Paul McCartney enlisted a little help from artificial intelligence to complete the'last Beatles song' two years ago. The track, 'Now and Then', became the first Beatles music to reach number 1 in the UK for 64 years. Now, in an apparent effort to repeat its success, McCartney has once again used AI – on two more songs. The sophisticated tool called'MAL' is the creation of WingNut Films, the production company headed by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. MAL has managed to extricate John Lennon's voice from two poor-quality demos he made shortly before his death.

Their final song was mixed with John Lennon's voice. The Beatles' return to the Grammys has come with an assist from artificial intelligence. "Now and Then" is nominated for record of the year and best rock performance at the 2025 Grammy Awards, making it the first nominated song ever to use AI in its production. The song utilized AI to clean up old demo recordings of John Lennon singing and playing piano, recorded in the late 1970s, as well as a guitar track from George Harrison, recorded six years before his death in 2001. "To me, this is a cool example of how AI can function in our current environment," Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

Large language models (LLMs) can solve complex multi-step problems, but little is known about how these computations are implemented internally. Motivated by this, we study how LLMs answer multi-hop queries such as "The spouse of the performer of Imagine is". These queries require two information extraction steps: a latent one for resolving the first hop ("the performer of Imagine") into the bridge entity (John Lennon), and one for resolving the second hop ("the spouse of John Lennon") into the target entity (Yoko Ono). Understanding how the latent step is computed internally is key to understanding the overall computation. By carefully analyzing the internal computations of transformer-based LLMs, we discover that the bridge entity is resolved in the early layers of the model. Then, only after this resolution, the two-hop query is solved in the later layers. Because the second hop commences in later layers, there could be cases where these layers no longer encode the necessary knowledge for correctly predicting the answer. Motivated by this, we propose a novel "back-patching" analysis method whereby a hidden representation from a later layer is patched back to an earlier layer. We find that in up to 57% of previously incorrect cases there exists a back-patch that results in the correct generation of the answer, showing that the later layers indeed sometimes lack the needed functionality. Overall our methods and findings open further opportunities for understanding and improving latent reasoning in transformer-based LLMs.

When a beloved actor or musician passes away, they always leave behind that lingering thought of what they might have been able to create if they'd only had a little more time. However, as John Lennon's posthumous chart success has shown, for the stars of the future, death doesn't need to be the final curtain call. From actors making ghostly returns to the screen or famous figures narrating the story of their own lives, AI is reviving more than just celebs' careers. But when stardom doesn't end with death, who gets the final say on a celebrity's legacy? Here, MailOnline reveals how these creepy technologies are bringing back your favourite figures from the past to perform again.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has already enabled the creation of the'last Beatles song', Now and Then, which raced to the top of the charts this week. Filmmaker Peter Jackson used an AI tool called'machine audio learning' (MAL) to isolate John Lennon's voice from an old 1970s home demo. The vocal performance – rendered'crystal clear' by the AI – was then complemented by new instrumentation from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with guitar recorded by George Harrison for the song in 1995. But MAL's work may not be finished, as it could be used to salvage the last filmed interview of John Lennon, recorded less than two months before his tragic murder. Long to the frustration of fans, much of Lennon's answers to questions in the historically priceless clip are drowned out by – somewhat bizarrely – the sound of the first Star Wars movie.

As the other members of the Beatles sing and play, Lennon, ever the cut-up, clowns around, bouncing from one leg to the other with a grin on his face. His hands move like flippers, turned out at an odd angle and making frantic circles in the air, as if he's wiping down an invisible window. And as his body moves from side to side, his head seems to lag slightly behind it. The larkish ebullience feels strained and off-kilter, like an audience that wants to clap along but can't find the beat. The music video for "Now and Then," which has been billed as "the last Beatles song," starts off as an affectionate nostalgia trip, intercutting present-day footage of the two surviving Beatles with archival footage of their late bandmates.

The remaining Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, have completed the band's final song, decades after their breakup and the deaths of John Lennon and George Harrison. The band announced the song, titled "Now and Then," will be available worldwide Thursday, Nov. 2, paired with a re-release of their very first single, "Love Me Do," which debuted in 1962. "Now and Then" features vocals from Lennon as well as guitar performed by Harrison, recorded six years before his 2001 death. According to a press release for the song, Lennon recorded a demo with vocals and piano in the late 1970s while living in the Dakota building in New York. The Beatles announced a new song, "Now and Then," featuring contributions from the departed members of the band, John Lennon and George Harrison.

Evans' mention of Beatles legend John Lennon ended up becoming somewhat of a reality, but not in the hands of just any creator, but fellow Beatle Paul McCartney. Earlier this year, McCartney told BBC Radio 4's Today show that there was a new final song from the band in the works, with the assistance of AI. "When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record it was a demo that John had – that we worked on and we just finished it up – it'll be released this year. We were able to take John's voice and get it pure through this AI so that then we could mix the record as you would normally do," McCartney said. After some backlash from fans, McCartney clarified that Lennon's vocals were original and not generated by computer. "We've seen some confusion and speculation about it," he shared to X. "Can't say too much at this stage but to be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It's all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings – a process which has gone on for years," he assured angry fans. The last two surviving Beatles, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, have made it clear that there is nothing artificially generated about their late bandmate John Lennon's voice in a new song, set to be released later this year.

New York City musician Jules Avalon reflects on the power of John Lennon and the Beatles at Strawberry Fields in Central Park, located across the street from where Lennon was murdered on Dec. 8, 1980. Paul McCartney befuddled Beatles fans last month when he announced the band would be releasing a record featuring the late John Lennon, with the help of artificial intelligence. "When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record it was a demo that John had – that we worked on and we just finished it up – it'll be released this year. We were able to take John's voice and get it pure through this AI so that then we could mix the record as you would normally do," he told BBC Radio 4's Today show. Fans began questioning why the Beatles would do such a thing, sharing their disdain on social media.

New York City musician Jules Avalon reflects on the power of John Lennon and the Beatles at Strawberry Fields in Central Park, located across the street from where Lennon was murdered on Dec. 8, 1980. Paul McCartney announced Tuesday that artificial intelligence has been used to help create the "last" ever Beatles song, featuring the voice of John Lennon. In an interview with BBC Radio, McCartney, speaking about AI, said "we were able to use that kind of thing when Peter Jackson did the film'Get Back' where it was us making the Let It Be album." "And he was able to extricate John's voice from a ropey little bit of cassette where it had John's voice and a piano – he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine'that is a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar.' And he did that," McCartney continue.