The man who made India digital isn't done yet Nandan Nilekani can't stop trying to push India into the future. He started nearly 30 years ago, masterminding an ongoing experiment in technological state capacity that started with Aadhaar--the world's largest digital identity system. Using Aadhaar as the bedrock, Nilekani and people working with him went on to build a sprawling collection of free, interoperating online tools that add up to nothing less than a digital infrastructure for society, covering government services, banking, and health care. They offer convenience and access that would be eye-popping in wealthy countries a tenth of India's size. At 70 years old, Nilekani should be retired. But he has a few more ideas.

It looks like fabric, feels like metal, and is as light as rubber. Any watch fan looking to tick all of the above boxes would normally expect to be a dab hand with a spring bar removal tool to experience all the above individually, but a new strap developed by Malaysian independent brand Ming appears to now offer the best of all worlds. The one strap to rule them all has been dubbed the Polymesh, and is 3D-printed from grade five titanium, and comprises 1,693 interconnected pieces (including the buckle) held together without any pins or screws. The only additional parts requiring assembly are the quick-release spring bars at each end that attach it to the watch--the articulated pin buckle is also formed in the same process. Ming says that the strap, which is made up from rows of 15 equilateral triangles, meshed together and bookended by larger end pieces, "has more motion engineered into the radial axis than the lateral one," leading to a supple end result that drapes like fabric yet retains the strength of titanium.

A Harvard Business School study shows that several AI companions use various tricks to keep a conversation from ending. Before you close this browser tab, just know that you risk missing out on some very important information. If you want to understand the subtle hold that artificial intelligence has over you, then please, keep reading. That was, perhaps, a bit manipulative. But it is just the kind of trick that some AI companions, which are designed to act as a friend or a partner, use to discourage users from breaking off a conversation.

A new kind of artificial intelligence agent, trained to understand how software is built by gorging on a company's data and learning how this leads to an end product, could be both a more capable software assistant and a small step towards much smarter AI. The new agent, called Asimov, was developed by Reflection, a small but ambitious startup confounded by top AI researchers from Google. Asimov reads code as well as emails, Slack messages, project updates and other documentation with the goal of learning how all this leads together to produce a finished piece of software. Reflection's ultimate goal is building superintelligent AI--something that other leading AI labs say they are working towards. Meta recently created a new Superintelligence Lab, promising huge sums to researchers interested in joining its new effort.

A new kind of large language model, developed by researchers at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), makes it possible to control how training data is used even after a model has been built. The new model, called FlexOlmo, could challenge the current industry paradigm of big artificial intelligence companies slurping up data from the web, books, and other sources--often with little regard for ownership--and then owning the resulting models entirely. Once data is baked into an AI model today, extracting it from that model is a bit like trying to recover the eggs from a finished cake. "Conventionally, your data is either in or out," says Ali Farhadi, CEO of Ai2, based in Seattle, Washington. "Once I train on that data, you lose control. And you have no way out, unless you force me to go through another multi-million-dollar round of training."

Zico Kolter has a knack for getting artificial intelligence to misbehave in interesting and important ways. His research group at Carnegie Mellon University has discovered numerous methods of tricking, goading, and confusing advanced AI models into being their worst selves. Kolter is a professor at CMU, a technical adviser to Gray Swan, a startup specializing in AI security, and, as of August 2024, a board member at the world's most prominent AI company, OpenAI. In addition to pioneering ways of jailbreaking commercial AI models, Kolter designs his own models that are more secure by nature. As AI becomes more autonomous, Kolter believes that AI agents may pose unique challenges--especially when they start talking to one another.

The same phenomena that let beetles float across ponds and cause Cheerios to cluster together in your cereal bowl can be harnessed to make tiny floating robots. One of these, the Marangoni effect, arises when a fluid with a lower surface tension rapidly spreads out across the surface of a fluid with higher surface tension. This effect is exploited by Stenus beetles, which have evolved to zip across ponds by secreting a substance called stenusin, as well as soap-powered toy boats. To investigate how this could be used by engineers, Jackson Wilt at Harvard University and his colleagues 3D-printed round, plastic pucks around a centimetre in diameter. Inside each was an air chamber for buoyancy and a tiny fuel tank containing alcohol, which has a lower surface tension than water, in concentrations from 10 to 50 per cent.

We focus on the adversarial multi-armed bandit problem. The EXP3 algorithm of Auer et al. (2003) was shown to have a regret bound of O(\sqrt{T N \log N}), where T is the time horizon and N is the number of available actions (arms). More recently, Audibert and Bubeck (2009) improved the bound by a logarithmic factor via an entirely different method. In the present work, we provide a new set of analysis tools, using the notion of convex smoothing, to provide several novel algorithms with optimal guarantees. First we show that regularization via the Tsallis entropy matches the minimax rate of Audibert and Bubeck (2009) with an even tighter constant; it also fully generalizes EXP3.

As both sides of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war attempt to claim technological supremacy, drone versus drone combat has become routine – and thanks to the ubiquity of cameras, this new kind of warfare is being documented in real time across air, land and sea. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has already been dubbed the "first drone war", with some sources suggesting that small drones are inflicting as much as 80 per cent of the damage to military hardware and personnel.

In late May, in a 58m Bel Air hilltop mansion, influencers, reality stars and other Angelenos milled around Netflix-branded TV screens displaying choices to be made: Are you a Gemini or a Capricorn? What color are your eyes? The party marked the launch of the streaming giant's latest offering: a slate of Choose Your Own Adventure-style mobile games inspired by its most popular reality television shows, and attendees were selecting the traits of their digital avatars. "I better be a character!" Selling Sunset star Jason Oppenheim exclaimed as he paused near the top of a staircase that led to a reflecting pool with the Netflix logo floating in it.