It's the spring of 1977, and George Lucas is petrified. Having just wrapped work on his third feature film, Star Wars, he retreats to Hawaii, unable to face the early reviews. Yet as he frets in a five-star resort, Lucas bumps into another Hollywood hideaway – Steven Spielberg. The hero's moniker certainly benefited from some finessing, and the action-packed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) raked in 354m at the box office. Yet as great as Indy's influence was on cinema, it might have had an even bigger one on video games.

The cybersecurity firm Darktrace has warned that since the release of ChatGPT it has seen an increase in criminals using artificial intelligence to create more sophisticated scams to con employees and hack into businesses. The Cambridge-based company, which reported a 92% drop in operating profits in the half year to the end of December, said AI was further enabling "hacktivist" cyber-attacks using ransomware to extort money from businesses. The company said it had seen the emergence of more convincing and complex scams by hackers since the launch of the hugely popular Microsoft-backed AI tool ChatGPT last November. "Darktrace has found that while the number of email attacks across its own customer base remained steady since ChatGPT's release, those that rely on tricking victims into clicking malicious links have declined while linguistic complexity, including text volume, punctuation and sentence length among others, have increased," the company said. "This indicates that cybercriminals may be redirecting their focus to crafting more sophisticated social engineering scams that exploit user trust." However, Darktrace said that the phenomenon had not yet resulted in a new wave of cybercriminals emerging, merely changing the tactics of the existing cohort.

When we think about artificial intelligence (AI), humans are rarely what springs to mind. And understandably so, as AI is all about machine intelligence and automation. AI has become an essential business tool, so we often commend the pioneering work of AI companies to support businesses as they digitally evolve. To shed a light on the importance of people in the creation of intelligent machines, we take a look at the best-in-class executives in the AI field who continue to push the technology – and its boundaries – forward. With a passion for AI, Andrej Karpathy is interested in training deep neural nets on large datasets.

Energy-based models (EBMs) have experienced a resurgence within machine learning in recent years, including as a promising alternative for probabilistic regression. However, energy-based regression requires a proposal distribution to be manually designed for training, and an initial estimate has to be provided at test-time. We address both of these issues by introducing a conceptually simple method to automatically learn an effective proposal distribution, which is parameterized by a separate network head. To this end, we derive a surprising result, leading to a unified training objective that jointly minimizes the KL divergence from the proposal to the EBM, and the negative log-likelihood of the EBM. At test-time, we can then employ importance sampling with the trained proposal to efficiently evaluate the learned EBM and produce stand-alone predictions. Furthermore, we utilize our derived training objective to learn mixture density networks (MDNs) with a jointly trained energy-based teacher, consistently outperforming conventional MDN training on four real-world regression tasks within computer vision. Code is available at https://github.com/fregu856/ebms_proposals.

Wherever you turn, artificial intelligence is showing up in new technology products and services across almost all industries. Here are a few examples of news headlines from just one day last week: Bloomberg: "Google Adds a Suite of New AI Tech for Photos and More" "Google's annual I/O conference kicked off on Tuesday and the company showed off all the ways it's using artificial intelligence to make our family memories more vivid, to make smartphone cameras less racist, and potentially to even save lives." BBC: "The Navy sub commanded by artificial intelligence" "MSubs of Plymouth, a specialist in autonomous underwater vehicles, won a £2.5m Ministry of Defence contract to build and test an Extra-Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (XLUUV) that should be able to operate up to 3,000 miles from home for three months. "The big innovation here is the autonomy.

Poppy Gustafsson runs a cutting-edge and gender-diverse cybersecurity firm on the brink of a £3bn stock market debut, but she is happy to reference pop culture classic the Terminator to help describe what Darktrace actually does. Launched in Cambridge eight years ago by an unlikely alliance of mathematicians, former spies from GCHQ and the US and artificial intelligence (AI) experts, Darktrace provides protection, enabling businesses to stay one step ahead of increasingly smarter and dangerous hackers and viruses. Marketing its products as the digital equivalent of the human body's ability to fight illness, Darktrace's AI-security works as an "enterprise immune system", can "self-learn and self-heal" and has an "autonomous response capability" to tackle threats without instruction as they are detected. "It really does feel like we're in this new era of cybersecurity," says Gustafsson, the chief executive of Darktrace. "The arms race will absolutely continue, I really don't think it's very long until this [AI] innovation gets into the hands of attackers, and we will see these very highly targeted and specific attacks that humans won't necessarily be able to spot and defend themselves from. "It's not going to be these futuristic Terminator-style robots out shooting each other, it's going to be all these little pieces of code fighting in the background of our businesses.

Volvo Cars, a Swedish company that's owned by a Chinese billionaire and builds vehicles at a plant in the American South using crucial parts made in Mexico, is a poster child for how globally interconnected the auto industry became in an era of increasing free trade. When Volvo opened its factory in Charleston, S.C., in 2018 with ambitious plans to export cars to China, it was the pinnacle of a push to showcase its reemergence as a global brand with a manufacturing presence on three continents. Then the U.S.-China trade war forced Volvo to abandon its export plans. And this spring, as the coronavirus spread around the globe, the factory was plagued by a shortage of components and had to halt production three times. To make matters worse, U.S. car buyers' preferences have shifted rapidly toward sport utility vehicles and away from the sedans Volvo makes in Charleston.

When Darktrace launched in 2013, the world of cybersecurity was an entirely different landscape. "Today, we are used to hearing about artificial intelligence. Six years ago, the idea that you simply couldn't keep all the bad guys out and that companies needed an AI-powered digital immune system to defend against attacks was radical," Poppy Gustafsson, co-CEO of Darktrace, tells Growth Quarters. Fast-forward several years and Darktrace has become of the leading players in the cybersecurity space, in part due to Gustafsson going against the worst advice she ever received: Being told not to do something in a certain way because it went against convention. Darktrace's proprietary technology has of course played a part too.

Researchers have developed an artificial neural network using deep learning to identify genes that are related to disease. An artificial neural network has revealed patterns in huge amounts of gene expression data and discovered groups of disease-related genes. The developers, from Linköping University, Sweden, hope that the method can eventually be applied within precision medicine and individualised treatment. The scientists created maps of biological systems based on how different proteins or genes interact with each other. Using artificial intelligence (AI), they investigated whether it is possible to discover biological networks with deep learning, in which entities known as artificial neural networks are trained by experimental data.

Darktrace has become a rarity in the British tech scene: a Unicorn. The cybersecurity company, which provides what it calls a network "immune system" powered by artificial intelligence, hit a $1.25 billion valuation last month, two sources close to the deal told Forbes. The new valuation came after a secondary round of financing in which former investors sold off their stakes. Vitruvian Partners, sources said, is the acquirer of the stock. How did Darktrace find itself at the vaunted Unicorn status?