In AI, the existential risk denotes the hypothetical threat posed by an artificial system that would possess both the capability and the objective, either directly or indirectly, to eradicate humanity. This issue is gaining prominence in scientific debate due to recent technical advancements and increased media coverage. In parallel, AI progress has sparked speculation and studies about the potential emergence of artificial consciousness. The two questions, AI consciousness and existential risk, are sometimes conflated, as if the former entailed the latter. Here, I explain that this view stems from a common confusion between consciousness and intelligence. Yet these two properties are empirically and theoretically distinct. Arguably, while intelligence is a direct predictor of an AI system's existential threat, consciousness is not. There are, however, certain incidental scenarios in which consciousness could influence existential risk, in either direction. Consciousness could be viewed as a means towards AI alignment, thereby lowering existential risk; or, it could be a precondition for reaching certain capabilities or levels of intelligence, and thus positively related to existential risk. Recognizing these distinctions can help AI safety researchers and public policymakers focus on the most pressing issues.

The State of AI: Is China about to win the race? In this conversation, the FT's John Thornhill and MIT Technology Review's Caiwei Chen consider the battle between Silicon Valley and Beijing for technological supremacy. Viewed from abroad, it seems only a matter of time before China emerges as the AI superpower of the 21st century. Here in the West, our initial instinct is to focus on America's significant lead in semiconductor expertise, its cutting-edge AI research, and its vast investments in data centers. The legendary investor Warren Buffett once warned: "Never bet against America." He is right that for more than two centuries, no other "incubator for unleashing human potential" has matched the US.

What makes a quantum computer good? Claims that one quantum computer is better than another rest on terms like quantum advantage or quantum supremacy, fault-tolerance or qubits with better coherence - what does it all mean? Eleven years ago, I was just getting a start on my PhD in theoretical physics, and to be honest with you I never thought about quantum computers, or writing about them, at all. Meanwhile, staff were hard at work putting together the world's first " Quantum computer buyer's guide " (we've always been ahead of the curve). Looking through it reveals what a different time it was - John Martinis at University of California, Santa Barbara got a shout out for working on an array of only nine qubits, and just last week he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics .

At 2.16pm California time last Sunday, the US billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen called it. "DeepSeek R1 is AI's Sputnik moment," he posted on X. A Chinese startup, operating since 2023 and helmed by a millennial mathematician, had unveiled a new chatbot that seemed to equal the performance of America's leading models at a fraction of the cost. Never mind that its answers on everything from the status of Taiwan to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were curbed by Chinese Communist party (CCP) censors. To Andreessen, a veteran of decades of technology booms and busts, it was like the Soviet Union getting the first satellite into orbit in 1957 and shocking America. The next day, shares in several of the world's biggest companies plunged – including the biggest fall in US market history for microchip maker Nvidia, which lost nearly 600bn.

This brief discusses evolutionary game theory as a powerful and unified mathematical tool to study evolution of collective behaviours. It summarises some of my recent research directions using evolutionary game theory methods, which include i) the analysis of statistical properties of the number of (stable) equilibria in a random evolutionary game, and ii) the modelling of safety behaviours' evolution and the risk posed by advanced Artificial Intelligence technologies in a technology development race. Finally, it includes an outlook and some suggestions for future researchers.

For Industry 4.0 Revolution, cooperative autonomous mobility systems are widely used based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, the MARL-based algorithms suffer from huge parameter utilization and convergence difficulties with many agents. To tackle these problems, a quantum MARL (QMARL) algorithm based on the concept of actor-critic network is proposed, which is beneficial in terms of scalability, to deal with the limitations in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Additionally, our QMARL is also beneficial in terms of efficient parameter utilization and fast convergence due to quantum supremacy. Note that the reward in our QMARL is defined as task precision over computation time in multiple agents, thus, multi-agent cooperation can be realized. For further improvement, an additional technique for scalability is proposed, which is called projection value measure (PVM). Based on PVM, our proposed QMARL can achieve the highest reward, by reducing the action dimension into a logarithmic-scale. Finally, we can conclude that our proposed QMARL with PVM outperforms the other algorithms in terms of efficient parameter utilization, fast convergence, and scalability.

The UK is aspiring to become an artificial intelligence (AI) superpower, and nothing seems to be able to stop it from achieving its ambitious goal. If we were to take a look at the progress the UK did in the past 10 years, we'll notice the number of AI companies has grown astronomically or, more exactly, by over 600 percent. If back in 2011, the UK had only 180 AI companies, today it numbers over 1,300, and the number keeps growing at a head-spinning rate. Much like in the decades when the superpowers of the world were competing for space supremacy, currently, governments compete to achieve artificial intelligence supremacy. The UK's AI sector has made a name of its own in the world due to phenomenal minds and generous government funding that amounts to £1 billion – public-sector investments and funds coming from private companies and academic partnerships.

This may be the year when artificial intelligence transforms daily life. So said Brad Smith, president and vice chairman of Microsoft, at a Vatican-organised event on AI last week. But Smith's statement was less a prediction than a call to action: the event--attended by industry leaders and representatives of the three Abrahamic religions--sought to promote an ethical, human-centred approach to the development of AI. There is no doubt that AI poses a daunting set of operational, ethical and regulatory challenges. And addressing them will be far from straightforward.

This is the third in a series of posts about how international competition could reshape the U.S. economy. As you might expect from the picture at the top of this post, I'm a little ambivalent when it comes to breathless reports that America is falling behind its rivals technologically. That picture is from the movie Dr. Strangelove, which (among other things) lampooned America's Cold War obsession with the "missile gap". On one hand, in a geopolitical contest such as the one we now find ourselves in with Russia and China, we need to prioritize which battles to concentrate resources on -- a point made very convincingly by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley's new book Danger Zone. But on the other hand, our obsession with the "missile gap" gave us the space race and the moon landings and all the technological spinoffs from those, plus a boost to our semiconductor industry.

In the wake of the technological industry, information technology and artificial intelligence are mere buzzwords that are often applied interchangeably. There's no doubt that artificial intelligence has proven its supremacy by reviving the space of information technology. After all, isn't it amazing how integration has revolutionized the IT industry into smart systems in the blink of an eye? Presently, the scope of Information Technology is unbeatable since it's all about software, data transmission systems and digital gadgets. Whether it's an LED display at Hikvision in Dubai or video wall suppliers in another state, this incorporation needs no introduction.