More than ever, we feel a duty and desire to extend empathy to our nonhuman neighbors. In the last three years, more than 30 countries have formally recognized other animals--including gorillas, lobsters, crows, and octopuses--as sentient beings. A trio of books from Ed Yong, Jackie Higgins, and Philip Ball detail creatures' rich inner worlds and capture what has led to these developments: a booming field of experimental research challenging the long-standing view that animals are neither conscious nor cognitively complex. It seems we have two types of laugh: one caused by tickling, and the other by everything else. Ukrainian artist Oleg Dron specializes in expansive, haunting landscapes.

I was here to examine the pitch being made by Anduril, other companies in defense tech, and growing numbers of people within the Pentagon itself: A future "great power" conflict--military jargon for a global war involving competition between multiple countries--will not be won by the entity with the most advanced drones or firepower, or even the cheapest firepower. It will be won by whoever can sort through and share information the fastest. And that will have to be done "at the edge" where threats arise, not necessarily at a command post in Washington. "You're going to need to really empower lower levels to make decisions, to understand what's going on, and to fight," Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf says. "That is a different paradigm than today." To show how the new tech will fix that, Anduril walked me through an exercise demonstrating how its system would take down an incoming drone threatening a base of the US military or its allies (the scenario at the center of Anduril's new partnership with OpenAI).

Apple is willing to bet big on the safety of Apple Intelligence, so much that the tech giant has offered up to a 1 million bounty to anyone who can hack it. The company announced Thursday that it's inviting'all security researchers - or anyone with interest and a technical curiosity' to perform'their own independent verification of our claims.' The public has been challenged to test the security of'Private Cloud Compute,' the servers that will receive and process user requests for Apple Intelligence when the AI task is too complex for on-device processing. The system, according to Apple, features end-to-end encryption and immediately deletes a user's request once the task is fulfilled. There are different payouts for certain discoveries, but the 1 million goes to anyone who can run code on the system without being detected and accessing sensitive parts.

Solving mathematics problems requires logical reasoning, something that most current AI models aren't great at. This demand for reasoning is why mathematics serves as an important benchmark to gauge progress in AI intelligence, says Wang. DeepMind's program, named AlphaGeometry, combines a language model with a type of AI called a symbolic engine, which uses symbols and logical rules to make deductions. Language models excel at recognizing patterns and predicting subsequent steps in a process. However, their reasoning lacks the rigor required for mathematical problem-solving. The symbolic engine, on the other hand, is based purely on formal logic and strict rules, which allows it to guide the language model toward rational decisions.

More than 60 days into the Israel-Gaza war, two Israeli news outlets – 972 magazine and Local Call – published a report on The Gospel, a new artificial intelligence system deployed in Gaza. The AI helps generate new targets at an unprecedented rate, allowing the Israeli military to loosen its already permissive constraints on the killing of civilians. The exchange of hostages between Israel and Hamas late last month created some challenges for the Netanyahu government – and its messaging. Producer Meenakshi Ravi looks at how Israeli media has been reporting on the story. As the world is focused on the events unfolding in Gaza, Israel has also escalated its attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, where Hamas has no authority or military presence.

The news: Meta is going all in on open-source AI. The company has unveiled LLaMA 2, its first large language model that's available for anyone to use--for free. It's also releasing a version of the AI model that people can build into ChatGPT-style chatbots. Why it matters: The idea is that by releasing the model into the wild and letting developers and companies tinker with it, Meta will learn important lessons about how to make its models safer, less biased, and more efficient. But… Many caveats still remain.

The first, developed by Huawei, details how its new AI model, Pangu-Weather, can predict weekly weather patterns around the world much more quickly than traditional forecasting methods, but with comparable accuracy. The second demonstrates how a deep-learning algorithm was able to predict extreme rainfall more accurately and with more notice than other leading methods, ranking first around 70% of the time in tests against similar existing systems. If adopted, these models could be used alongside conventional weather predicting methods to improve authorities' ability to prepare for bad weather, says Lingxi Xie, a senior researcher at Huawei. To build Pangu-Weather, researchers at Huawei built a deep neural network trained on 39 years of reanalysis data, which combines historical weather observations with modern models. Unlike conventional methods that analyze weather variables one at a time, which could take hours, Pangu-Weather is able to analyze all of them at the same time in mere seconds.

Energetic bear cubs play with rehabilitation staff after arriving at a wildlife center. African conservationists are hoping that artificial intelligence (AI) powered cameras could help aid in the protection of endangered species, such as the forest and savannah elephants. "We must urgently put an end to poaching and ensure that sufficient suitable habitat for both forest and savanna elephants is conserved," Dr. Bruno Oberle, Director-General of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), said when discussing the potential new technology. The cameras, developed in collaboration between Dutch tech start-up Hack the Planet and British scientists at Stirling University, will be able to detect different animal species and humans in real time and provide live alerts to local villages and rangers, Stirling wrote in a press release. A pilot test of the tech, which works with satellites and a range of networks including Wi-Fi, long-rage radio and cellular coverage, immediately labeled images and sent out warnings calling for help.

Every time a new application of AI is announced, I feel a short-lived rush of excitement -- followed soon after by a knot in my stomach. This is because I know the technology, more often than not, hasn't been designed with equity in mind. One system, ChatGPT, has reached 100 million unique users just two months after its launch. The text-based tool engages users in interactive, friendly, AI-generated exchanges with a chatbot that has been developed to speak authoritatively on any subject it's prompted to address. In an interview with Michael Barbaro on the The Daily podcast from the New York Times, tech reporter Kevin Roose described how an app similar to ChatGPT, Bing's AI chatbot, which also is built on OpenAI's GPT-3 language model, responded to his request for a suggestion on a side dish to accompany French onion soup for Valentine's Day dinner with his wife.

It has also collaborated with large organizations, including Microsoft. The system uses machine-learning algorithms on satellite imagery to categorize damage in the disaster area at a much faster rate than is possible using other existing methods. This method is incredibly important given the number of separate earthquakes and aftershocks that have occurred since the first earthquake incident in the early hours of February 6. Yesterday, February 20, for example, another 6.4 magnitude tremor struck near the city of Antakya, close to the border with Syria, trapping more people under the rubble. An MIT Technology Review report points out that xView2 has recently also been deployed in response to wildfires in California as well as during recovery efforts after flooding in Nepal, where it helped to identify damage from landslides caused by the floods.