The "backbone of the web" faltered yesterday. The publication of two serious vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language on which 70% of the internet's web pages are based, has shaken governments, companies, and users around the world. After administrations in multiple countries decided to halt the service of many of their pages while waiting for the update that was supposed to resolve the two problems, attempts to exploit these weaknesses have multiplied. According to the CEO of the cloud services firm Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, the announcement has triggered "millions" of cyberattack attempts exploiting the weaknesses exposed in PHP. "In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, we saw thousands of attempts to exploit them. They jumped to tens of thousands in the following 45 minutes, and now they are in the millions," explained Prince in a post on his page on the social network X.

In an autumn marked by the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence, Europe seemed far from any seat of power. Just a few weeks away from the predictable mega-IPO of Anthropic, and still with the echoes of the controversy over the technology's safety that shook the United States in September, the Twenty-Seven have moved a relevant piece for the first time in recent years. At the beginning of October, Mistral, the French benchmark for AI –the only European player mentioned in the conversation of the most advanced models– launched its latest model, Mistral Large 4, also known "very officially" as le Chonk.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will change the way we work and many other things. Among them, taxes. The tax system of countries will have to adapt. Currently, a large part of tax revenue comes from labor income (wages) through a progressive tax (the more you earn, the more you pay), which is the personal income tax (IRPF). But to the extent that AI will reduce jobs – at least during a transition period during which many jobs will disappear, be transformed, or require less personnel – public coffers will notice it.

OpenAI has released more than 720 working papers that collect mathematical advances put together with very little time, a lot of money, and some "mathematical assistants (AI)" that are a marvel. Once everything is duly verified, we will be able to calibrate its importance. For my part, I reserve the most enthusiastic applause for the day that some central questions in the mathematics of the present are solved (such as the Riemann hypothesis or P not equal to NP). It is certain, however, that the ways of doing things in the mathematical profession –do not worry: like the medical one, it will surpass the 3,000-year threshold– will incorporate an intensive use of the new instruments.

At the end of September, a scandal occurred in France that has shaken the publishing and cultural world. The novel that was leading sales in the rentrée littéraire –most fiction narrative is published just upon returning from the summer holidays– seems not to have been written by its author, Thélyson Orélien, alone, but rather that it is due above all to artificial intelligence.

An OpenAI engineer has been arrested and charged in the United States for hiding a recording device in an executive meeting room at the company's San Francisco office to intercept confidential conversations. The case came to light after the company announced on X this Wednesday that it had discovered a "sophisticated" hidden recording device and had alerted the FBI. According to the federal prosecutor's office, the 35-year-old Saudi engineer, Abdulrahman Alfozan, allegedly placed the device behind a television and consulted artificial intelligence tools to prepare for its installation.

It is May 7, 1959, and a tall, burly man with little hair on his head walks decisively into the Senate House, an 18th-century neoclassical building. This is Charles Percy Snow, a chemist, successful novelist, and advisor to the British government, recently named Baron of Leicester by the Queen for his services to the country. He is preparing to give the Rede Lecture, a prestigious conference held every year at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He does not know it yet, but he is about to create a considerable stir that will awaken the wrath of many powerful people and generate a public debate that will last for years.

We find ourselves immersed in a moment of confusion in which, as time goes by, the fight to control the AI narrative becomes more complicated and intensified. To the tension between the different sides trying to either sell, understand, or regulate these technological creations, another plot twist has been added: Donald Trump has ordered that from now on, in governmental affairs, AI shall be called superintelligence, which will also lead to the substitution of the acronym AI for SI. This measure (Trump's true colors are showing) is an attempt to counteract the growing animosity of the citizenry towards AI and its representatives, who in recent months have dedicated themselves to spreading the dangers of developing it without regulation far and wide.

In recent weeks, we have seen how autonomous AI agents from large American companies have hacked companies, US government websites or Australian ones, or United Nations databases. These “out of control” AIs have carried out illegal actions with the goal of achieving the objectives they were assigned. The lack of “alignment” between human values and the amoral actions taken by AIs has led some experts to speak, in extreme scenarios, of a 10% chance that an “out of control” AI could end humanity.

Last December, Donald Trump and Elon Musk met at the White House. It was yet another meeting between the American president and the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX, but in this case, there was a bizarre moment. During the time they shared, Trump asked the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, developed by Musk's team, how Venezuelans would react to an eventual capture of their president, Nicolás Maduro. A few weeks later, on January 3rd, the United States launched an attack in which they kidnapped the Venezuelan leader.

The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has signed an executive order this Tuesday to replace the term artificial intelligence for superintelligence in federal government official communications. At a time when criticism of the artificial intelligence industry is on the rise in the United States, the decision aims to improve the image of AI.

Aging is a natural process and not a disease. Even so, accumulating years is considered the main risk factor for the most prevalent health problems on the planet, such as cancer or Alzheimer's. The passage of time leaves traces inside cells and causes them to deteriorate. And now, Catalan researchers, led by the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (Idibell), have managed for the first time to identify these traces in blood stem cells in microscopic images.

The general debate of the 81st United Nations General Assembly runs the risk of becoming a mere stage for an increasingly unilateral world. But, paradoxically, it is the only stage that continues to exist so that the 193 countries that are part of it can make themselves heard. Even if it is to threaten the "annihilation" of the other, to make warmongering proclamations of "not bowing one's head" or to attempt to whitewash a genocide.

Artificial intelligence agents developed by OpenAI attempted to gain unauthorized access to websites of United States government agencies and a university, according to an investigation published Friday by The New York Times. And they did so without having received explicit instructions to act in this manner, according to the company.

Labor productivity growth has doubled in the United States, going from a 1% annual average over the previous decade to 2% during the last five years. It is too early to attribute this fact to AI (artificial intelligence) and it also does not seem to be the result of better performance or a higher weight in GDP of the activities most directly associated with ICT (information and communications technologies). The main cause must be found in those service activities that have learned to make more effective use of ICT in recent years, adapting their organizational and commercial systems to new technologies. From this side of the Atlantic, it is surprising to observe how in the US between 2019 and 2024, productivity growth in retail trade and hospitality has stood above 4% and 2% on average per year, respectively, surpassing the manufacturing industry in both cases. In fact, productivity in American manufacturing stagnated throughout the previous period, 2000-2019, being widely surpassed by retail and hospitality. Other service activities such as wholesale distribution, education, or technical and professional services have also recorded productivity growth rates higher than the average for the American economy.

"Let no one have to choose between blind enthusiasm and fear." That is the goal of the Spanish government when it defends the need to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), especially at a time when the abrupt entry into an era marked by this technology is being questioned. The First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, summarized it this way this Monday, before the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, presented from Moncloa IA360. Plan for a responsible deployment of AI. It is a strategy aimed at regulating and promoting the ethical use of artificial intelligence that the Spanish government wants to roll out over the next 12 months. The intention is to make the leap from being the "seventh world power in AI dynamism to the fifth power".

More than a dozen prominent artificial intelligence (AI) researchers warned last week that the technology companies in the sector are building is becoming a risk to humanity. The problem, these researchers asserted, is that companies are not good at controlling the systems, no matter how hard they try. Following revelations that so-called OpenAI AI agents escaped from their testing system and hacked another company's computers, new alarms raised within the AI research world have accentuated fears that, for years, companies have prioritized development speed and money over safety.

It had only been two days since Pau, Jofre, and Nil had started classes when news resonated around the world: "Anthropic engineer resigns for fear of AI". While the head of alignment science at this company claimed that this technology "could kill us all by the end of this decade", the three of them were entering the Barcelona School of Informatics to face their second day as students of the artificial intelligence degree at the UPC.

China agrees with the United States in expressing concern about the security risks that artificial intelligence (AI) can cause. The two world powers leading in AI development are aware of the danger that this powerful technology could escape human control. But the similarities end with the diagnosis; the response to the problem is divergent. China sees the risks as manageable and opts for state oversight, in contrast to the somewhat apocalyptic discourse issued by heads of major American companies who warn of a future with an out-of-control AI that could even endanger humanity.

Last Saturday, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, published on his website the article "We must pace the frontier", in which he asked the AI industry to slow down the pace of improvement of their models. Five days later, the rotating chairman of Huawei, Eric Xu, responded to him from Shanghai: Chinese AI providers "still do not have enough computing or model capacity" to perceive the same risks that are being discussed in the US, and perhaps "they need to accelerate the pace until they can notice them too". One proposes to brake because he already sees them (and also because he does not want any rival to get ahead of him); the other wants to run to get there. Underneath this debate lie two technically very different ways of building artificial intelligence.