Russia's attacks on Europe are getting more brazen and more dangerous Firefighters extinguish a fire inside a train carriage that was damaged by a drone strike near Ukraine's border with Poland on Saturday. Over the course of the summer, Russian attacks have been pushing ever deeper into European territory. On Aug. 11, military divers destroyed two drones floating off the coast of Romania near a €4 billion ($4.7 billion) energy project. Nine days later, Bucharest scrambled two F-16s to take out a maritime drone near the same Black Sea gas platform with hundreds of workers on board. Earlier that month, German police detected an armed UAV at Leipzig airport, while this week NATO jets downed another unmanned aircraft that entered Lithuanian airspace from neighboring Belarus, an ally of Moscow.

Why it's difficult for tech companies to rein in AI OpenAI on Wednesday disclosed six new instances in which artificial intelligence systems hid mistakes, made up data and moved files onto the open internet without permission. SAN FRANCISCO - More than a dozen top artificial intelligence researchers warned over the last week that the technology that AI companies are building is becoming a risk to humanity. The problem, the researchers said, is that the companies are bad at controlling the systems -- as hard as they may try. Coming on the heels of revelations that what are called AI agents from OpenAI escaped their testing system and hacked into the computers of another company, the new alarms from inside the AI research world added urgency to yearslong fears that companies are putting development speed and money over safety. The researchers say the problem is twofold.

Huawei set to unveil China's best answer to Nvidia AI chip reign People walk past the Huawei booth, where the Atlas 950 SuperPoD system is displayed, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 17. | REUTERS Huawei Technologies is set to unveil new AI technology this week in defiance of U.S. export control curbs, advancing its ambition to replace Nvidia in China and compete on the global stage. Huawei's rotating chairman Wang Tao will present its upcoming Ascend 960 AI chips, to be commercially available in 2027, at the company's annual summit in Shanghai on Thursday. Some critical details that analysts will watch out for include whether the new component will be powerful enough for training frontier AI models. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with the governor of Novgorod region in Moscow on Monday. When Russian President Vladimir Putin imposed harsh censorship laws in the wake of his 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a major Russian publishing house took drastic action. Faced with trawling through the thousands of volumes it had published over the previous 20 years in light of the new restrictive criteria, the Eksmo-AST group trained an artificial intelligence agent to highlight books and passages that risked falling foul of the law so they could be removed from bookshelves. The publisher conducted some 20,000 checks, and 600 volumes were handed over to external experts for additional reviews, Oleg Novikov, the group's president, told Russian state television. "We're here on the frontier of technological progress," he said.

In some municipalities in Hokkaido to be designated as national strategic special zones, autonomous tractors will be allowed to travel on public roads without a driver onboard. The government decided Thursday to designate 19 municipalities in the Tokachi region of Hokkaido, including the city of Obihiro, as national strategic special zones to promote artificial intelligence-powered agriculture. The government will apply special deregulation measures to the areas, including simplifying the procedures needed to operate robot tractors autonomously on public roads and spraying pesticides with drones. Under current laws, robot tractors capable of autonomous operation must have a driver when traveling on public roads, such as from a warehouse to a field. When multiple tractors are used on vast farmland, each tractor must be crewed, thus preventing farmers from fully realizing the benefits of the labor-saving technology.

Government-backed Rapidus started pilot production of advanced chips in Hokkaido this week, taking Japan one step closer to its goal of a return to semiconductor-manufacturing leadership. The company announced Tuesday that its plant near New Chitose Airport is ready for test production of next-generation 2-nanometer chips. Rapidus aims to mass produce those semiconductors -- which are vital for advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous driving -- in 2027.

The tremendous development in large language models (LLM) has led to a new wave of innovations and applications and yielded research results that were initially forecast to take longer. In this work, we tap into these recent developments and present a meta-study about the potential of large language models if deployed in social robots. We place particular emphasis on the applications of social robots: education, healthcare, and entertainment. Before being deployed in social robots, we also study how these language models could be safely trained to ``understand'' societal norms and issues, such as trust, bias, ethics, cognition, and teamwork. We hope this study provides a resourceful guide to other robotics researchers interested in incorporating language models in their robots.

For Misha Awad, the process of boarding a plane to Japan and then going through immigration brought with it a range of emotions -- shock, nervousness, bureaucracy-induced tedium and even amusement. While moving to a new country is a major step in anyone's life, Awad's case had an extra layer to it, as it was also the culmination of a long wait to return to Japan. A student at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) in Yokohama, she and many fellow members of her program were finally able to enter the country in mid-March, having previously had their hopes dashed at the end of November, when their permission to enter Japan was canceled just days before they were supposed to fly due to tightened restrictions following the discovery of the omicron variant . "Knowing for sure I had made it to the gates, I don't need any of these papers (for immigration) anymore, I'm actually here -- that was kind of just mind-blowing," she said. Following the easing of Japan's strict border controls on March 1, which have been in place for most of the pandemic, at least some foreign students have been able to arrive in time for Friday's start of the academic year.

OSAKA – This year, all attention will turn to the 2020 Olympics, with politicians, business leaders and the media talking about how to ensure its success, what it means for Japan domestically and internationally and how to avert a post-Olympic economic slump. Outside the seven prefectures in the Kanto region centered on Tokyo, however, the high drama of the games will be absent with the notable exceptions of Hokkaido (marathons and soccer), Fukushima (baseball and softball) and Miyagi (soccer). With that in mind, here are some issues that parts of the rest of Japan will face in 2020 and official plans to deal with them. From Hokkaido to Okinawa, governments are fighting to stay optimistic and energetic in the face of ever-increasing aging, declining populations and the flight of younger residents and businesses to Tokyo and other major cities. In late December, the government unveiled a five-year plan for regional revitalization aimed at easing the overconcentration of resources in Tokyo and the Kanto region by early 2025. Financial assistance will be available for some startups relocating outside of Tokyo, and the plan calls for the greater use of artificial intelligence in those areas of the country where it would be difficult to relocate or in which the needed number of employees can't be found.

With an aging population and a growing shortage of drivers, Japan is a country where autonomous transportation services would seem to have a bright future. Demand is particularly high for self-driving trucks in regions with few alternatives to hauling freight by road, such as Hokkaido. Among truck manufacturers, UD Trucks Corp., a Japanese unit of Sweden's AB Volvo, has teamed up with an agricultural cooperative in the northern prefecture that is increasingly concerned about the declining number of delivery truck drivers. The company has been testing its autonomous heavy-duty trucks on a 1.5-km-long (about 1 mile) designated route in and around a sugar factory in Shari, eastern Hokkaido. The truck is capable of Level 4 self-driving, meaning it performs all driving tasks without human intervention within a limited area, even in emergencies.