Should private companies be able to dim the sun? Solar geoengineering aims to manipulate the climate by bouncing sunlight back into space. In theory, it could ease global warming. But as interest in the idea grows, so do concerns about potential consequences. A startup called Stardust Solutions recently raised a $60 million funding round, the largest known to date for a geoengineering startup. My colleague James Temple has a new story out about the company, and how its emergence is making some researchers nervous.

Gabriela Cibils is on a mission - to help turn Paraguay into the Silicon Valley of South America. When she was growing up in the landlocked country, nestled between Brazil and Argentina, she says the nation wasn't super tech focused. But it was different for Ms Cibils, as her parents worked in the technology sector. And she was inspired to study in the US, where she got a degree in computing and neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating she spent eight years working in Silicon Valley, near San Francisco, with roles at various American start-ups.

A Dragons' Den-style event this week, where tech companies will have 20 minutes to pitch ideas for increasing automation in the British justice system, is one of numerous examples of how the cash-strapped Labour government hopes artificial intelligence and data science can save money and improve public services. Amid warnings from critics that Downing Street has been "drinking the Kool-Aid" on AI, the Department of Health and Social Care this week announced an AI early warning system to detect dangerous maternity services after a series of scandals, and Wes Streeting, the health secretary, said he wants one in eight operations to be conducted by a robot within a decade. AI is being used to prioritise actions on the 25,000 pieces of correspondence the Department for Work and Pensions receives each day and to detect potential fraud and error in benefit claims. Ministers even have access to an AI tool that is supposed to provide a "vibe check" on parliamentary opinion to help them weigh the political risks of policy proposals. Again and again, ministers are turning to technology to tackle acute crises that in the past might have been dealt with by employing more staff or investing more money.

Artificial intelligence will be "mainlined into the veins" of the nation, ministers have announced, with a multibillion-pound investment in the UK's computing capacity despite widespread public fear about the technology's effects. Keir Starmer will launch a sweeping action plan to increase 20-fold the amount of AI computing power under public control by 2030 and deploy AI for everything from spotting potholes to freeing up teachers to teach. Labour's plan to "unleash" AI includes a personal pledge from the prime minister to make Britain "the world leader" in a sector that has been transformed by a series of significant breakthroughs in the last three years. The government plan features a potentially controversial scheme to unlock public data to help fuel the growth of AI businesses. This includes anonymised NHS data, which will be available for "researchers and innovators" to train their AI models.

Today's best AI models, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, come with conditions: their creators control the terms on which they are accessed to prevent them being used in harmful ways. This is in contrast with'open' models, which can be downloaded, modified, and used by anyone for almost any purpose. A new report by non-profit research organization Epoch AI found that open models available today are about a year behind the top closed models. "The best open model today is on par with closed models in performance, but with a lag of about one year," says Ben Cottier, lead researcher on the report. Meta's Llama 3.1 405B, an open model released in July, took about 16 months to match the capabilities of the first version of GPT-4.

The number of people living in urban areas has tripled in the last 50 years, meaning when a major natural disaster such as an earthquake strikes a city, more lives are in danger. Meanwhile, the strength and frequency of extreme weather events has increased--a trend set to continue as the climate warms. That is spurring efforts around the world to develop a new generation of earthquake monitoring and climate forecasting systems to make detecting and responding to disasters quicker, cheaper, and more accurate than ever. On Nov. 6, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, the Global Initiative on Resilience to Natural Hazards through AI Solutions will meet for the first time. The new United Nations initiative aims to guide governments, organizations, and communities in using AI for disaster management.

He used to go to the Regal City North cinema in Chicago three times a week. But he never goes there anymore--because of the parking lot. The parking garage, which is directly connected to the theater, once charged 2 for parking. Then it fell into disrepair sometime during the pandemic. "Someone destroyed the crossbar at the exit, and the stairwells had broken glass in them. They never replaced the glass for the stairwell," Spencer told me.

Gather'round, children, and let me tell you a story about the old bugaboo we used to call DRM. Digital Rights Management was the beast under every gamer's bed in the mid-2000s, an invisible bit of software baked into game discs that dictated and tracked player behavior under the guise of preventing piracy. DRM software, like SecuROM, limited the times a game could be downloaded and forced players to regularly connect to the internet for authentication checks, at a time when less than half of American adults had reliable broadband connections. DRM features soured the releases of BioShock, Mass Effect and Spore, and by 2010, anti-piracy software had rendered Assassin's Creed 2 and Splinter-Cell: Conviction unplayable. When Microsoft attempted to release the Xbox One with always-on DRM features in 2013, intense vitriol from fans forced the company to reverse its plans at the 11th hour.

America is set to return to the moon on Thursday, marking the first time a US-made craft touched down on the lunar surface since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Odysseus, or Odie, is soaring through space, but unlike previous trips, this one is owned by Houston-based Intuitive Machines. The six-legged robot lander is scheduled to touch down at 6:24pm ET at a crater called Malapert A near the moon's south pole. The landing attempt will be livestreamed on NASA TV beginning at 5pm ET. While the mission is operated by a private company, NASA has sponsored the journey to take its scientific instruments and technology to the moon.

US president Joe Biden's plan for containing the dangers of artificial intelligence already risks being derailed by congressional bean counters. A White House executive order on AI announced in October calls on the US to develop new standards for stress-testing AI systems to uncover their biases, hidden threats, and rogue tendencies. But the agency tasked with setting these standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), lacks the budget needed to complete that work independently by the July 26, 2024, deadline, according to several people with knowledge of the work. Speaking at the NeurIPS AI conference in New Orleans last week, Elham Tabassi, associate director for emerging technologies at NIST, described this as "an almost impossible deadline" for the agency. Some members of Congress have grown concerned that NIST will be forced to rely heavily on AI expertise from private companies that, due to their own AI projects, have a vested interest in shaping standards.