Imagine having a live art class taught by Leonardo da Vinci, or having a fully interactive discussion about the meaning of life with Socrates. You can now do this in your living room with a laptop and headset through startups like Ireland's Engage XR and Sweden's Hello History, combining the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.

Yahya Sinwar, the former leader of the Hamas militant organization, was killed by the Israeli military in the south Gazan city of Rafah in October 2024. Given the role Sinwar played in the planning and execution of the October 7 terrorist attack, as well as his role in the development of Hamas's military wing, his killing was seen as a possibly game-changing victory for the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The more lottery tickets you buy, the higher your chances of winning, but spending more than you win is obviously not a wise strategy. Something similar happens in AI powered by deep learning: we know that the larger a neural network is (i.e., the more parameters it has), the better it can learn the task we set for it.

How will the internet evolve in the coming decades?

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly automating tasks like translation, text classification and customer service. But tapping into an LLM's power typically requires users to send their requests to a centralized server—a process that's expensive, energy-intensive and often slow.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is credited with giving humans fire as well as the "spark" that spurred civilization. One of the unintended consequences of Prometheus's "gift" was that the need for celestial Gods diminished. Modern humans have been up to all sorts of things that present similar unintended consequences, from using CFCs that led to a hole in the ozone layer to building systems that they do not understand or cannot fully control.

Smart homes have become increasingly popular in recent years. Where once they simply referred to automated systems for things like lighting and heating, nowadays the definition has expanded to include voice assistants and a wide variety of sensors and remotely programmable devices. In the UK, ownership of smart-home devices has doubled in the past five years.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to reshape industries and transform workplaces, it's imperative that organizations and leaders examine not only its impact on productivity, innovation and economic gains, but also the ethical implications tied to these transformative technologies.

People write with personal style and individual flourishes that set them apart from other writers. So does AI, including top programs like Chat GPT, new Johns Hopkins University-led research finds.

In a review paper published recently in Science Robotics a cognitive roboticist, cognitive psychologist and a psychiatrist discuss the concept of "sense of self" in humans, and they explore how robots can be used to better understand the phenomenon.

The deployment of robot teams could allow humans to complete various real-world tasks faster and more efficiently. For instance, multiple co-operating robots could help to quickly find and rescue survivors of natural disasters or monitor pollution across large geographical areas.

QUT biomedical engineers have developed a new automated method to drastically advance melt electrowriting, a new, high-resolution 3D printing technology used in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

A quietly growing belief in Silicon Valley could have immense implications: the breakthroughs from large AI models -– the ones expected to bring human-level artificial intelligence in the near future –- may be slowing down.

"We have entered the Intelligence Age," proclaimed Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, in September. "Deep learning worked," he explained, and this breakthrough in learning from data will unleash a smart era in which the more data becomes available, "the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems."

Police departments around the world are increasingly using body-worn cameras in an attempt to improve public trust and accountability. But this has created huge amounts of data, about 95% of which is never reviewed or even seen.

Large language models are everywhere, including running in the background of the apps on the device you're using to read this. The auto-complete suggestions in your texts and emails, the query responses composed by Gemni, Copilot and ChatGPT, and the images generated from DALL-E are all built using LLMs.

Road surface information plays an essential role across multiple sectors, influencing everything from transportation safety to economic growth and environmental sustainability. Knowing whether a road is paved or unpaved can impact decision-making for route planning and emergency responses.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a way to use sound to detect when lithium-ion batteries are about to catch fire. The NIST team included Wai Cheong "Andy" Tam and Anthony Putorti.

A former CEO and executive chairman of Google, recently suggested that the tech giant's apparent lag in AI development was due to the company prioritizing employees' personal well-being over progress. Eric Schmidt told an audience: "Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning."

The rigid structures of language we once clung to with certainty are cracking. Take gender, nationality or religion: these concepts no longer sit comfortably in the stiff linguistic boxes of the last century. Simultaneously, the rise of AI presses upon us the need to understand how words relate to meaning and reasoning.

Imagine this: You're at an office job, wearing noise-canceling headphones to dampen the ambient chatter. A co-worker arrives at your desk and asks a question, but rather than needing to remove the headphones and say, "What?", you hear the question clearly.

Scientists from the University of Surrey are teaching artificial intelligence models to re-light different body types and clothing without the need for 3D modeling. This may have a positive impact on the film, television and gaming industries in the near future.

What happens when the technology meant to protect marginalized voices ends up silencing them? Rebecca Dorn, a research assistant at USC Viterbi's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) has uncovered how large language models (LLMs) that are used to moderate online content are failing queer communities by misinterpreting their language.

Technology firms are ceaselessly promoting new AI products, but climate activist Sage Lenier says AI is useless, unsustainable and has given the industry an existential problem.

As the International Rescue Committee copes with dramatic increases in displaced people in recent years, the refugee aid organization has looked for efficiencies wherever it can—including using artificial intelligence.

Think back to a time when you needed a quick answer, maybe for a recipe or a DIY project. A few years ago, most people's first instinct was to "Google it." Today, however, many people are more likely to reach for ChatGPT, OpenAI's conversational AI, which is changing the way people look for information.

With artificial intelligence increasingly permeating every aspect of our lives, experts are becoming more and more concerned about its dangers. In some cases, the risks are pressing, in others they won't emerge until many months or even years from now.

Imagine using artificial intelligence to compare two seemingly unrelated creations—biological tissue and Beethoven's "Symphony No. 9." At first glance, a living system and a musical masterpiece might appear to have no connection. However, a novel AI method developed by Markus J. Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering and professor of civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering at MIT, bridges this gap, uncovering shared patterns of complexity and order.

A team of roboticists and engineers at MIT CSAIL, Institute for AI and Fundamental Interactions, has developed a generative AI approach to teaching robots how to traverse terrain and move around objects in the real world.

A perspective suggests that "digital twins" are not simply tools for science but are an example of the integration of complexity science and data science into a new scientific field. A "digital twin" is a digital representation of a real-world object or system.