A trio linked with a US technology supplier have been charged over a ploy to smuggle American artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China, the Department of Justice said on Thursday. The individuals allegedly conspired to sell billions of dollars' worth of technology to buyers in China by faking documents and using dummy equipment to slip past audits, according to the DOJ. The goods in question included Nvidia-made semiconductors, highly coveted AI chips which are subject to export controls. In August 2025, two Chinese nationals were also arrested and charged with illegally shipping millions of dollars' worth of Nvidia chips to China. The DOJ said in a statement on Thursday that it had arrested US-citizen Yih-Shyan Wally Liaw and Taiwanese citizen Ting-Wei Willy Sun, while Ruei-Tsang Steven Chang, a Taiwanese citizen, remains a fugitive.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. A magnitude 4.0 earthquake was reported Sunday at 3:30 p.m. in the Bay Area. It was followed in the same area by two smaller quakes. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here .

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi for their work in the development of metal organic frameworks (MOF). The three scientists, who won the award on Wednesday, come from the universities of Kyoto in Japan, Melbourne in Australia and Berkeley in the United States, respectively. Such constructions can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or break down traces of pharmaceuticals in the environment. "Metal organic frameworks have enormous potential, bringing previously unforeseen opportunities for custom-made materials with new functions," said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. According to Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, the new form of molecular architecture can be compared with the handbag of the fictional Harry Potter character Hermione Granger: small on the outside but very large on the inside.

Utilizing global information to reduce the complexity of imperfect-information games has also been investigated in some works. In their implementation, the value network of the agent can observe the full information about the game state, including those that are hidden from the policy. They argue that such a training style improves training performance. Moreover, in Suphx [15], a strong Mahjong AI system, they used a similar method namely oracle guiding. Particularly, in the beginning of the training stage, all global information is utilized; then, as the training goes, the additional information would be dropped out slowly to none, and only the information that the agent is allowed to observe is reserved in the subsequent training stage.

In just a few years, Samsung has built up a substantial collection of artificial intelligence tricks, features and apps. While some of them have been impressive, like live translation and annotation, others (often involving generative AI) aren't actually helpful -- or notable -- enough to warrant regular use. The latest trio of Galaxy S flagship phones means another barrage of AI. Samsung has saved the best hardware for its S25 Ultra, of course, but the company also has smaller (and cheaper) flagships, with the Galaxy S25 ( 800) and larger S25 ( 1,000) both launching at the same time. And those AI features could be more crucial for the base S25 and larger S25 .

Stable Diffusion, an open-source alternative to AI image generators like Midjourney and DALL-E, has been updated to version 3.5. The new model tries to right some of the wrongs (which may be an understatement) of the widely panned Stable Diffusion 3 Medium. Stability AI says the 3.5 model adheres to prompts better than other image generators and competes with much larger models in output quality. In addition, it's tuned for a greater diversity of styles, skin tones and features without needing to be prompted to do so explicitly. The new model comes in three flavors.

Three computer scientists, including an artificial intelligence researcher at Google DeepMind, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for their work in protein science, including cracking the code for proteins' structures. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences gave half of the prize to David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, for computational protein design, and the other half to Demis Hassabis of University College London and John Jumper, CEO of London-based Google DeepMind, for work on predicting protein structure. "One of the discoveries being recognized this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities," said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large language models, which power chatbots like ChatGPT. On most tasks, performance improved predictably and smoothly as the models scaled up--the larger the model, the better it got. The performance remained near zero for a while, then performance jumped. Other studies found similar leaps in ability.

As a Harry Potter fan and a lover of writing, I was curious to see what would happen if I asked ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) to write a Harry Potter fan fiction. So, I fed ChatGPT a few prompts and let it do its magic. The result was a piece of fan fiction titled "The Lost Diadem of Ravenclaw", which follows the story of Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they embark on a quest to find the lost diadem of Ravenclaw. The diadem, which is said to enhance the intelligence of its wearer, has been missing for centuries and is believed to be hidden in the Forbidden Forest. As they journey through the forest, the trio encounters a number of obstacles and challenges, including an encounter with a pack of werewolves and a showdown with the infamous Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange. Despite the challenges they face, Harry, Ron, and Hermione persevere and eventually find the lost diadem.