"What counties [sic] do younger women like older white men," a public message from a user on Meta's AI platform says. "I need details, I'm 66 and single. I'm from Iowa and open to moving to a new country if I can find a younger woman." The chatbot responded enthusiastically: "You're looking for a fresh start and love in a new place. This is just one of many seemingly personal conversations that can be publicly viewed on Meta AI, a chatbot platform that doubles as a social feed and launched in April.

The fast-rising Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is sparking national security concerns in the U.S., over fears that its AI models could be used by the Chinese government to spy on American civilians, learn proprietary secrets, and wage influence campaigns. In her first press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the National Security Council was "looking into" the potential security implications of DeepSeek. This comes amid news that the U.S. Navy has banned use of DeepSeek among its ranks due to "potential security and ethical concerns." DeepSeek, which currently tops the Apple App Store in the U.S., marks a major inflection point in the AI arms race between the U.S. and China. For the last couple years, many leading technologists and political leaders have argued that whichever country developed AI the fastest will have a huge economic and military advantage over its rivals. DeepSeek shows that China's AI has developed much faster than many had believed, despite efforts from American policymakers to slow its progress.

The rapid proliferation of open-source language models significantly increases the risks of downstream backdoor attacks. These backdoors can introduce dangerous behaviours during model deployment and can evade detection by conventional cybersecurity monitoring systems. In this paper, we introduce a novel class of backdoors in autoregressive transformer models, that, in contrast to prior art, are unelicitable in nature. Unelicitability prevents the defender from triggering the backdoor, making it impossible to evaluate or detect ahead of deployment even if given full white-box access and using automated techniques, such as red-teaming or certain formal verification methods. We show that our novel construction is not only unelicitable thanks to using cryptographic techniques, but also has favourable robustness properties. We confirm these properties in empirical investigations, and provide evidence that our backdoors can withstand state-of-the-art mitigation strategies. Additionally, we expand on previous work by showing that our universal backdoors, while not completely undetectable in white-box settings, can be harder to detect than some existing designs. By demonstrating the feasibility of seamlessly integrating backdoors into transformer models, this paper fundamentally questions the efficacy of pre-deployment detection strategies.

The article has as its main objective the identification of fundamental epistemological obstacles in the study of information related to unnecessary methodological assumptions and the demystification of popular beliefs in the fundamental divisions of the aspects of information that can be understood as Bachelardian rupture of epistemological obstacles. These general considerations are preceded by an overview of the motivations for the study of information and the role of the concept of information in the conceptualization of intelligence, complexity, and consciousness justifying the need for a sufficiently general perspective in the study of information, and are followed at the end of the article by a brief exposition of an example of a possible application in the development of the unified theory of information free from unnecessary divisions and claims of superiority of the existing preferences in methodology. The reference to Gaston Bachelard and his ideas of epistemological obstacles and epistemological ruptures seems highly appropriate for the reflection on the development of information study, in particular in the context of obstacles such as the absence of semantics of information, negligence of its structural analysis, separation of its digital and analog forms, and misguided use of mathematics.

Your smartphone is not listening to you around the clock -- but it's collecting so much information that it does not even need to. It has long been speculated that Apple, Google, Samsung and other popular phone makers are recording users 24/7 to collect information for advertising purposes. Most of us have seemingly randomly been promoted an advert for a product that we could have sworn was only talked about in private. To test this, we set up a freshly-factory-reset Samsung phone, using a new Google account on the Android device. We created a fictitious person named Robin, 22, and made a fake a Facebook account for him to use.

Researchers combined machine learning and a molecule-making machine to find the best conditions for automated complex chemistry. Pictured, from left: University of Illinois chemistry professor Martin D. Burke, materials science and engineering professor Charles M. Schroeder, graduate student Nicholas Angello and postdoctoral researcher Vandana Rathore. Pictured on the screen behind them are international collaborators, led by professors Bartosz A. Grzybowski and Alán Aspuru-Guzik. Artificial intelligence, "building-block" chemistry and a molecule-making machine were combined to find the best general reaction conditions for synthesizing chemicals important to biomedical and materials research – a finding that could speed innovation and drug discovery as well as make complex chemistry automated and accessible. With the machine-generated optimized conditions, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and collaborators in Poland and Canada doubled the average yield of a special, hard-to-optimize type of reaction linking carbon atoms together in pharmaceutically important molecules.

Experts predict artificial intelligence will gain sentience within the next 100 years. Some predict it'll happen sooner. Others say it'll never happen. Still other experts say it already has happened. It's possible the experts are just guessing.

Defence lawyers in the Wisconsin murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse said on Wednesday they would ask for a mistrial because of a dispute with prosecutors over video evidence, as the jury watched footage of his shootings at protests last year. Rittenhouse, 18, is charged with killing Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and attempted homicide in the wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz, 28, during a chaotic night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25, 2020. The protests that night – marred by arson, rioting and looting – followed the police shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, who was left paralyzed from the waist down. Rittenhouse has pleaded not guilty. At issue in the trial is a drone video that shows Rosenbaum chasing Rittenhouse in the parking lot of a used-car dealership and the teenager turning and opening fire with his semi-automatic rifle as Rosenbaum gets close to him.

There were two major console launches--the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X--as well as big titles like Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the Final Fantasy VII remake, and Cyberpunk 2077 (we said big, not good!). Slate staffers recently convened to discuss what they played to pass the time in lockdown, what games surprised and disappointed them, and how many hours they honestly spent in Animal Crossing. Karen Han: I don't think it's out of line for me to say that this was the biggest year for games in recent memory, not just because of new console launches but because I feel like, thanks to the pandemic, we had a lot more time on our hands to be playing games. Is that fair to say, at least for this group? Daniel Schroeder: I think you're spot on. Before this year I never had chunks of time big enough to descend into and obsess over a new game like I like to. This year I was able to sort of keep up!

CNN's series often carry sponsorship originating from the countries and regions we profile. However, CNN retains full editorial control over all of its reports. You want to book a doctor's appointment -- and you want to do it now. You know of a clinic. But which doctor is best for you? What if your medical file has clues that will help determine the best treatment for you?