Listen to any pundit's post-match reaction and you will hear variations of that soundbite. But can you analyse an athlete's state of mind, based on their on-pitch body language? In an era when football is increasingly leaning on data to demonstrate physical attributes, statistics offering an accurate indication of a player's psychological qualities, such as emotional control and leadership, are harder to come by. But Premier League clubs including Brighton are using a technique intended to help in that regard with selection and recruitment. Thomas Tuchel made headlines by telling England's players to communicate more after he evaluated their interactions during the final of Euro 2024, but counting the number of times players gesture or talk to each other on the pitch tells only part of the mental battle being played out.

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A whole lot has happened since Emily St. John Mandel published her literary science-fiction novel Station Eleven ten years ago this week--including certain global disruptions that made the book appear startlingly prescient. Station Eleven traces the aftermath of a swine-flu pandemic that kills most of the human population, following a group of traveling players who tour the Great Lakes region performing Shakespeare. Station Eleven sold over a million copies, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and recently secured a top spot on the New York Times readers' list of the best books of the century. The 2021 miniseries, creatively adapted for HBO by Patrick Somerville, scored several Emmy nominations and the deep, abiding love of television critics. This list of accolades still fails to represent how many readers connected to this particular story of postapocalyptic society, going so far as to get "Survival Is Not Enough" tattoos--a reference to a motto the Traveling Symphony favors in the book.

When NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice in 2016, he soon found himself out of a job, eventually moving onto other ventures in media and entertainment. Today, he's entering the AI industry by launching a project he says he hopes will allow others to bypass "gatekeeping:" an artificial intelligence platform called Lumi. The new subscription-based platform aims to provide tools for storytellers to create, illustrate, publish and monetize their ideas. The company has raised 4 million in funding led by Alexis Ohanian's Seven Seven Six, and its product went live today, July 24. In an interview with TIME, Kaepernick says this project can be viewed as an extension of his activism.

In the domains of image and audio, diffusion models have shown impressive performance. However, their application to discrete data types, such as language, has often been suboptimal compared to autoregressive generative models. This paper tackles the challenge of improving discrete diffusion models by introducing a structured forward process that leverages the inherent information hierarchy in discrete categories, such as words in text. Our approach biases the generative process to produce certain categories before others, resulting in a notable improvement in log-likelihood scores on the text8 dataset. This work paves the way for more advances in discrete diffusion models with potentially significant enhancements in performance.

Much like the internet did in the 1990s, AI is going to change the very definition of work. While change can be scary, if the last three years taught us anything, it can also be an opportunity to reinvent how we do things. I believe the best way to manage the changes ahead for employees and employers alike is to adopt a skills-first mindset. For employees, this means thinking about your job as a collection of tasks instead of a job title, with the understanding that those tasks will change regularly as AI advances. By breaking down your job into tasks that AI can fully take on, tasks for which AI can improve your efficiency, and tasks that require your unique skills, you can identify the skills you should actually be investing in to stay competitive in the job you have. This story is from the WIRED World in 2024, our annual trends briefing.

Artificial intelligence has made significant progress in the Close World problem, being able to accurately recognize old knowledge through training and classification. However, AI faces significant challenges in the Open World problem, as it involves a new and unknown exploration journey. AI is not inherently proactive in exploration, and its challenge lies in not knowing how to approach and adapt to the unknown world. How do humans acquire knowledge of the unknown world. Humans identify new knowledge through intrinsic cognition. In the process of recognizing new colors, the cognitive cues are different from known color features and involve hue, saturation, brightness, and other characteristics. When AI encounters objects with different features in the new world, it faces another challenge: where are the distinguishing features between influential features of new and old objects? AI often mistakes a new world's brown bear for a known dog because it has not learned the differences in feature distributions between knowledge systems. This is because things in the new and old worlds have different units and dimensions for their features. This paper proposes an open-world model and elemental feature system that focuses on fundamentally recognizing the distribution differences in objective features between the new and old worlds. The quantum tunneling effect of learning ability in the new and old worlds is realized through the tractive force of meta-characteristic. The outstanding performance of the model system in learning new knowledge (using pedestrian re-identification datasets as an example) demonstrates that AI has acquired the ability to recognize the new world with an accuracy of $96.71\%$ at most and has gained the capability to explore new knowledge, similar to humans.

It promises more than a thousand planets to visit, a space-station city of awe-inspiring proportions – and space fights that feel exciting. By day, you explore a run-down, heavily Ghibli-inspired island, befriending the community and crafting quirky trinkets out of the things that you find there. By night, you sell those things to cats at the weekly night market. Inside each world are nestled several more. This puzzle game, from some of the minds behind the superlative Limbo and Inside, challenges you to bend your brain in heretofore unknown ways as you flit between worlds, solving puzzles in one to change the shape of another.

Discover the groundbreaking power of machine learning to decipher the ineffable and transform the way we approach complex challenges. Remember those old "Magic Eye" images that revealed hidden 3D pictures when you stared at them just right? Solving complex problems with traditional programming methods often felt like trying to decode those perplexing images. One such challenge was identifying objects, like a dog, in a picture using only if-then-else statements. The task seemed impossible; we simply lacked the vocabulary to approach it effectively.

The large tech companies – Google, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft – are in a race to introduce new artificial intelligence systems and what are called chatbots, that you can have conversations with and are more sophisticated than Siri or Alexa. Microsoft's AI search engine and chatbot, Bing, can be used on a computer or cell phone to help with planning a trip or composing a letter. It was introduced on February 7 to a limited number of people as a test – and initially got rave reviews. But then several news organizations began reporting on a disturbing so-called "alter ego" within Bing Chat, called Sydney. We went to Seattle last week to speak with Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, about Bing and Sydney, who to some had appeared to have gone rogue.