Late this spring, I was led into a car in Kyiv, blindfolded, and driven to a secret factory in western Ukraine. The facility belongs to TAF Drones, founded three years ago by Oleksandr Yakovenko, a young Ukrainian businessman who wanted to help fend off the Russian invasion. When the war started, Yakovenko was busy running a logistics company in Odesa, but his country needed all the help it could get. Ukraine was overmatched--fighting a larger, wealthier adversary with a bigger army and more sophisticated weapons. "The government said to me, 'We need you to make drones,' " Yakovenko told me.

On May 9th, Vladimir Putin will oversee a parade in Moscow's Red Square, commemorating the Soviet Union's victory in the Second World War, an annual display of military bravado that, since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, has taken on more explicit political undertones. The country's triumph over Nazism is presented as proof of its righteousness in the current war--and of it's role as a global power. Last year, as intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads rolled across the square, Putin linked the "radiant memory" of those who gave up their lives in the Second World War with "our brothers-in-arms who have fallen in the struggle against neo-Nazism and in the righteous fight for Russia"--that is, Russian soldiers killed in the current war in Ukraine. The Lede Reporting and commentary on what you need to know today. This year, the celebrations in Moscow serve another purpose: a way for Putin to show that he is not geopolitically isolated--China's Xi Jinping and Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are expected to attend.

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT have been designed to replicate human speech as closely as possible to improve the user experience. But as AI gets more and more sophisticated, it's becoming difficult to discern these computerised models from real people. Now, scientists at University of California San Diego (UCSD) reveal that two of the leading chatbots have reached a major milestone. Both GPT, which powers OpenAI's ChatGPT, and LLaMa, which is behind Meta AI on WhatsApp and Facebook, have passed the famous Turing test. Devised by British WWII codebreaker Alan Turing Alan Turing in 1950, the Turing test or'imitation game' is a standard measure to test intelligence in a machine.

A course at the University of Chicago taught by Daniel Holz and James Evans considers threats posed by climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear annihilation, and biological warfare, Rivka Galchen writes.

On 7 and 8 May in Washington DC, the city's biggest convention hall welcomed America's military industrial complex, its top technology companies, and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that's not how they would describe it. It was the inaugural "AI Expo for National Competitiveness", hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project – better known as the "techno-economic" thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference's lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that's best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump's family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces. The conference hall was also filled with booths representing the US military and dozens of its contractors, ranging from Booz Allen Hamilton to a random company that was described to me as Uber for airplane software.

Alan Turing was a British mathematician born on June 23, 1912 In Maida Vale, London, to father Julius, a civil servant, and mother Ethel, the daughter of a railway engineer. His talents were recognised early on at school but he struggled with his teachers when he began boarding at Sherborne School aged 13 because he was too fixated on science. Turing continued to excel at maths but his time at Sherborne was also rocked by the death of his close friend Christopher Morcom from tuberculosis. Morcom was described as Turing's'first love' and he remained close with his mother following his death, writing to her on Morcom's birthday each year. He then moved on to Cambridge where he studied at King's College, graduating with a first class degree in mathematics.

Rishi Sunak's global summit on the safety of artificial intelligence this autumn will be hosted at Bletchley Park, the home of top-secret codebreakers during the second world war. The first major gathering on the technology will bring together governments, leading AI firms and experts to discuss how its risks can be mitigated through internationally coordinated action. Sunak announced the summit on a trip to Washington in June amid fears that the technology's rapid advancement could spin out of control and concerns that existing safeguards would soon be outdated. Safety concerns are mounting after breakthroughs in generative AI, which can produce convincing text, images and even voice on command, with tech executives such as Elon Musk among those expressing alarm. In recent months the prime minister has changed his tone on the technology.

This paper is our attempt at answering a twofold question covering the areas of ethics and authorship analysis. Firstly, since the methods used for performing authorship analysis imply that an author can be recognized by the content he or she creates, we were interested in finding out whether it would be possible for an author identification system to correctly attribute works to authors if in the course of years they have undergone a major psychological transition. Secondly, and from the point of view of the evolution of an author's ethical values, we checked what it would mean if the authorship attribution system encounters difficulties in detecting single authorship. We set out to answer those questions through performing a binary authorship analysis task using a text classifier based on a pre-trained transformer model and a baseline method relying on conventional similarity metrics. For the test set, we chose works of Arata Osada, a Japanese educator and specialist in the history of education, with half of them being books written before the World War II and another half in the 1950s, in between which he underwent a transformation in terms of political opinions. As a result, we were able to confirm that in the case of texts authored by Arata Osada in a time span of more than 10 years, while the classification accuracy drops by a large margin and is substantially lower than for texts by other non-fiction writers, confidence scores of the predictions remain at a similar level as in the case of a shorter time span, indicating that the classifier was in many instances tricked into deciding that texts written over a time span of multiple years were actually written by two different people, which in turn leads us to believe that such a change can affect authorship analysis, and that historical events have great impact on a person's ethical outlook as expressed in their writings.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. There are an estimated 73,300 species of tree on Earth, 9,000 of which have yet to be discovered, according to a global count of tree species by thousands of researchers who used second world war codebreaking techniques created at Bletchley Park to evaluate the number of unknown species. Researchers working on the ground in 90 countries collected information on 38 million trees, sometimes walking for days and camping in remote places to reach them. The study found there are about 14 percent more tree species than previously reported and that a third of undiscovered tree species are rare, meaning they could be vulnerable to extinction by human-driven changes in land use and the climate crisis. "It is a massive effort for the whole world to document our forests," said Jingjing Liang, a lead author of the paper and professor of quantitative forest ecology at Purdue University in Indiana, US. "Counting the number of tree species worldwide is like a puzzle with pieces spreading all over the world. We solved it together as a team, each sharing our own piece."

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. In "His Master's Voice," a 1968 sci-fi novel by the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, a team of scientists and scholars convened by the American government try to decipher a neutrino signal from outer space. They manage to translate a fragment of the signal's information, and a couple of the scientists use it to construct a powerful weapon, which the project's senior mathematician fears could wipe out humanity. The intention behind the message remains elusive, but why would an advanced life-form have broadcast instructions that could be so dangerous? Late one night, a philosopher on the team named Saul Rappaport, who emigrated from Europe in the last year of the Second World War, tells the mathematician about a time--"the year was 1942, I think"--when he nearly died in a mass execution.