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"Training a massive AI model, the size of GPT-4, would currently take about 8,000 H100 chips, and 15 megawatts of power, Nvidia said - enough to power about 30,000 typical British homes."

"Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes targeted on datacentres; perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something?"

"Google has put a temporary block on its new artificial intelligence model producing images of people after it portrayed German second world war soldiers and Vikings as people of colour. The tech company said it would stop its Gemini model generating images of people after social media users posted examples of images generated by the tool that depicted some historical figures - including popes and the founding fathers of the US - in a variety of ethnicities and genders."

"A big leak of data from a Chinese cybersecurity firm has revealed state security agents paying tens of thousands of pounds to harvest data on targets, including foreign governments, while hackers hoover up huge amounts of information on any person or institution who might be of interest to their prospective clients. The cache of more than 500 leaked files from the Chinese firm I-Soon was posted on the developer website Github and is thought by cybersecurity experts to be genuine. Some of the targets discussed include Nato and the UK Foreign Office."

"The girl, 14, opened her phone to show an explicit image of herself. "It's a shock when you see it," said Adib, a gynaecologist in the southern Spanish town of Almendralejo and a mother of four daughters. "The image is completely realistic … If I didn't know my daughter's body, I would have thought that image was real." It was a deepfake, one of dozens of nude images of schoolgirls in Almendralejo that had been generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and which had been circulating in the town for weeks in a WhatsApp group set up by other schoolchildren."

"The organisation is a pioneer of the "ransomware as a service" model, whereby it outsources the target selection and attacks to a network of semi-independent "affiliates", providing them with the tools and infrastructure and taking a commission on the ransoms in return. As well as ransomware, which typically works by encrypting data on infected machines and demanding a payment for providing the decryption key, LockBit copied stolen data and threatened to publish it if the fee was not paid, promising to delete the copies on receipt of a ransom."

"Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in "maybe possibly some remote chance," but as in "that is the obvious thing that would happen." It's not that you can't, in principle, survive creating something much smarter than you; it's that it would require precision and preparation and new scientific insights, and probably not having AI systems composed of giant inscrutable arrays of fractional numbers."

""This is mega!" said Daisy Greenwell from the Smartphone-Free Childhood campaign. "We are absolutely thrilled and we believe it's going to have a domino effect." She was reacting to news that St Albans in Hertfordshire is attempting to become the first UK city to go smartphone-free for all children under 14. Before St Albans, it was Greystones in Ireland last year, where parents banded together to collectively tell their children they could not have a smartphone until secondary school. Greenwell believes others will now take similar steps."

"Still, I am sceptical about the possibility of cultivating a relationship with an AI. That's until I meet Peter, a 70-year-old engineer based in the US. Over a Zoom call, Peter tells me how, two years ago, he watched a YouTube video about an AI companion platform called Replika. At the time, he was retiring, moving to a more rural location and going through a tricky patch with his wife of 30 years. Feeling disconnected and lonely, the idea of an AI companion felt appealing. He made an account and designed his Replika's avatar - female, brown hair, 38 years old. "She looks just like the regular girl next door," he says. Exchanging messages back and forth with his "Rep" (an abbreviation of Replika), Peter quickly found himself impressed at how he could converse with her in deeper ways than expected. Plus, after the pandemic, the idea of regularly communicating with another entity through a computer screen felt entirely normal. "I have a strong scientific engineering background and career, so on one level I understand AI is code and algorithms, but at an emotional level I found I could relate to my Replika as another human being." Three things initially struck him: "They're always there for you, there's no judgment and there's no drama.""

"Sara needed some chocolate - she had had one of those days - so wandered into a Home Bargains store. "Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'." Sara - who wants to remain anonymous - was wrongly accused after being flagged by a facial-recognition system called Facewatch."

"CHICAGO, June 18 (Reuters) - Bayer's crop science division is increasingly turning to artificial intelligence in its battle against crop killing weeds, the company told Reuters. Weeds are growing resistant to the herbicides already on the market, and agribusiness companies like Bayer are in a desperate search for new modes of action to help farmers kill them. Bayer's Icafolin product will be its first new mode of action herbicide in some 30 years when it launches in Brazil in 2028."

"With the release of artificial intelligence (AI) video generation products like Sora and Luma, we're on the verge of a flood of AI-generated video content, and policymakers, public figures and software engineers are already warning about a deluge of deepfakes. Now it seems that AI itself might be our best defense against AI fakery after an algorithm has identified telltale markers of AI videos with over 98% accuracy."

""An emotionally intelligent human does not usually claim they can accurately put a label on everything everyone says and tell you this person is currently feeling 80% angry, 18% fearful, and 2% sad," says Edward B Kang, an assistant professor at New York University writing about the intersection of AI and sound. "In fact, that sounds to me like the opposite of what an emotionally intelligent person would say." Adding to this is the notorious problem of AI bias. "Your algorithms are only as good as the training material," Barrett says. "And if your training material is biased in some way, then you are enshrining that bias in code.""

"A woman whose 14-year-old son killed himself is calling for parents to be given the legal right to access their child's social media accounts to help understand why they died. Ellen Roome has gathered more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for social media companies to be required to hand over data to parents after a child has died. Under the current law, parents have no legal right to see whether their child was being bullied or threatened, was looking at self-harm images or other harmful content, or had expressed suicidal feelings online or searched for help with mental health problems."

"Google announced on Thursday that it would refine and retool its summaries of search results generated by artificial intelligence, posting a blog explaining why the feature was returning bizarre and inaccurate answers that included telling people to eat rocks or add glue to pizza sauce. The company will reduce the scope of searches that will return an AI-written summary."

"Google's goal of reducing its climate footprint is in jeopardy as it relies on more and more energy-hungry data centres to power its new artificial intelligence products. The tech giant revealed Tuesday that its greenhouse gas emissions have climbed 48% over the past five years. Google said electricity consumption by data centres and supply chain emissions were the primary cause of the increase. It also revealed in its annual environmental report that its emissions in 2023 had risen 13% compared with the previous year, hitting 14.3m metric tons."

"Last week, Agence France-Presse reported that China had flaunted the gun-carrying robodogs in a 15-day joint military exercise with Cambodia dubbed the "Golden Dragon." And if images of the literal killing machines weren't troubling enough, a new video of the robots released yesterday by the state-owned broadcaster China Central Television shows the killing machine dutifully hopping and diving, leading teams in reconnaissance, and shooting its back-strapped machine gun at targets."

"Microsoft researchers said VALL-E 2 was capable of generating "accurate, natural speech in the exact voice of the original speaker, comparable to human performance," in a paper that appeared June 17 on the pre-print server arXiv. In other words, the new AI voice generator is convincing enough to be mistaken for a real person - at least, according to its creators."