility to hallucinations and factual inaccuracies during text generation. Existing solutions either underutilize models' self-correction with preemptive strategies or use costly post-hoc verification. To further explore the potential of real-time self-verification and correction, we present Dynamic Self-Verify Decoding (DSVD), a novel decoding framework that enhances generation reliability through real-time hallucination detection and efficient error correction. DSVD integrates two key components: (1) parallel self-verification architecture for continuous quality assessment, (2) dynamic rollback mechanism for targeted error recovery. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate DSVD's effectiveness, achieving significant improvement in truthfulness (Quesetion-Answering) and factual accuracy (FActScore). Results show the DSVD can be further incorporated with existing faithful decoding methods to achieve stronger performance. Our work establishes that real-time self-verification during generation offers a viable path toward more trustworthy language models without sacrificing practical deployability.

Transforming a car manufacturing plant entering its seventh decade into a futureproof facility, ready for AI-powered autonomous driving, comes with natural challenges. "We had to survey everything and go out with the tape measure," explains Dan Ford, site director at Jaguar Land Rover's (JLR) site in Halewood, Merseyside, England. "But the drawing's measurements were off: we struck a drainpipe." Besides that minor bump in the road (the Great British weather and an August downpour meant work was delayed by 48 hours), JLR's 250 million ( 323.4 million) upgrade of its Halewood plant has been smooth. Off the River Mersey, 10 miles from Liverpool, Halewood has long been synonymous with the British car industry--and JLR is the UK's largest automotive employer.

On Friday, TriStar Pictures released Here, a 50 million Robert Zemeckis-directed film that used real-time generative AI face transformation techniques to portray actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright across a 60-year span, marking one of Hollywood's first full-length features built around AI-powered visual effects. The film adapts a 2014 graphic novel set primarily in a New Jersey living room across multiple time periods. Rather than cast different actors for various ages, the production used AI to modify Hanks' and Wright's appearances throughout. The de-aging technology comes from Metaphysic, a visual effects company that creates real time face swapping and aging effects. During filming, the crew watched two monitors simultaneously: one showing the actors' actual appearances and another displaying them at whatever age the scene required.

For decades, my dad has been saying that he doesn't want to hear a word about self-driving cars until they exist fully and completely. Until he can go to sleep behind the wheel (if there is a wheel) in his driveway in western New York State and wake up on vacation in Florida (or wherever), what is the point? Driverless cars have long supposedly been right around the corner. Elon Musk once said that fully self-driving cars would be ready by 2019. Ford planned to do it by 2021.

Google is selling its ultra-premium Pixel 9 Pro in two sizes, but it's not the size that counts here. Instead, it's the suite of AI features Google hopes will revolutionize how you use your phone. The Morning After's Mat Smith has spent plenty of time with both handsets to work out if they're good enough to justify your cash. He explores headline features, like Gemini Advanced, as well as the smart new AI-enabled photo tweaks. One of my favorites is Add Me, which puts you in the background of a group shot you were holding the phone for.

At the close of Metal Gear Solid 4, just after Snake pulverises Liquid Ocelot, there is series of cutscenes that never ends. It does end – after 71 minutes – it's just that I've never watched that far. I understand that the game's director Hideo Kojima is a committed cinephile who has drawn much of his inspiration from movies, but I don't care. Those are minutes of my life I'll never get back. I think it's time we retired the whole convention.