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"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.""

"In 2021, Mr Kono had "declared war" on floppy disks. On Wednesday, almost three years later, he announced: "We have won the war on floppy disks!" Mr Kono has made it his goal to eliminate old technology since he was appointed to the job. He had earlier also said he would "get rid of the fax machine". Once seen as a tech powerhouse, Japan has in recent years lagged in the global wave of digital transformation because of a deep resistance to change. For instance, workplaces have continued to favour fax machines over emails - earlier plans to remove these machines from government offices were scrapped because of pushback."

"First, the problems were manually translated into formal mathematical language for our systems to understand. In the official competition, students submit answers in two sessions of 4.5 hours each. Our systems solved one problem within minutes and took up to three days to solve the others. AlphaProof solved two algebra problems and one number theory problem by determining the answer and proving it was correct. This included the hardest problem in the competition, solved by only five contestants at this year's IMO. AlphaGeometry 2 proved the geometry problem, while the two combinatorics problems remained unsolved."

"Halfway through their three-hour conversation, Brown said something that caught me off-guard. In hindsight, it isn't all that surprising-as long as you're aware of the latest advances-but it may still shock you coming from a physics university professor: A lot of physics professors are using [large language models] just as personal tutors.1"

"At least 50 separate deadly strikes by armed forces in Africa have been confirmed during the three years up to November 2024, with analysts describing a "striking pattern of civilian harm" with little or no accountability. Although the rapid growth of armed drones deployed by Ukraine and Russia receives significant scrutiny, scant focus is being paid to the escalating use in Africa of a new breed of imported cheaper drones, such as Turkey's Bayraktar TB2, said Cora Morris of campaign group Drone Wars UK, which on Monday published a report on the growth of armed drones in Africa, called Death on Delivery."

"But Duolingo now seems to have changed its tune, at least in terms of hiring. CEO Luis von Ahn wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this week: "To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are, in fact, continuing to hire at the same speed as before). I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it-and use it responsibly-the better off we will be in the long run." Though many language learners obviously appreciate the human touch on their materials, Duolingo isn't the only one leaning toward AI for language education. Last month, Google applied its flagship Google Gemini AI model to create three new tools, dubbed Little Language Lessons, accessible via the Google Labs page. However, Google did dub the new set of tools as "just an early exploration.""

"Not everything is so straightforward in Google land, as Google's chat protocols Hangouts and Talk, suffered a privacy issue on the 26 September that saw instant messages routed to unintended recipients."

"How we verify your users We use a combination of AI technology, liveness anti-spoofing and document authenticity checks so you can be confident in the age of your customers."

"Analyst Brian Nowak estimates that the AI technology will have a $4.1 trillion economic effect on the labor force - or affect about 44% of labor - over the next few years by changing input costs, automating tasks and shifting the ways companies obtain, process and analyze information. Today, Morgan Stanley pegs the AI effect at $2.1 trillion, affecting 25% of labor. "We see generative AI expanding the scope of business processes that can be automated," he wrote in a Sunday note. "At the same time, the input costs supporting GenAI functionality are rapidly falling, enabling a strongly expansionary impact to software production. As a result, Generative AI is set to impact the labor markets, expand the enterprise software TAM, and drive incremental spend for Public Cloud services.""

"This new paper asked professionals to write realistic memos, strategy documents and policies. The ones who were given ChatGPT completed tasks 37% faster, and their average writing quality increased as well. All of this is without added training or extensive experience using ChatGPT (which I found makes a huge difference)."

"Ultimately, he suggests, each user would have their own "large language model" (LLM), the underlying technology of services such as ChatGPT, which would be trained on their own speech and behaviour patterns, to let them generate extremely personalised responses to queries and requests. Such systems could be a natural progression from AI tools that already exist today. Services such as Gmail can summarise and suggest replies to emails based on previous messages, while Microsoft Teams will transcribe and summarise video conferences, automatically generating a to-do list from the contents."