In recent times, there have been two techno-religious awakenings. To be human is to yearn for a Sky Daddy. Something that explains the unexplainable, someone to blame. No wonder, then, that in the ZIRP-fueled 2010s, when a new gospel of creation was being spread, some people started to see technology as a kind of religion. Startup founders and CEOs became messianic figures.

Interaction between learner and feedback-giver has come into focus recently for post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs), through the use of reward models that judge the appropriateness of a model's response. In this paper, we investigate whether Dialogue Games -- goal-directed and rule-governed activities driven predominantly by verbal actions -- can also serve as a source of feedback signals for learning. We introduce Playpen, an environment for off- and online learning through Dialogue Game self-play, and investigate a representative set of post-training methods: supervised fine-tuning; direct alignment (DPO); and reinforcement learning with GRPO. We experiment with post-training a small LLM (Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct), evaluating performance on unseen instances of training games as well as unseen games, and on standard benchmarks. We find that imitation learning through SFT improves performance on unseen instances, but negatively impacts other skills, while interactive learning with GRPO shows balanced improvements without loss of skills. We release the framework and the baseline training setups to foster research in the promising new direction of learning in (synthetic) interaction.

If you feel like you're living in a convincing virtual reality akin to The Matrix, a scientist thinks you may well be right. Melvin Vopson, an associate professor in physics at the University of Portsmouth, claims our entire universe may be an advanced computer simulation. And the proof that this so-called simulation hypothesis is correct may be hiding in plain sight in the Bible. Professor Vopson told MailOnline: 'The bible itself tells us that we are in a simulation and it also tells us who is doing it. 'It is done by an AI – an artificial intelligence.'

More than 60 days into the Israel-Gaza war, two Israeli news outlets – 972 magazine and Local Call – published a report on The Gospel, a new artificial intelligence system deployed in Gaza. The AI helps generate new targets at an unprecedented rate, allowing the Israeli military to loosen its already permissive constraints on the killing of civilians. The exchange of hostages between Israel and Hamas late last month created some challenges for the Netanyahu government – and its messaging. Producer Meenakshi Ravi looks at how Israeli media has been reporting on the story. As the world is focused on the events unfolding in Gaza, Israel has also escalated its attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, where Hamas has no authority or military presence.

Israel's military has made no secret of the intensity of its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. In the early days of the offensive, the head of its air force spoke of relentless, "around the clock" airstrikes. His forces, he said, were only striking military targets, but he added: "We are not being surgical." There has, however, been relatively little attention paid to the methods used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to select targets in Gaza, and to the role artificial intelligence has played in their bombing campaign. As Israel resumes its offensive after a seven-day ceasefire, there are mounting concerns about the IDF's targeting approach in a war against Hamas that, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, has so far killed more than 15,000 people in the territory.

Angie Wisdom and Dr. Chirag Shah discuss how artificial intelligence could play a role in online and professional relationships. As national conversations around artifical intelligence (AI) intensify, faith leaders and scholars are examining the potential ramifications these emerging technologies will have on worship – both its practice and its role in modern life. Some experts and faith leaders are also concerned about whether religion will have any place in AI programming – or if the intellectual will eventually take precedence over the spiritual in society. It's possible and even probable, say experts. Dan Schneider, Media Research Center and Free Speech America vice president, is both blunt and emphatic in his assessment of AI. "The [political] left controls AI, and the left is going to what the left wants to do," Schneider, whose headquarters are in Reston, Virginia, told Fox News Digital in a recent phone interview.

The Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) operation against Hamas is called the world's first artificial intelligence (AI) war. Register for AWS ML Fridays and learn how to make a career in data science. "For the first time, artificial intelligence was a key component and power multiplier in fighting the enemy," an IDF Intelligence Corps senior officer said. He said this is a first-of-its-kind campaign for the IDF. In 2020, an Iranian nuclear scientist was killed using a satellite controlled weapon.

In the early days of computing, there was an acronym: GIGO. It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. The few people in the mainframe industry understood that if the data going into the system wasn't good then than what came out wasn't accurate information. The advent of the PC meant far more people began using computers, and most of them understood far less than the early programmers and users. A pundit pointed out the GIGO began to mean Garbage In, Gospel Out.

Google notes in their patent overview that "Baby cribs are routinely purchased on the basis of safety and aesthetic features. Typically a mattress for the crib is separately purchased for similar reasons. Many users separately select a baby monitor that includes a camera and/or microphone. More sophisticated monitors may have an infrared camera and/or a speaker. The monitor may include a camera that can be placed in a position that overlooks the baby crib.