N Korea's Kim unveils 50 rocket launchers ahead of key congress North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has unveiled dozens of nuclear-capable rocket launchers ahead of a key congress of the governing Workers' Party, according to state media. Kim hailed the 600mm-calibre rocket launchers as "wonderful" and "attractive" during the ceremony on Wednesday, adding that new military and construction goals will be set during the upcoming congress. "When this weapon is used, actually, no force would be able to expect God's protection," Kim said, according to the KCNA "It is really a wonderful and attractive weapon," Kim said, according to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency. He described the launchers as the "world's most advantageous weapon for concentrated super-powerful attack", according Yonhap. Photos released by state media showed dozens of launch vehicles parked in neat rows on the plaza of Pyongyang's House of Culture, which will host the congress.

An Indian university is facing backlash after one of its professors was caught falsely presenting a Chinese-made robot dog at a major artificial intelligence summit, it has reportedly since been asked to leave, as the institution's own. "You need to meet Orion. This has been developed by the Centre of Excellence at Galgotias University," Neha Singh, a professor of communications, told Indian state-run broadcaster DD News this week. The episode has drawn sharp criticism and has cast an uncomfortable spotlight on India's AI ambitions. The embarrassment was amplified by Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who shared the video clip on his official social media account before the backlash.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting kicked off in the Swiss resort city of Davos on Monday, with global figures from politics, business, academia and civil society attending the five-day event. The annual forum that attempts to shape global agendas comes at a time of massive global upheaval. United States President Donald Trump will attend the annual event along with other global leaders. His attendance comes amid strained US ties with its European allies over his threat to take over Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark. Here is more about the WEF and what to expect at the meeting.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Former Vice President Kamala Harris addresses delegates with the Democratic National Committee at their winter meeting in downtown Los Angeles on Friday. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . California's two most prominent Democrats, former Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Gavin Newsom, addressed national Democratic leaders in L.A.

Plus: Google's new image generator has extremely loose guardrails We're learning more about what vitamin D does to our bodies At a checkup a few years ago, a doctor told me I was deficient in vitamin D. But he wouldn't write me a prescription for supplements, simply because, as he put it, everyone in the UK is deficient. Putting the entire population on vitamin D supplements would be too expensive for the country's national health service, he told me. But supplementation--whether covered by a health-care provider or not--can be important. As those of us living in the Northern Hemisphere spend fewer of our waking hours in sunlight, let's consider the importance of vitamin D. Read the full story . This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review's weekly biotech newsletter. Here's why we don't have a cold vaccine.

Nyalleng Moorosi is part of a movement aimed at involving more African voices in AI policymaking. The room is draped in white curtains, and a giant screen blinks with videos created with generative AI. A classic East African folk song by the Tanzanian singer Saida Karoli plays loudly on the speakers. Friends greet each other as waiters serve arrowroot crisps and sugary mocktails. A man and a woman wearing leopard skins atop their clothes sip beer and chat; many women are in handwoven Ethiopian garb with red, yellow, and green embroidery. "The best thing about the Indaba is always the parties," computer scientist Nyalleng Moorosi tells me.

We consider the fundamental benchmarking problem of gathering in an $(N,f)$-fault system consisting of $N$ robots, of which at most $f$ might fail at any execution, under asynchrony. Two seminal results established impossibility of a solution in the oblivious robot (OBLOT) model in a $(2,0)$-fault system under semi-synchrony and in a $(3,1)$-Byzantine fault system under asynchrony. Recently, a breakthrough result circumvented the first impossibility result by giving a deterministic algorithm in a $(2,0)$-fault system under asynchrony in the luminous robot (LUMI) model using 2-colored lights. However, a breakthrough result established impossibility of gathering in a $(2,1)$-crash system in the LUMI model under semi-synchrony. In this paper, we consider a {\em mobility fault} model in which a robot crash only impacts it mobility but not the operation of the light. We establish four results under asynchrony in LUMI with the mobility fault model. We show that it is impossible to solve gathering in a $(2,1)$-mobility fault system using 2-colored lights, and then give a solution using 3-colored lights, which is optimal w.r.t. the number of colors. We then consider an $(N,f)$-mobility fault system, $f

Collectible card games (CCGs) are a difficult genre for AI due to their partial observability, long-term decision-making, and evolving card sets. Due to this, current AI models perform vastly worse than human players at CCG tasks such as deckbuilding and gameplay. In this work, we introduce UrzaGPT, a domain-adapted large language model that recommends real-time drafting decisions in Magic: The Gathering. Starting from an open-weight LLM, we use Low-Rank Adaptation fine-tuning on a dataset of annotated draft logs. With this, we leverage the language modeling capabilities of LLM, and can quickly adapt to different expansions of the game. We benchmark UrzaGPT in comparison to zero-shot LLMs and the state-of-the-art domain-specific model. Untuned, small LLMs like Llama-3-8B are completely unable to draft, but the larger GPT-4o achieves a zero-shot performance of 43%. Using UrzaGPT to fine-tune smaller models, we achieve an accuracy of 66.2% using only 10,000 steps. Despite this not reaching the capability of domain-specific models, we show that solely using LLMs to draft is possible and conclude that using LLMs can enable performant, general, and update-friendly drafting AIs in the future.

In 2002, artificial intelligence was still in winter. Despite decades of effort, dreams of bestowing computers with human-like cognition and real-world understanding had not materialized. To look for a way forward, a small group of scientists gathered for "The St. Thomas Common Sense Symposium." AI pioneer Marvin Minsky was the central presence, along with his protégé Pushpinder Singh. After the symposium, Minsky, Singh, and renowned philosopher Aaron Sloman published a paper on the group's ideas for how to reach human-like AI.

Donald Trump joined big oil and technology bosses on Tuesday at a major artificial intelligence and energy summit in Pittsburgh, outraging environmentalists and community organizations. The event came weeks after the passage of a mega-bill that experts say could stymy AI growth with its attacks on renewable energy. "We're here today because we believe that America's destiny is to dominate every industry and be the first in every technology, and that includes being the world's number one superpower in artificial intelligence," said Trump. The inaugural Pennsylvania energy and innovation summit, held at Carnegie Mellon University, is an attempt to position the state as an AI leader, showcasing the technological innovation being developed in the city and the widespread availability of fossil fuel reserves to power them. At the gathering, Trump announced 70bn in AI and energy investments for the state, Axios first reported, in a move the event's host, the Republican Pennsylvania senator, Dave McCormick, says will be a boon to local economies.