Though the two countries are now in a race to develop atomic technology, China's most advanced reactor was the result of collaboration with American scientists. This April, in a speech given at the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the physicist Xu Hongjie announced a breakthrough. For over a decade, his team had been working on an experimental nuclear reactor that runs on a lava-hot solution of fissile material and molten salt, rather than on solid fuel. The reactor, which went online two years ago, was a feat in itself. It is still the only one of its kind in operation in the world, and has the potential to be both safer and more efficient than the water-cooled nuclear plants that dominate the industry. Now, Xu explained, his team had been able to refuel the reactor without shutting it down, demonstrating a level of mastery over their new system. As dazzling as that was, the timing of Xu's speech also freighted the topic with geopolitical import. Only a few months earlier, DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial-intelligence company, had set alarms ringing through the U.S. tech world when it became clear that the relatively small Chinese startup, operating under U.S. export controls, had created a large language model that rivalled anything devised by the behemoths of Silicon Valley.

The most accurate clock in space launches within days and will begin building a highly synchronised network out of the best clocks on Earth. But the project, decades in preparation, will only operate for a few years before it burns up as the International Space Station deorbits at the end of the decade. NASA's most accurate atomic clock will be tested on a mission to Venus The Atomic Clock Ensemble in Space (ACES) is a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that will generate a time signal with unprecedented accuracy and then transmit it via laser to nine ground stations as it passes overhead at 27,000 kilometres per hour. This network of clocks will be in extremely close synchronisation and provide highly accurate timekeeping around the world. The result is that ACES will be able to test Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says that the passing of time is affected by the strength of gravity, with great accuracy.

Police departments are often some of the tech industry's earliest adopters of new products like drones, facial recognition, predictive software, and now–artificial intelligence. After already embracing AI audio transcription programs, some departments are now testing a new, more comprehensive tool--software that leverages technology similar to ChatGPT to auto-generate police reports. According to an August 26 report from Associated Press, many officers are already "enthused" by the generative AI tool that claims to shave 30-45 minutes from routine officework. Initially announced in April by Axon, Draft One is billed as the "latest giant leap toward [the] moonshot goal to reduce gun-related deaths between police and the public." The company--best known for Tasers and law enforcement's most popular lines of body cams--claims its initial trials cut an hour of paperwork per day for users.

A major outage struck Bing.com, Microsoft's search engine, early Thursday with the problem apparently spreading to the brand's application programming interface which means that services such as DuckDuckGo also went down. According to reports the outage also impacts ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google's dominance in the world of web searching, Bing's API has numerous high profile clients. DuckDuckGo issued a brief statement on X. Users were greeted with an error page featuring a panda on Bing.com with the message: 'It's not you, it's us.' 'Announcement: We're currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search that might prevent you from getting results.

Harvey, a startup building what it describes as a "copilot for lawyers," today emerged from stealth with $5 million in funding led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, the tranche through which OpenAI and its partners are investing in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems. Also participating in the round was Jeff Dean, the lead of Google AI, Google's AI research division. Harvey was founded by Winston Weinberg, a former securities and antitrust litigator at law firm O'Melveny & Myers, and Gabriel Pereyra, previously a research scientist at DeepMind, Google Brain (another of Google's AI groups) and Meta AI. Weinberg and Pereyra are roomates -- Pereyra showed Weinberg OpenAI's GPT-3 text-generating system and Weinberg realized that it could be used to improve legal workflows. "Our product provides lawyers with a natural language interface for their existing legal workflows," Pereyra told TechCrunch in an email interview. "Instead of manually editing legal documents or performing legal research, Harvey enables lawyers to describe the task they wish to accomplish in simple instructions and receive the generated result.

When I recently Googled "best toaster" on my phone, thinking about replacing the appliance in my apartment kitchen, the search immediately yielded a carrousel of images of products from various high-design brands: Balmuda, Hay, Smeg. Lower down on the results page were ads for online retailers such as Amazon and Wayfair, then another carrousel of "Popular Toasters" with user-review metrics, then a list of suggested queries under the heading "People also ask." ("Is it worth buying an expensive toaster?" "You can't gain much beyond the $100 models," says an answer pulled from CNET.) Swiping down further, I reached aggregated listicles clearly designed to exploit Google's search algorithm and profit from affiliate marketing: toaster tips from Good Housekeeping, the "4 best toaster ovens of 2022" from Wirecutter. Further down still was a map of toasters that could be purchased in physical proximity to my apartment. I felt lost among the suggestions, awash in information and yet compelled by none of it. This kind of cluttered onslaught of homogenous e-commerce options is what recently prompted Dmitri Brereton, a twenty-six-year-old engineer at a recruiting-software company in San Francisco, to publish a blog post titled "Google Search Is Dying."

When OpenAI first debuted its powerful GPT-3 natural language model in June of 2020, it debuted in a limited beta capacity and featured a waiting list where developers could sign up to use its infrastructure and capabilities. Now, the waiting list has been dropped and GPT-3's capabilities are immediately available to developers and enterprises to work on their most challenging language problems, according to a Nov. 18 (Thursday) announcement by OpenAI, an independent AI research and deployment company. But there are some caveats – the general release adds conditions to prevent GPT-3 from being used to harm people, as well as conditions that only allow its use in certain nations around the world. That means that developers in some nations, including Cuba, Iran and Russia, cannot currently access it. "OpenAI is committed to the safe deployment of AI," the organization said in a statement.

A new song from the hit Broadway show Hamilton has been released, but this ditty was not written Lin-Manuel Miranda – it was create by artificial intelligence. A film production student at California's Chapman University used an machine learning model capable of producing written content from simple commands. The system, named Calamity A.I, was fed 45TB of text data and then Elis Weiss, the human mastermind, entered one sentence: 'Here are the lyrics to a new song from the hit musical Hamilton: An American Musical.' The AI returned a full song of lyrics with four versus, a chorus and bridge that included the characters from the story. However, the system added a few extras to its version – Eliza gave Hamilton syphilis, which he then proclaimed Hillary Clinton as his new lover.

A diverse team of engineers, artists, and algorithms, collaborated to create songs for SophiaPop, via various neural networks, robotics technologies, and artistic tools, and animated the results on Sophia the Robot, a robotic celebrity and animated character. Sophia is a platform for arts, research, and other uses. To advance the art and technology of Sophia, we combine various AI with a fictional narrative of her burgeoning career as a popstar. Her actual AI-generated pop lyrics, music, and paintings, and animated conversations wherein she interacts with humans real-time in narratives that discuss her experiences. To compose the music, SophiaPop team built corpora from human and AI-generated Sophia character personality content, along with pop music song forms, to train and provide seeds for a number of AI algorithms including expert models, and custom-trained transformer neural networks, which then generated original pop-song lyrics and melodies. Our musicians including Frankie Storm, Adam Pickrell, and Tiger Darrow, then performed interpretations of the AI-generated musical content, including singing and instrumentation. The human-performed singing data then was processed by a neural-network-based Sophia voice, which was custom-trained from human performances by Cereproc. This AI then generated the unique Sophia voice singing of the songs. Then we animated Sophia to sing the songs in music videos, using a variety of animation generators and human-generated animations. Being algorithms and humans, working together, SophiaPop represents a human-AI collaboration, aspiring toward human AI symbiosis. We believe that such a creative convergence of multiple disciplines with humans and AI working together, can make AI relevant to human culture in new and exciting ways, and lead to a hopeful vision for the future of human-AI relations.

The Justice Department says Google CEO Sundar Pichai (left) met privately with Apple chief Tim Cook in 2018 to discuss how their two companies could collaborate. The Justice Department says Google CEO Sundar Pichai (left) met privately with Apple chief Tim Cook in 2018 to discuss how their two companies could collaborate. Buried on page 36 of the Justice Department lawsuit accusing Google of abusing its monopoly power is this remarkable figure: $8 billion to $12 billion. That's the hefty sum Google allegedly paid Apple for one of the most prized pieces of real estate in the world of online search: default status on iPhones and all other Apple devices. Justice Department investigators say Apple, which does not have its own search engine, hammered out a multiyear deal making Google the default search engine on all iPhones and other Apple products.