Just a week after an AI disproved an 80-year-old conjecture and astonished mathematicians, another conjecture that had stood for half a century has fallen, inspired by the same techniques, but this time written entirely by humans. Last week, an unreleased AI model from OpenAI disproved an important conjecture first posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, called the unit distance problem. The puzzle, which Erdős considered his "most striking contribution to geometry" and which many mathematicians had failed to unravel, concerns the number of similar-sized connections you can make between dots arranged on a flat surface. Erdős had set an upper ceiling on this number, which many experts had assumed was correct. But the AI model showed that this number could in fact be much larger, using an obscure trick from algebraic number theory to make complex structures with extremely high dimensions, which could then be used to arrange the dots in a very different arrangement than humans had considered.

Inspired by Shannon Vallor's book The AI Mirror, this compelling piece looks at how we are being affected by our deepening interactions with tech Traditional ballet with tutus and pointe shoes is my preferred night at the theatre, but I enjoyed a contemporary piece recently at London's Sadler's Wells East. The piece, Mirror, by the Alexander Whitley Dance Company, will also be at the city's Royal Opera House on 4 June. It is inspired by the book by Shannon Vallor, a professor in the ethics of data and artificial intelligence, in which she argues for and against the use of AI. Vallor wants us to find a middle ground between passively resigning ourselves to AI as a replacement for our agency, and seeing it as an existential threat that must be defeated. As a science journalist, I like the balance of Vallor's book, but, for me, this didn't translate to the dance piece.

The recruitment website is jazzy, awash with pictures of happy young workers, and festooned with upbeat mini-slogans such as insane speed, infinite curiosity and customer obsession. Read a bit lower, and there are promises of perks galore: competitive compensation, free meals, free gym membership, free health and dental care and so on. But then comes the catch. Each job ad contains a warning: Please don't join if you're not excited about working ~70 hrs/week in person with some of the most ambitious people in NYC. The website belongs to Rilla, a New York-based tech business which sells AI-based systems that allow employers to monitor sales representatives when they are out and about, interacting with clients. The company has become something of a poster child for a fast-paced workplace culture known as 996, also sometimes referred to as hustle culture or grindcore.

Eggie, Neo, Isaac and Memo are domestic robots. But would you let them load your dishwasher? The idea of having a friendly robot butler that can do all the dull duties of running a home has existed for decades. But now, thanks to AI, it's genuinely happening and this year the first truly multi-purpose domestic bots will start to enter homes. In Silicon Valley, they're being trained at speed to fold laundry, load the dishwasher, and clean up after us.

On a Wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane--which was, thankfully, empty--and immediately jerked back. That sense of peril felt right for the moment. As I stepped into the cab, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was delivering a speech criticizing President Donald Trump's economic policies, and in particular the administration's sweeping on-again, off-again tariffs. A day earlier, the White House had claimed that Chinese goods would be subject to overall levies as high as 245 percent when accounting for preexisting tariffs, and the AI giant Nvidia's stock had plummeted after the company reported that it expected to take a quarterly hit of more than 5 billion for selling to China.

Finals season looks different this year. Across college campuses, students are slogging their way through exams with all-nighters and lots of caffeine, just as they always have. Through the end of May, OpenAI is offering students two months of free access to ChatGPT Plus, which normally costs 20 a month. It's a compelling deal for students who want help cramming--or cheating--their way through finals: Rather than firing up the free version of ChatGPT to outsource essay writing or work through a practice chemistry exam, students are now able to access the company's most advanced models, as well as its "deep research" tool, which can quickly synthesize hundreds of digital sources into analytical reports. The OpenAI deal is just one of many such AI promotions going around campuses.

Identifying and then implementing an effective response to disruptive new AI technologies is enormously challenging for any business looking to integrate AI into their operations, as well as regulators looking to leverage AI-related innovation as a mechanism for achieving regional economic growth. These business and regulatory challenges are particularly significant given the broad reach of AI, as well as the multiple uncertainties surrounding such technologies and their future development and effects. This article identifies two promising strategies for meeting the AI challenge, focusing on the example of Fintech. First, dynamic regulation, in the form of regulatory sandboxes and other regulatory approaches that aim to provide a space for responsible AI-related innovation. An empirical study provides preliminary evidence to suggest that jurisdictions that adopt a more proactive approach to Fintech regulation can attract greater investment. The second strategy relates to so-called innovation ecosystems. It is argued that such ecosystems are most effective when they afford opportunities for creative partnerships between well-established corporations and AI-focused startups and that this aspect of a successful innovation ecosystem is often overlooked in the existing discussion. The article suggests that these two strategies are interconnected, in that greater investment is an important element in both fostering and signaling a well-functioning innovation ecosystem and that a well-functioning ecosystem will, in turn, attract more funding. The resulting synergies between these strategies can, therefore, provide a jurisdiction with a competitive edge in becoming a regional hub for AI-related activity.

The first concert I bought tickets to after the pandemic subsided was a performance of the British singer-songwriter Birdy, held last April in Belgium. I've listened to Birdy more than to any other artist; her voice has pulled me through the hardest and happiest stretches of my life. I know every lyric to nearly every song in her discography, but that night Birdy's voice had the same effect as the first time I'd listened to her, through beat-up headphones connected to an iPod over a decade ago--a physical shudder, as if a hand had reached across time and grazed me, somehow, just beneath the skin. Countless people around the world have their own version of this ineffable connection, with Taylor Swift, perhaps, or the Beatles, Bob Marley, or Metallica. My feelings about Birdy's music were powerful enough to propel me across the Atlantic, just as tens of thousands of people flocked to the Sphere to see Phish earlier this year, or some 400,000 went to Woodstock in 1969.

Yesterday afternoon, Elon Musk fired the latest shot in his feud with OpenAI: His new AI venture, xAI, now allows anyone to download and use the computer code for its flagship software. No fees, no restrictions, just Grok, a large language model that Musk has positioned against OpenAI's GPT-4, the model powering the most advanced version of ChatGPT. Sharing Grok's code is a thinly veiled provocation. Musk was one of OpenAI's original backers. He left in 2018 and recently sued for breach of contract, arguing that the start-up and its CEO, Sam Altman, have betrayed the organization's founding principles in pursuit of profit, transforming a utopian vision of technology that "benefits all of humanity" into yet another opaque corporation.

Doha, Qatar – Under blocks of flashing lights, entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders converged in central Doha on Monday as Web Summit, one of the world's biggest tech conferences, opened in Qatar's capital. The event, held in the Middle East for the first time, brings together participants from dozens of countries who, over four days, will be hoping to establish new connections, share insights and secure funds. Kicking off proceedings, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani announced that the Gulf state's sovereign wealth fund would invest more than 1bn in international and regional venture capital funds. Dubbed "Fund of Funds", the programme aims to foster innovation by attracting top international venture capital funds and entrepreneurs both to Qatar and the wider Gulf region. The commitment to boost the start-up sector builds on Qatar's aspiration to be a regional IT hub.