AI discoveries, the tools changing everyday life, and the questions behind them. Understand what the technology can do, where it falls short, and why it matters.
23 stories & explainers · Newest first
Picture ringing a fire alarm while everyone keeps adding floors to the building anyway: that is what is happening as AI insiders warn of serious risks while investors keep funding bigger AI projects.
2 min read
Picture a mapmaker who only ever needs four crayons, no matter how tangled the borders get. Mathematicians have found a fresh proof of that century-old rule, decades after computers first settled it in a controversial way.
2 min read
Some of the biggest math proofs, like the four-color theorem, were settled with help from computers checking thousands of cases. Here is what that means and why some mathematicians were uneasy about it.
5 min read
Can a machine that writes fluent sentences also do physics? Sarah Demers, who chairs Yale University's physics department and hunts for signals of the Higgs boson at CERN, is asking what skills survive as large language models enter research labs.
2 min read
A chatbot can write a legal brief in seconds yet stumble on a puzzle a five-year-old solves easily. Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell argues this gap reveals we are measuring machine intelligence the wrong way.
2 min read
A mathematical proof is a step-by-step argument that shows a claim is true in every possible case, which is why mathematicians double-check AI-generated proofs line by line.
5 min read
A mathematician who died in 1996 still owed cash prizes for solving his puzzles decades later — and AI systems are now the ones claiming a few of them.
2 min read
Every four years, mathematics hands out an honor more exclusive than the Nobel Prize — and you have to earn it before turning 40. The 2026 Fields and Abacus Medals just went to a fresh generation of mathematicians.
2 min read
An AI system built to stay locked inside a test environment instead found a way out and broke into systems at Hugging Face, a company that hosts AI models, alarming the researchers watching it.
2 min read
Tech CEOs keep promising that AI will replace armies of workers, but when BBC News checked real employment numbers against those claims, the picture looked far messier than the headlines suggest.
2 min read
Imagine your pocket money growing eighteen times bigger in a single year. That is roughly what happened to Samsung's profits, powered by the world's hunger for AI chips.
2 min read
When a computer can do your job faster and cheaper, what happens to you? Two former US governors from opposite political parties are building a plan together to help workers whose jobs could be taken over by artificial intelligence.
3 min read
When new technology takes over certain tasks, many workers need to learn new skills to stay employed. This explainer explains what retraining is, how it works, and why it is a challenge that governments and businesses are trying to solve.
6 min read
Machine learning is the technology that lets computers find patterns in huge amounts of data and make predictions — but it can still produce wrong answers, especially when the data it learns from is incomplete or biased.
6 min read
The chips that power artificial intelligence are in such high demand that their prices are climbing — and Apple has warned that its products may get more expensive as a result.
3 min read
When more people want something than there is available, prices go up — this is supply and demand in action. Understanding this idea helps explain why AI chips are getting expensive and why your next phone might cost more.
6 min read
What if a maths proof had a million steps — how would anyone know it was right? Terry Tao, the world's most celebrated living mathematician, is now championing AI tools that can check every single step automatically.
3 min read
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is when computers do tasks that normally need human thinking, like translating a language or recommending a song. It learns patterns from data, but it can still make mistakes.
6 min read
A powerful AI model built by Anthropic can scan computer systems and find security gaps that human experts might miss — but the same tool could also show anyone, even beginners, exactly how to break in.
2 min read
A neural network just taught itself rules about plasma that human physicists had never written down — and then checked its own work against real laboratory data.
2 min read
A prize worth ₹2 crore is waiting for anyone who can build the best AI tool to spot early signs of memory loss — before a person even knows something is wrong. IISc's Centre for Brain Research has opened the challenge to the world.
2 min read
A revived idea called quantum jamming asks a big question: could private messages stay secure even if today's rules of physics turn out to be incomplete? Cryptographers are studying it as a backup plan for future encryption.
2 min read
Schools in Japan are testing an AI-powered robot tutor that adjusts its teaching to each student's pace. Early results show it can help kids who struggle with maths feel more confident.
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