Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

As Nature reported last week ( Nature https://doi.org/qhbv; 2025), one country is pushing forwards with plans to change that. China is proposing to set up a global body to coordinate the regulation of AI, to be known as the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO). Establishing such a body is in all countries' interests, and governments around the world should get on board.

When Polish endoscopists began using AI to detect cancer, their accuracy improved. But their performance on non-AI procedures got worse. When students used AI to draft SAT-style essays, their creativity initially spiked. Yet those who started with AI-generated ideas showed reduced alpha-wave activity (a marker of creative flow), " tended to converge on common words and ideas," and their "output was very, very similar" to one another's.

At the Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Services Conference on Tuesday, CFO Denis Coleman discussed the company's recently announced OneGS 3.0 initiative-a multiyear overhaul of its OneGS program aimed at integrating AI throughout the bank's operating model to reduce complexity and boost productivity. The effort is a top priority and will involve every division and function across the firm, from business lines to control functions to engineering, Coleman said. "At its core, it's an effort to drive more scale and more growth," he said.

An open licensing standard that aims to make AI companies pay for the content they vacuum up across the web is now an official specification. Really Simple Licensing 1.0 - or RSL for short - gives publishers the ability to dictate licensing and compensation rules to the web crawlers that visit their sites. The RSL Collective announced the standard in September with backing from Yahoo, Ziff Davis, and O'Reilly Media.

An initiative by a UK-based charity, supported by technology companies and universities, has developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital twin that allows people with communications disabilities to speak in a natural way. The technology, known as VoxAI, represents a step-change from the computer-assisted voice used by late physicist Stephen Hawking, one of the first well-known public figures with motor neurone disease (MND).

Ryan Li has long been steeped in the worlds of both AI and crypto. He started working with AI about ten years ago as an undergrad at UC Berkeley and has since built two crypto startups. That experience has led him to conclude that popular AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity give rise to far too many hallucinations about crypto-and that those errors can cost traders millions, if not billions, of dollars.

TSMC is the other. TSMC is using its 3nm process, reportedly, while Samsung will do a 2nm as a litmus test for the process. The different versions are due to the fact that 'they translate designs to physical form differently,' CEO Elon Musk said recently. The goal is for the two to operate identically, obviously, which is a challenge. Some might remember Apple's A9 'Chipgate' saga, which found that the chips differed in performance because of different manufacturers.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the next frontier, Google is surging, and the party scene has gotten completely out of hand. Those were the through lines from this year's NeurIPS in San Diego. NeurIPS, or the "Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems," started in 1987 as a purely academic affair. It has since ballooned alongside the hype around AI into a massive industry event where labs come to recruit and investors come to find the next wave of AI startups.

Jenny Xiao, partner at Leonsis Capital and former researcher at OpenAI, came in with a nuanced take. There's something of a bubble, but it's "relatively contained" in the infrastructure layer with overinvestment primarily in data centers, GPUs and in large language model companies. But right now, there's actually underinvestment in the application layer because there are so many ways AI can make an impact in various enterprises, Xiao said.

It was a distinctly clever, if somewhat surprising, choice from Altman who has mostly kept his personal life out of the media spotlight. But Altman is a salesman, and a good salesman understands the optics of good television. So he talked about being a dad and being worried that his son-who wasn't crawling at six months-was developing slower than other children (spoiler: he's not). "I cannot imagine having gone through, figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT," Altman told Fallon. "People did it for a long time, no problem. So clearly it was possible, but I have relied on it so much."

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested in AI, OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman became the face of AI, and billion-dollar AI companies seem to be minted at will. As an early investor in OpenAI, Microsoft has been changed as much as any company by the genAI revolution. The tech giant's value has skyrocketed to between $3 trillion and $4 trillion depending on the day, and it's become the premiere AI firm in the world.

Some days, starting feels effortless. A clear challenge or opportunity presents itself, an idea crystallizes, and then contracts into a single coherent thought. Today, frankly? That's not happening. I'm staring at a pristine white canvas while the cursor mocks me. That uncomfortable space-the blinking cursor, the first messy draft, the false starts-isn't a nuisance. It's where creativity lives. Today, the temptation is to skip past all that.

"We had a clear choice - be the last airline built on legacy technology or be the first built on the platforms that will define the next decade of aviation," said Adam Boukadida, chief financial officer of Riyadh Air. "With IBM, we've stripped out 50 years of legacy in a single stroke. Riyadh Air isn't just built for today; it's built for the future and creating a pathway for many airlines to follow in the years to come."

AWS kicked off re:Invent 2025 with a defensive urgency that is unusual for the cloud leader, arriving in Las Vegas under pressure to prove it can still set the agenda for enterprise AI. With Microsoft and Google tightening their grip on CIOs' mindshare through integrated AI stacks and workflow-ready agent platforms, AWS CEO Matt Garman and his lieutenants rolled out new chips, models, and platform enhancements,

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (who has dubbed himself Secretary of War, though the name has not been legally changed by Congress) promised that the platform "puts the worlds [sic] most powerful frontier AI models directly into the hands of every American warrior" and will "make our fighting force more lethal than ever before." In a video, Hegseth says that "the future of American warfare is here, and it's spelled A-I."