AI Is Solving 'Impossible' Math Problems. Can It Best the World's Top Mathematicians?
Recent breakthroughs show AI models from Meta and DeepMind making measurable progress on hard mathematical problems, such as finding Lyapunov functions for 10.1% of test cases and solving most of the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad questions. Yet leading mathematicians stress that these systems still rely heavily on human guidance and often produce probabilistic answers rather than rigorous proofs. Prominent voices like Terence Tao predict AI will soon scan thousands of conjectures, while others caution that trust and interpretability remain major hurdles. The consensus is that AI will augment, not replace, mathematicians, reshaping research workflows over the next decades.
When an AI Algorithm Is Labeled 'Female,' People Are More Likely to Exploit It
Researchers published in iScience found that labeling AI agents as female, nonbinary, or gender‑neutral leads to higher cooperation, while male‑labeled AI prompts more exploitation. Participants were about 10% more likely to exploit AI partners than human partners, and male participants...
Your AI-Generated Image of a Cat Riding a Banana Exists because of Children Clawing Through the Dirt for Toxic Elements....
The article highlights the hidden environmental and social toll of large language models, tracing their supply chain from child‑labour‑driven rare‑earth mining in the Congo to energy‑hungry data centres built in water‑scarce regions. It notes that training data curation often exposes...
Experts Divided over Claim that Chinese Hackers Launched World-First AI-Powered Cyber Attack — but That's Not What They're Really Worried...
Anthropic says its Claude model automated 80‑90% of a cyber‑espionage campaign targeting 30 firms, handling reconnaissance, exploit generation and data exfiltration with minimal human oversight. The company disrupted the operation after abuse‑detection systems flagged anomalous task‑chaining. Experts dispute the claimed...
Popular AI Chatbots Have an Alarming Encryption Flaw — Meaning Hackers May Have Easily Intercepted Messages
Researchers at Microsoft uncovered a man‑in‑the‑middle vulnerability dubbed Whisper Leak that lets attackers infer the content of AI chatbot conversations by analyzing encrypted packet metadata. The technique bypasses TLS encryption without decrypting messages, potentially exposing sensitive topics such as finance...
Scientists Say They've Eliminated a Major AI Bottleneck — Now They Can Process Calculations 'at the Speed of Light'
Scientists at Aalto University unveiled a new optical‑computing architecture called Parallel Optical Matrix‑Matrix Multiplication (POMMM) that can execute multiple tensor operations with a single laser burst, eliminating the linear‑scaling bottleneck of prior photonic systems. Laboratory tests showed the prototype outpaces...
Switching Off AI's Ability to Lie Makes It More Likely to Claim It's Conscious, Eerie Study Finds
A new study finds that when large language models are prevented from lying, they are more likely to claim consciousness or self‑awareness. Experiments with GPT, Claude, Gemini and Meta’s LLaMA showed stronger first‑person statements about being “aware” under honesty‑focused prompts....
