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Category: robotics/AI – Page 164

Vo1d malware botnet grows to 1.6 million Android TVs worldwide

A new variant of the Vo1d malware botnet has grown to 1,590,299 infected Android TV devices across 226 countries, recruiting devices as part of anonymous proxy server networks.

This is according to an investigation by Xlab, which has been tracking the new campaign since last November, reporting that the botnet peaked on January 14, 2025, and currently has 800,000 active bots.

In September 2024, Dr. Web antivirus researchers found 1.3 million devices across 200 countries compromised by Vo1d malware via an unknown infection vector.

Microsoft names cybercriminals behind AI deepfake network

Microsoft has named multiple threat actors part of a cybercrime gang accused of developing malicious tools capable of bypassing generative AI guardrails to generate celebrity deepfakes and other illicit content.

An updated complaint identifies the individuals as Arian Yadegarnia from Iran (aka ‘Fiz’), Alan Krysiak of the United Kingdom (aka ‘Drago’), Ricky Yuen from Hong Kong, China (aka ‘cg-dot’), and Phát Phùng Tấn of Vietnam (aka ‘Asakuri’).

As the company explained today, these threat actors are key members of a global cybercrime gang that it tracks as Storm-2139.

A vectorial code for semantics in human hippocampus

As we listen to speech, our brains actively compute the meaning of individual words. Inspired by the success of large language models (LLMs), we hypothesized that the brain employs vectorial coding principles, such that meaning is reflected in distributed activity of single neurons. We recorded responses of hundreds of neurons in the human hippocampus, which has a well-established role in semantic coding, while participants listened to narrative speech. We find encoding of contextual word meaning in the simultaneous activity of neurons whose individual selectivities span multiple unrelated semantic categories. Like embedding vectors in semantic models, distance between neural population responses correlates with semantic distance; however, this effect was only observed in contextual embedding models (like BERT) and was reversed in non-contextual embedding models (like Word2Vec), suggesting that the semantic distance effect depends critically on contextualization. Moreover, for the subset of highly semantically similar words, even contextual embedders showed an inverse correlation between semantic and neural distances; we attribute this pattern to the noise-mitigating benefits of contrastive coding. Finally, in further support for the critical role of context, we find that range of neural responses covaries with lexical polysemy. Ultimately, these results support the hypothesis that semantic coding in the hippocampus follows vectorial principles.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Creating a common language

Kaiming He, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, believes AI can create a common language that lowers barriers between scientific fields and fosters collaboration across scientific disciplines.

“There is no way I could ever understand high-energy physics, chemistry, or the frontier of biology research, but now we are seeing something that can help us to break these walls,” said He.

MIT Associate Professor Kaiming He discusses the role of AI in interdisciplinary collaborations, connecting basic science to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks.

By 2030, AI Could Replace Three Hundred Million Jobs Globally

The question is, can DEI proponents, who are already being marginalized, retool? Can they see themselves as champions who will guide humanity — regardless of peoples’ race, class, sexual orientation, gender, etc. — in this Fourth Industrial Revolution?

For, if political leaders are as unable as they seem to establish meaningful guardrails, AI will push those struggling to live their best lives (a right that should belong to all) to be thrown so far under the bus that roadkill will be more recognizable.

Humanoid robots enter full-scale commercial production in China

A robotic labor force.

Engineering companies in China have begun the process of starting full-scale mass production of humanoid robots in anticipation of a commercial boom in 2025. Companies such as Shanghai Zhiyuan Innovation Technology (AgiBot) and Shanghai Kepler Robot Company have already been testing the robots to optimize performance while reducing production costs.

Meta In Talks To Raise $35 Billion For Data Center With Financing Led By Apollo Global

In today’s AI news, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and other leading social media platforms, is looking to raise as much as $35 Billion to build data centers in the US. Apollo Global Management Inc., an alternative asset manager has discussed providing a major part of the financing, said the people, who asked not to be identified. KKR & Co. is also a part of the investor group.

In other advancements, With so much software now getting written by AI, having a window into its security can be a challenge. That’s the premise of Archipelo, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup that is today emerging from stealth with $12 Million in funding. Archipelo’s pitch is that it has a platform for “Developer Security Posture Management” (DevSPM).

S integration with Suno, you can turn simple, creative requests into songs. ‘ + And, In its annual letter, payments giant Stripe declared that it was “seeing an AI boom” with its data, revealing that artificial intelligence startups are growing more rapidly than traditional SaaS companies have historically. In a chart, Stripe showed that the top 100 AI companies were able to achieve $5 million in annualized revenue in 24 months in 2024 compared to the top 100 SaaS companies taking 37 months.

In videos, ever wondered how to enhance your AI performance? IBM’s Susan Eickhoff shows how to boost AI performance using an ensemble of models, combining traditional AI and large language models. Learn structured data analysis and dynamic prediction methods.

And, since its launch in 2020, Project Aria has propelled research across the world to advance the state of the art in machine perception and AI, through access to cutting-edge research hardware and open-source datasets, models, and tooling. Today, Meta is excited to announce the next step in this journey: the introduction of Aria Gen 2 glasses.

Then, join Dr. Ben Armstrong Executive Director, MIT Industrial Performance Center at the 2025 MIT Bangkok Symposium for an insightful session entitled Positive-Sum Automation & Artificial Intelligence. MIT’s working group on Generative AI and the Work of the Future is studying how dozens of large companies are adopting generative AI to improve productivity…

S largest model to date. Chen speaks about what the new model says about the AI scaling wall, how scaling traditional GPT models compares to reasoning models. + Thats all for today, but AI is moving fast — like, comment, follow, and subscribe for more AI news!

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Claude 3.7 Sonnet Takes Back the AI Crown—Here’s How it Stands Against the Rest

In our creative writing tests—designed to measure how well these models craft engaging stories that actually make sense—Claude 3.7 delivered narratives with more human-like language and better overall structure than its competitors.

Think of these tests as measuring how useful these models might be for scriptwriters or novelists working through writer’s block.

While the gap between Grok-3, Claude 3.5, and Claude 3.7 isn’t massive, the difference proved enough to give Anthropic’s new model a subjective edge.