Race on to establish globally recognised'AI-free' logo Organisations worldwide are racing to develop a universally recognised label for human-made products and services as part of the growing backlash against AI use. Declarations like Proudly Human, Human-made, 'No A.I and AI-free are appearing across films, marketing, books and websites. It is in response to fears that jobs or entire professions are being swept away in a wave of AI-powered automation. BBC News has counted at least eight different initiatives trying to come up with a label that could get the kind of global recognition that the Fair Trade logo has for ethically made products. But with so many competing labels - as well as confusion over the definition of AI-free - experts say consumers are in danger of being left confused unless a single standard can be agreed on.

Two people have died following an outbreak of invasive meningitis at the University of Kent. BBC South East understands that a further 11 people from the Canterbury area are currently in hospital and reported to be seriously ill. It is understood that most are aged between 18 and 21 and are students at the university. Both of the people who have died are also believed to be between 18 and 21, with one also confirmed to be a student. More than 30,000 students, staff and their families are being contacted by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to inform them of the situation.

The video games industry is unpredictable. If you'd told us this time last year that a previously unknown French studio would claim game of the year, Battlefield 6 would knock Call of Duty off the top of the annual charts and that Saudi Arabia would buy gaming giant Electronic Arts (EA) we'd have been... sceptical. So you'd have to be very sure of yourself - or very foolish - to try and predict what's going to happen in the year ahead. Luckily, we're not in the crystal ball business here at BBC Newsbeat, but there are a few things we can be confident video game fans should keep an eye on in 2026. GTA 6: Will it actually arrive in 2026?

Meta says it is acquiring the Chinese-founded AI firm Manus as it looks to boost the capabilities of its tech. Bloomberg analysts and The Wall Street Journal suggested the purchase could be worth more than $2bn (£1.48bn). Meta said the deal would help improve its own AI by giving people access to agents - tools which can do complex things with minimal user interaction such as planning trips or making presentations. Manus's exceptional talent will join Meta's team to deliver general-purpose agents across our consumer and business products, including Meta AI, it said in a blog post. Barton Crockett, analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, told Reuters it was a natural fit for Meta, which extended into boss Mark Zuckerberg's vision of personal AI using agents.

Large language models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been proved to excel at multiple tasks, such as commonsense reasoning. Powerful as these models can be, they are not grounded in the 3D physical world, which involves richer concepts such as spatial relationships, affordances, physics, layout, and so on. In this work, we propose to inject the 3D world into large language models, and introduce a whole new family of 3D-LLMs. Specifically, 3D-LLMs can take 3D point clouds and their features as input and perform a diverse set of 3D-related tasks, including captioning, dense captioning, 3D question answering, task decomposition, 3Dgrounding, 3D-assisted dialog, navigation, and so on. Using three types of prompting mechanisms that we design, we are able to collect over 300k 3D-language data covering these tasks. To efficiently train 3D-LLMs, we first utilize a 3D feature extractor that obtains 3D features from rendered multi-view images. Then, we use 2D VLMs as our backbones to train our 3D-LLMs.

It is crucial that image datasets for computer vision are representative and contain accurate demographic information to ensure their robustness and fairness, especially for smaller subpopulations. To address this issue, we present Dollar Street - a supervised dataset that contains 38,479 images of everyday household items from homes around the world. This dataset was manually curated and fully labeled, including tags for objects (e.g.

Disney and OpenAI have made a surprise deal - what happens next? Disney's famous Mickey Mouse character will soon be available for use in AI-generated videos The world's best-known AI company and the world's best-known entertainment firm have come to a surprise agreement to allow AI versions of some of the most iconic characters in film, TV and cartoons to be used in generative AI videos and images. Social media is dead - here's what comes next The Walt Disney Company has signed a deal with OpenAI that will allow the AI firm's Sora video generation tool and ChatGPT image creator to use more than 200 of Disney's most iconic characters. Meanwhile, Disney remains in dispute with another AI firm, Midjourney, over alleged infringement of their intellectual property (IP), claiming Midjourney aims to "blatantly incorporate and copy Disney's and Universal's famous characters" into their image generating tool. The characters now deemed fair game for OpenAI users include the likes of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Simba and Mufasa from and Moana, as well as Marvel and Lucasfilm characters, including some of's most well-known names.

Artificial intelligence risks increasing inequality between developed and developing countries, a United Nations report has warned. The report, titled "The Next Great Divergence" and released by the United Nations Development Programme's Asia and Pacific regional bureau on Tuesday, calls for urgent, coordinated policy action to manage the impact of the technology. "We think that AI is heralding a new era of rising inequality between countries, following years of convergence in the last 50 years," Philip Schellekens, the bureau's chief economist, told a briefing in Geneva, according to the Reuters news agency. The report argues that AI, like the Industrial Revolution before it, has the potential to unlock unprecedented opportunities or deepen existing divides, across a global landscape marked by vast gaps in wealth, skills, and digital access. Even wealthier countries would suffer if poorer states were left behind by the AI revolution, said Schellekens. "If inequality continues to rise, the spillover effects of that in terms of the security agenda, in terms of undocumented forms of migration, will also become more daunting," he worries.

What is in the 28-point US plan for Ukraine? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Can the US get all sides to end the war? Why is Europe opposing Trump's peace plan? The Take How Ukraine turned into the world's drone testing lab The use of drones in the Russia-Ukraine war has revolutionised an industry of death and destruction. The rapid development of drone technology has changed how wars are fought.

Nvidia has claimed it is a generation ahead of rivals in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry amid growing suggestions a rival may emerge to threaten to its market dominance - and multi-trillion dollar valuation. Shares in the chip giant fell on Tuesday, following a report Meta planned to spend billions on AI chips developed by Google to power its data centres. In a statement on X, Nvidia, the world's most valuable company, said it was the only platform which runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done. In response, Google said it was committed to supporting both its own and Nvidia's chips. Nvidia's chips have become a critical part of powering the data centres behind many of the most popular AI tools, such as ChatGPT.