The Download: China's dying EV batteries, and why AI doomers are doubling down China figured out how to sell EVs. Now it has to bury their batteries. In the past decade, China has seen an EV boom, thanks in part to government support. Buying an electric car has gone from a novel decision to a routine one; by late 2025, nearly 60% of new cars sold were electric or plug-in hybrids. But as the batteries in China's first wave of EVs reach the end of their useful life, early owners are starting to retire their cars, and the country is now under pressure to figure out what to do with those aging components. The issue is putting strain on China's still-developing battery recycling industry and has given rise to a gray market that often cuts corners on safety and environmental standards.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the creation of highly effective chatbots. However, the compute costs of widely deploying LLMs have raised questions about profitability. Companies have proposed exploring ad-based revenue streams for monetizing LLMs, which could serve as the new de facto platform for advertising. This paper investigates the implications of personalizing LLM advertisements to individual users via a between-subjects experiment with 179 participants. We developed a chatbot that embeds personalized product advertisements within LLM responses, inspired by similar forays by AI companies. The evaluation of our benchmarks showed that ad injection only slightly impacted LLM performance, particularly response desirability. Results revealed that participants struggled to detect ads, and even preferred LLM responses with hidden advertisements. Rather than clicking on our advertising disclosure, participants tried changing their advertising settings using natural language queries. We created an advertising dataset and an open-source LLM, Phi-4-Ads, fine-tuned to serve ads and flexibly adapt to user preferences.

When Synthesia launched in 2017, its primary purpose was to match AI versions of real human faces--for example, the former footballer David Beckham--with dubbed voices speaking in different languages. A few years later, in 2020, it started giving the companies that signed up for its services the opportunity to make professional-level presentation videos starring either AI versions of staff members or consenting actors. The avatars' body movements could be jerky and unnatural, their accents sometimes slipped, and the emotions indicated by their voices didn't always match their facial expressions. Now Synthesia's avatars have been updated with more natural mannerisms and movements, as well as expressive voices that better preserve the speaker's accent--making them appear more humanlike than ever before. For Synthesia's corporate clients, these avatars will make for slicker presenters of financial results, internal communications, or staff training videos.

Hardcore gardeners sometimes, when no one else is listening, talk quietly to their prize blooms. But at next year's Chelsea flower show, visitors will be encouraged to have a chat with its first ever AI-powered garden. The garden designer Tom Massey has partnered with Microsoft to create the Avanade "intelligent" garden. Sensors in the soil are partnered with an AI trained on Royal Horticultural Society plant data and gardening advice, meaning visitors can ask the garden: "How are you?" Massey said: "It could answer: I need a bit more water, I can do with a haircut, maybe."

A long-term fallout of the Covid crisis has been the rise of the contactless enterprise, in which customers, and likely employees, interact with systems to get what they need or request. This means a pronounced role for artificial intelligence and machine learning, or conversational AI, which add the intelligence needed to deliver superior customer or employee experience. Deloitte recently analyzed patents in the area of conversational AI to assess the direction of the market -- and the technology has been developing quickly. "Rapid adoption of conversational AI will likely be underpinned by innovations in the various steps of chatbot development that have the potential to hasten the creation and training of chatbots and enable them to efficiently handle complex requests -- with a personal touch," the analyst team, led by Deloitte's Sherry Comes, writes. Conversational AI is a ground-breaking application for AI, agrees Chris Hausler, director of data science for Zendesk.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a technology that is embedded in almost every machine learning device. Voice assistants that we use on a daily basis like Siri and Alexa also use NLP to understand our commands. Basically, NLP allows the device to hear what you say, understand it, and act on it. This technology is a part of artificial intelligence and enables devices to understand the human language. So, it is safe to say that NLP is all around us, in mobile applications, in smart home devices, and in movies too.

Social media platforms like Facebook use a combination of artificial intelligence and human moderators to scout out and eliminate hate speech. But now researchers have developed a new AI tool that wouldn't just scrub hate speech but would actually craft responses to it, like: "The language used is highly offensive. All ethnicities and social groups deserve tolerance." "And this type of intervention response can hopefully short-circuit the hate cycles that we often get in these types of forums." The idea, she says, is to fight hate speech with more speech--an approach advocated by the ACLU and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Social media platforms like Facebook use a combination of artificial intelligence and human moderators to scout out and eliminate hate speech. But now researchers have developed a new AI tool that wouldn't just scrub hate speech, but would actually craft responses to it, like: 'The language used is highly offensive. All ethnicities and social groups deserve tolerance.' "And this type of intervention response can hopefully short circuit the hate cycles that we often get in these types of forums." The idea, she says, is to fight hate speech with more speech.

Artificial intelligence is creeping into our smartphones in small, subtle ways. Google's Pixel 3, announced Tuesday, can answer robocalls on your behalf thanks to Google's Duplex technology and Google Assistant. Meanwhile, Android P, the latest operating system for Google's phones, can learn from how you interact with phone alerts to suggest stopping notifications for particular apps, reducing the amount of unnecessary intrusions your phone makes into your daily life. But there's another new phone in the pipeline that takes these kinds of developments further. By pairing them with more robust voice control, it may help fill in the picture of how we'll talk to the next generation of smartphones--and what they'll learn about us in order to talk back.

Making use of a cloud service with massive data collected online, the robot Charpy can respond to learners in natural conversations based on their interests and English skill levels. "We hope that Charpy will help learners to overcome difficulties in conversations," said Mitsunori Fukuchi, president of CAI Media, based in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture. According to the company, Charpy's character is set as a little bird that likes chocolate. The robot is programmed with 1,000 conversation phrases. According to Fukuchi, the robot can handle all English skill levels from beginners to advanced levels using the cloud service.