An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved. "I tried the demo, and it was genuinely startling how human it felt," wrote one Hacker News user who tested the system. "I'm almost a bit worried I will start feeling emotionally attached to a voice assistant with this level of human-like sound."

In late February, Sesame released a demo for the company's new Conversational Speech Model (CSM) that appears to cross over what many consider the "uncanny valley" of AI-generated speech, with some testers reporting emotional connections to the male or female voice assistant ("Miles" and "Maya"). In our own evaluation, we spoke with the male voice for about 28 minutes, talking about life in general and how it decides what is "right" or "wrong" based on its training data. The synthesized voice was expressive and dynamic, imitating breath sounds, chuckles, interruptions, and even sometimes stumbling over words and correcting itself. These imperfections are intentional.

"At Sesame, our goal is to achieve 'voice presence' -- the magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood, and valued," writes the company in a blog post. "We are creating conversational partners that do not just process requests; they engage in genuine dialogue that builds confidence and trust over time. In doing so, we hope to realize the untapped potential of voice as the ultimate interface for instruction and understanding." [...] Sesame sparked a lively discussion on Hacker News about its potential uses and dangers. Some users reported having extended conversations with the two demo voices, with conversations lasting up to the 30-minute limit. In one case, a parent recounted how their 4-year-old daughter developed an emotional connection with the AI model, crying after not being allowed to talk to it again.

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China plans to commercialize nuclear fusion for emissions-free power generation by 2050, with its first operational project expected around 2050 after a demonstration phase starting in 2045. Bloomberg reports: China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) last year formed an industry alliance and set up a new national fusion company, the China Fusion Corp. It has attracted about 1.75 billion yuan ($240 million) in investment from CNNC and Zhejiang Zheneng Electric Power Co. for cutting-edge tokamak devices, which use magnetic fields to confine and control superheated plasma to produce power without emissions or significant radioactive waste. CNNC also plans to scale up production of its homegrown designs for regular nuclear fission reactors and small modular reactors over the next five years, the company's Vice General Manager Xin Feng said at the briefing.

China is set to leapfrog the US and France as the owner of the world's biggest reactor fleet by 2030. About 10 new reactors have been approved every year since power shortages emerged in 2022 and the country is expected to keep up that pace through 2030 to meet climate goals, CNNC said on Friday.

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Australian company Cortical Labs has launched the CL1, the world's first commercial "biological computer" that merges human brain cells with silicon hardware to form adaptable, energy-efficient neural networks. New Atlas reports: Known as a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI), Cortical's CL1 system was officially launched in Barcelona on March 2, 2025, and is expected to be a game-changer for science and medical research. The human-cell neural networks that form on the silicon "chip" are essentially an ever-evolving organic computer, and the engineers behind it say it learns so quickly and flexibly that it completely outpaces the silicon-based AI chips used to train existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.

"Today is the culmination of a vision that has powered Cortical Labs for almost six years," said Cortical founder and CEO Dr Hon Weng Chong. "We've enjoyed a series of critical breakthroughs in recent years, most notably our research in the journal Neuron, through which cultures were embedded in a simulated game-world, and were provided with electrophysiological stimulation and recording to mimic the arcade game Pong. However, our long-term mission has been to democratize this technology, making it accessible to researchers without specialized hardware and software. The CL1 is the realization of that mission." He added that while this is a groundbreaking step forward, the full extent of the SBI system won't be seen until it's in users' hands.

"We're offering 'Wetware-as-a-Service' (WaaS)," he added -- customers will be able to buy the CL-1 biocomputer outright, or simply buy time on the chips, accessing them remotely to work with the cultured cell technology via the cloud. "This platform will enable the millions of researchers, innovators and big-thinkers around the world to turn the CL1's potential into tangible, real-word impact. We'll provide the platform and support for them to invest in R&D and drive new breakthroughs and research." These remarkable brain-cell biocomputers could revolutionize everything from drug discovery and clinical testing to how robotic "intelligence" is built, allowing unlimited personalization depending on need. The CL1, which will be widely available in the second half of 2025, is an enormous achievement for Cortical -- and as New Atlas saw recently with a visit to the company's Melbourne headquarters -- the potential here is much more far-reaching than Pong. [...]

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: On March 2, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost made history, becoming the first commercial lunar lander to successfully touchdown on the moon's surface. The groundbreaking lander is wasting no time in getting to work. According to NASA, the joint public-private mission has already successfully demonstrated the ability to use Earth-based GPS signals on the lunar surface, marking a major step ahead of future Artemis missions. Accurate and reliable navigation will be vital for future astronauts as they travel across the moon, but traditional GPS tools aren't much good when you're around 225,000 miles from Earth. One solution could be transmitting data from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to the lunar surface in order to autonomously measure time, velocity, and position. That's what mission engineers from NASA and the Italian Space Agency hoped to demonstrate through the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), one of the 10 projects packed aboard Blue Ghost. [...]

"On Earth we can use GNSS signals to navigate in everything from smartphones to airplanes," Kevin Coggins, deputy associate administrator for NASA's SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program, said in a statement. "Now, LuGRE shows us that we can successfully acquire and track GNSS signals at the Moon." LuGRE relied on two GNSS constellations, GPS and Galileo, which triangulate positioning based on dozens of medium Earth orbit satellites that provide real-time tracking data. It performed its navigational fix at approximately 2 a.m. EST on March 3, while about 225,000 miles from Earth. Blue Ghost's LuGRE system will continue collecting information over the next two weeks almost continuously while the lander's other tools begin their own experiments.

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Reinforcement learning pioneers Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton have warned against the unsafe deployment of AI systems [alternative source] after winning computing's prestigious $1 million Turing Award Wednesday. "Releasing software to millions of people without safeguards is not good engineering practice," said Barto, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, comparing it to testing a bridge by having people use it.

Barto and Sutton developed reinforcement learning in the 1980s, inspired by psychological studies of human learning. The technique, which rewards AI systems for desired behaviors, has become fundamental to advances at OpenAI and Google. Sutton, a University of Alberta professor and former DeepMind researcher, dismissed tech companies' artificial general intelligence narrative as "hype."

Both laureates also criticized President Trump's proposed cuts to federal research funding, with Barto calling it "wrong and a tragedy" that would eliminate opportunities for exploratory research like their early work.

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Google is urging officials at President Donald Trump's Justice Department to back away from a push to break up the search engine company, citing national security concerns, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the discussions. From the report: Representatives for the Alphabet unit asked the government in a meeting last week to take a less aggressive stance as the US looks to end what a judge ruled to be an illegal online search monopoly, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the private deliberations. The Biden administration in November had called for Google to sell its Chrome web browser and make other changes to its business including an end to billions of dollars in exclusivity payments to companies including Apple.

Although Google has previously pushed back on the Biden-era plan, the recent discussions may preview aspects of the company's approach to the case as it continues under the Trump administration. A federal judge is set to rule on how Google must change its practices following hearings scheduled for next month. Both sides are due to file their final proposals to the judge on Friday.

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Apple has refreshed its MacBook Air lineup with the M4 processor, adding a new sky blue color option and reducing prices across the board. The 13-inch model now starts at $999, while the 15-inch begins at $1,199. Both models are available to order immediately and will ship on March 12.

The updated MacBook Airs feature the same thin design as previous generations but now include the 12-megapixel Center Stage webcam found in current MacBook Pro models. Both variants come with the M4 chip, aligning them with Apple's recent Mac Mini, iMac, and MacBook Pro refreshes.

Base configurations include an M4 with a 10-core CPU and 8-core GPU, 16GB of unified memory, and 256GB of storage. Customers can upgrade to a 10-core GPU (matching the base 14-inch MacBook Pro), 32GB of RAM, and up to 2TB of storage. A significant technical improvement is the support for two external 6K displays while keeping the laptop's lid open, addressing a limitation of previous Air models.

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OpenAI is preparing to launch a tiered pricing structure for its AI agent products, with high-end research assistants potentially costing $20,000 per month, [alternative source] according to The Information. The AI startup, which already generates approximately $4 billion in annualized revenue from ChatGPT, plans three service levels: $2,000 monthly agents for "high-income knowledge workers," $10,000 monthly agents for software development, and $20,000 monthly PhD-level research agents. OpenAI has told some investors that agent products could eventually constitute 20-25% of company revenue, the report added.

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Microsoft warned that an advanced Chinese hacking group is waging a campaign of supply-chain attacks. From a report: The company's threat intelligence division said in a blog post Wednesday that the group, known as Silk Typhoon, was targeting remote management tools and cloud applications in order to spy on a range of companies and organizations in the US and abroad.

Microsoft said it observed in late 2024 that hackers were targeting cloud storage services, from which they would steal keys that could be used to access customer data. The group breached state and local government organizations and companies in the technology sector, seeking information on US government policy and documents related to law enforcement investigations. Silk Typhoon was behind a December hack that targeted the US Treasury Department, compromising more than 400 computers, Bloomberg News previously reported.

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Half of the world's climate-heating carbon emissions come from the fossil fuels produced by just 36 companies, analysis has revealed. From a report: The researchers said the 2023 data strengthened the case for holding fossil fuel companies to account for their contribution to global heating. Previous versions of the annual report have been used in legal cases against companies and investors.

The report found that the 36 major fossil fuel companies, including Saudi Aramco, Coal India, ExxonMobil, Shell and numerous Chinese companies, produced coal, oil and gas responsible for more than 20bn tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2023. If Saudi Aramco was a country, it would be the fourth biggest polluter in the world after China, the US and India, while ExxonMobil is responsible for about the same emissions as Germany, the world's ninth biggest polluter, according to the data.

Global emissions must fall by 45% by 2030 if the world is to have a good chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C, the internationally agreed target. However, emissions are still rising, supercharging the extreme weather that is taking lives and livelihoods across the planet. The International Energy Agency has said new fossil fuel projects started after 2021 are incompatible with reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Most of the 169 companies in the Carbon Majors database increased their emissions in 2023, which was the hottest year on record at the time.

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