The field of artificial intelligence is currently abuzz with discussions surrounding "agentic AI" or "AI agents." However, despite the widespread excitement, the term agent itself often lacks a precise, universally agreed-upon definition within these conversations. Recently, significant focus has shifted towards agents built upon large language models (LLMs), leveraging some reasoning and language understanding capabilities to execute complex tasks, interact with external tools, and learn from feedback [53, 56, 63, 66, 67]. This move towards more autonomous, goal-directed LLM systems represents a promising yet challenging frontier in AI development. During this time, AI algorithms have also reached superhuman performance in numerous tasks such as game playing [9,57,62,65] and text and image processing [2, 15, 51]. On the other hand, there are still significant obstacles that modern AI has yet to overcome. Grosz [21] proposed a revised Turing Test to create: "A computer team member that can behave, over the long term and in uncertain, dynamic environments, in such a way that people on the team will not notice that it is not human."

Driverless cars are here – if you happen to live in San Francisco, at least. Regulators voted last week to allow two companies to run driverless taxi services in the city. So it is surprising to hear from the British boss of an autonomous-car company that the next step – the dream of a car that can drive you anywhere – may still be a decade or more away. Gavin Jackson, of British startup Oxa, says it could be 10 or even 20 years before an "Uber effect" takes over and robo-taxis are capable of going anywhere without human intervention. "It's just the hardest problem you could possibly want to solve, because the variables are infinite," he tells the Observer over lunch in London.

Guiding robots, in the form of canes or cars, have recently been explored to assist blind and low vision (BLV) people. Such robots can provide full or partial autonomy when guiding. However, the pros and cons of different forms and autonomy for guiding robots remain unknown. We sought to fill this gap. We designed autonomy-switchable guiding robotic cane and car. We conducted a controlled lab-study (N=12) and a field study (N=9) on BLV. Results showed that full autonomy received better walking performance and subjective ratings in the controlled study, whereas participants used more partial autonomy in the natural environment as demanding more control. Besides, the car robot has demonstrated abilities to provide a higher sense of safety and navigation efficiency compared with the cane robot. Our findings offered empirical evidence about how the BLV community perceived different machine forms and autonomy, which can inform the design of assistive robots.

Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world's first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare. The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers. That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven.

Drone advances in Ukraine have accelerated a long-anticipated technology trend that could soon bring the world's first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare. The longer the war lasts, the more likely it becomes that drones will be used to identify, select and attack targets without help from humans, according to military analysts, combatants and artificial intelligence researchers. That would mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun. Ukraine already has semi-autonomous attack drones and counter-drone weapons endowed with AI. Russia also claims to possess AI weaponry, though the claims are unproven.

HAGA, Japan--Honda Motor Co. said it would focus for now on partially autonomous driving technology to improve safety, adding itself to the list of auto makers that say fully self-driving cars aren't ready for prime time. The Japanese auto maker, an investor in General Motors Co.'s Cruise self-driving unit, this week showed off a prototype system that allows a car to automatically overtake slow-moving vehicles on a highway. It plans to roll out the technology globally starting in 2024, and it says it has found ways to use less-expensive radar and sensor technologies to make the system affordable for mass-market cars. An alert human driver still needs to be at the wheel. Honda's executive chief engineer, Mahito Shikama, said the company intends to focus on technologies such as the automatic passing system and other crash-prevention measures that fall short of full autonomy.

SPOT is a quadruped robot "dog" from the Boston Dynamics company. It can be difficult for rescue personnel to reach an injured person in inaccessible terrain in time to provide necessary aid. It is probable that autonomous drones and quadruped robot "dogs" will become our'friends in need' in the future. But we are currently far from achieving full autonomy for these robotic systems. Consequently, well-functioning collaboration between human and machine is crucial. A moment later, a yellow quadruped robot makes its way across the well-manicured lawns of Gränsö Manor.

Can John Deere become one of the leading AI and robotics companies in the world alongside Tesla and Silicon Valley technology giants over the next decade? That notion may seem incongruous with the general perception of the 185-year-old company as a heavy-metal manufacturer of tractors, bulldozers and lawnmowers painted in the signature green and yellow colors. But that is what the company sees in its future, according to Jorge Heraud, vice president of automation and autonomy for Moline, Illinois-based Deere, a glimpse of which was showcased at last January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Deere unveiled its fully autonomous 8R farm tractor, driven by artificial intelligence rather than a farmer behind the wheel. The autonomous 8R is the culmination of Deere's nearly two decades of strategic planning and investment in automation, data analytics, GPS guidance, internet-of-things connectivity and software engineering. While a good deal of that R&D has been homegrown, the company also has been on a spree of acquisitions and partnerships with agtech startups, harvesting know-how as well as talent.

Ethics is at the center of AI research more than ever. We have a better understanding of the risks of harm language models entail -- companies keep improving language models making them not just bigger but smarter and more efficient, multimodal systems are more common (e.g. Google's MUM and OpenAI's DALL·E), and real-world AI is taking leaps forward -- and backward. All in all, AI has maintained or even accelerated the pace of progress we've seen throughout the last decade. The AI community will bring new promising developments and impressive breakthroughs, some of which we can foresee.

As it pursues the goal of fully autonomous driving, Tesla has bet entirely on cameras and artificial intelligence, shunning other commonly used tools such as laser detection. Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has touted a system built around eight "surround" cameras that feed data into the auto's "deep neural network," according to Tesla's website. But as with so many other things involving Tesla, there is controversy. At the giant Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Luminar Technologies has set up a demonstration of two autos moving at about 30 miles per-hour towards the silhouette of a child. A car utilizing Luminar's lidar, a laser-based system, stops in advance of trouble, while its rival, a Tesla, careens into the mannequin.