After weeks of testing, an electronic system for filing returns directly to the IRS is now available for taxpayers from 12 selected states. From a report: The new system, called Direct File, is a free online tool. Taxpayers in the selected states who have very simple W-2s and claim a standard deduction may be eligible to use it this tax season to file their federal income taxes. The program will also offer a Spanish version, which will be available starting at 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday. The Treasury Department estimates that one-third of all federal income tax returns filed could be prepared using Direct File and that 19 million taxpayers may be eligible to use the tool this tax season. "Direct File will offer millions of Americans a free and simple way to file their taxes, with no expensive and unnecessary filing fees and no upselling, putting hundreds of dollars back in the pocket of working families each year, consistent with President Biden's pledge to lower costs," said National Economic Advisor Lael Brainard. Certain taxpayers in Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, Arizona, Massachusetts, California and New York can participate. Direct File can only be used to file federal income taxes, taxpayers from states that require filing state taxes will need to do so separately.

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China unleashed the full might of its solar energy industry last year. It installed more solar panels than the United States has in its history. It cut the wholesale price of panels it sells by nearly half. And its exports of fully assembled solar panels climbed 38 percent while its exports of key components almost doubled. Get ready for an even bigger display of China's solar energy dominance. The New York Times: While the United States and Europe are trying to revive renewable energy production and help companies fend off bankruptcy, China is racing far ahead. At the annual session of China's legislature this week, Premier Li Qiang, the country's second-highest official after Xi Jinping, announced that the country would accelerate the construction of solar panel farms as well as wind and hydroelectric projects. With China's economy stumbling, the ramped-up spending on renewable energy, mainly solar, is a cornerstone of a big bet on emerging technologies. China's leaders say that a "new trio" of industries -- solar panels, electric cars and lithium batteries -- has replaced an "old trio" of clothing, furniture and appliances. The goal is to help offset a steep slump in China's housing construction sector. China hopes to harness emerging industries like solar power, which Mr. Xi likes to describe as "new productive forces," to re-energize an economy that has slowed for more than a decade. The emphasis on solar power is the latest installment in a two-decade program to make China less dependent on energy imports.

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A anonymous reader shares a report: Personal artificial intelligence assistants that know our health status and legal history inside out. The ability to transfer your data from one place to another seamlessly without any roadblocks. These are just some of the predictions for the future of the web from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, on the 35th anniversary of its invention. [...] Another thing Berners-Lee says might happen in the future is a big tech company being forced to break up. [...] Berners-Lee said he always prefers it when tech companies "do the right thing by themselves" before regulators step in. "That's always been the spirit of the internet." He uses the example of the Data Transfer Initiative, a private initiative that launched in 2018 and is now backed by the likes of Google, Apple, and Meta, to encourage portability of photos, videos and other data between their platforms. "Maybe the companies were prompted a bit by the possibility of regulation," Berners-Lee said. "But this was an independent thing." However, he added: "Things are changing so quickly. AI is changing very, very quickly. There are monopolies in AI. Monopolies changed pretty quickly back in the web. Maybe at some point in the future, agencies will have to work to break up big companies, but we don't know which company that will be."

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Contributors from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, writing for BrowserBench: Since the initial version of the Speedometer benchmark was released in 2014 by the WebKit team, it has become a key tool for browser engines to drive performance optimizations as users and developers continue to demand richer and smoother experiences online. We're proud to release Speedometer 3.0 today as a collaborative effort between the three major browser engines: Blink, Gecko, and WebKit. Like previous releases (Speedometer 2 in 2018 and Speedometer 1 in 2014), it's designed to measure web application responsiveness by simulating user interactions on real web pages. Today's release of Speedometer 3.0 marks a major step forward in web browser performance testing: it introduces a better way of measuring performance and a more representative set of tests that reflect the modern Web. This is the first time the Speedometer benchmark, or any major browser benchmark, has been developed through a cross-industry collaboration supported by each major browser engine: Blink/V8, Gecko/SpiderMonkey, and WebKit/JavaScriptCore. It's been developed under a new governance model, driven by consensus, and is hosted in a shared repository that's open to contribution. This new structure involves a lot of collective effort: discussions, research, debates, decisions, and hundreds of PRs since we announced the project in December 2022. Speedometer 3 adds many new tests. We started designing this new benchmark by identifying some key scenarios and user interactions that we felt were important for browsers to optimize. In particular, we added new tests that simulate rendering canvas and SVG charts (React Stockcharts, Chart.js, Perf Dashboard, and Observable Plot), code editing (CodeMirror), WYSIWYG editing (TipTap), and reading news sites (Next.js and Nuxt.js).

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Apple is planning to make further changes in EU countries to allow some developers to distribute their iOS apps directly from a website. From a report: The new web distribution feature will be available with a software update "later this spring," according to Apple, providing developers with a key new way to distribute iOS apps in EU markets without the need for a separate app store -- as long as they're willing to adhere to Apple's strict rules. While Apple is opening up iOS to more third-party apps here, these are still some key security protections around how apps are distributed via websites -- namely, you'll still have to work within the strict Apple app development ecosystem.

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None of the big oil and gas producers surrounding the North Sea plan to stop drilling soon enough to meet the 1.5C (2.7F) global heating target, a report has found. From a report: The five countries -- the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark -- have failed to align their oil and gas policies with their climate promises under the Paris agreement, according to the campaign group Oil Change International. North Sea governments must act urgently, said Silje Ask Lundberg from Oil Change International, who co-wrote the report. "Failure to address these issues not only undermines international climate goals, but also jeopardises the liveability of our planet." The report found that policies in Norway and the UK were furthest from the Paris climate agreement because the countries were "aggressively" exploring and licensing new oil and gas fields. In 2021, the International Energy Agency found there was no room for new oil exploration in its pathway to net zero emissions.

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According to a new analysis of the subscription app economy from mobile subscription toolkit provider RevenueCat, the top 5% of apps generate 200 times the revenue of the bottom quartile after their first year, while the median monthly revenue an app generates after 12 months is under $50 USD. From a report: The "State of Subscription Apps" report offers a bird's-eye view into the subscription app universe, as RevenueCat has nearly 30,000 apps using its platform's tools to manage their monetization. Outside of Apple and Google, that makes RevenueCat the largest collection of subscription app developers on one platform. This report specifically looks at data from over 29,000 apps and over 18,000 developers who collectively generate over $6.7 billion in tracked revenue and have over 290 million subscribers. After crunching its data, the company found that only 17.2% of apps will reach even $1,000 in monthly revenue, but after they hit that point, the odds of them growing further increase.

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A six-week audit by the Federal Aviation Administration of Boeing's production of the 737 Max jet found dozens of problems (non-paywalled link) throughout the manufacturing process at the plane maker and one of its key suppliers, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times. From the report: The air-safety regulator initiated the examination after a door panel blew off a 737 Max 9 during an Alaska Airlines flight in early January. Last week, the agency announced that the audit had found "multiple instances" in which Boeing and the supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, failed to comply with quality-control requirements, though it did not provide specifics about the findings. The presentation reviewed by The Times, though highly technical, offers a more detailed picture of what the audit turned up. Since the Alaska Airlines episode, Boeing has come under intense scrutiny over its quality-control practices, and the findings add to the body of evidence about manufacturing lapses at the company. For the portion of the examination focused on Boeing, the F.A.A. conducted 89 product audits, a type of review that looks at aspects of the production process. The plane maker passed 56 of the audits and failed 33 of them, with a total of 97 instances of alleged noncompliance, according to the presentation. The F.A.A. also conducted 13 product audits for the part of the inquiry that focused on Spirit AeroSystems, which makes the fuselage, or body, of the 737 Max. Six of those audits resulted in passing grades, and seven resulted in failing ones, the presentation said. At one point during the examination, the air-safety agency observed mechanics at Spirit using a hotel key card to check a door seal, according to a document that describes some of the findings. That action was "not identified/documented/called-out in the production order," the document said.

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Google is restricting AI chatbot Gemini from answering questions about the global elections set to happen this year, the Alphabet-owned firm said on Tuesday, as it looks to avoid potential missteps in the deployment of the technology. From a report: The update comes at a time when advancements in generative AI, including image and video generation, have fanned concerns of misinformation and fake news among the public, prompting governments to regulate the technology. When asked about elections such as the upcoming U.S. presidential match-up between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, Gemini responds with "I'm still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search". Google had announced restrictions within the U.S. in December, saying they would come into effect ahead of the election. "In preparation for the many elections happening around the world in 2024 and out of an abundance of caution, we are restricting the types of election-related queries for which Gemini will return responses," a company spokesperson said on Tuesday.

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A new startup called Cognition AI can turn a user's prompt into a website or video game. From a report: A new installment of Silicon Valley's most exciting game, Are We in a Bubble?!, has begun. This time around the game's premise hinges on whether AI technology is poised to change the world as the consumer internet did -- or even more dramatically -- or peter out and leave us with some advances but not a new global economy. This game isn't easy to play, and the available data points often prove more confusing than enlightening. Take the case of Cognition AI Inc. You almost certainly have not heard of this startup, in part because it's been trying to keep itself secret and in part because it didn't even officially exist as a corporation until two months ago. And yet this very, very young company, whose 10-person staff has been splitting time between Airbnbs in Silicon Valley and home offices in New York, has raised $21 million from Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund and other brand-name investors, including former Twitter executive Elad Gil. They're betting on Cognition AI's team and its main invention, which is called Devin. Devin is a software development assistant in the vein of Copilot, which was built by GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, but, like, a next-level software development assistant. Instead of just offering coding suggestions and autocompleting some tasks, Devin can take on and finish an entire software project on its own. To put it to work, you give it a job -- "Create a website that maps all the Italian restaurants in Sydney," say -- and the software performs a search to find the restaurants, gets their addresses and contact information, then builds and publishes a site displaying the information. As it works, Devin shows all the tasks it's performing and finds and fixes bugs on its own as it tests the code being written. The founders of Cognition AI are Scott Wu, its chief executive officer; Steven Hao, the chief technology officer; and Walden Yan, the chief product officer. Hao was most recently one of the top engineers at Scale AI, a richly valued startup that helps train AI systems. Yan, until recently at Harvard University, requested that his status at the school be left ambiguous because he hasn't yet had the talk with his parents.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're confused about what makes a PC an "AI PC," you're not alone. But finally have something of an answer: if it packs a GPU, a processor that boasts a neural processing unit and can handle VNNI and Dp4a instructions, it qualifies -- at least according to Robert Hallock, Intel's senior director of technical marketing. As luck would have it, that combo is present in Intel's current-generation desktop processors -- 14th-gen Core, aka Core Ultra, aka "Meteor Lake." All models feature a GPU, NPU, and can handle Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI) that speed some -- surprise! -- neural networking tasks, and the DP4a instructions that help GPUs to process video. Because AI PCs are therefore just PCs with current processors, Intel doesn't consider "AI PC" to be a brand that denotes conformity with a spec or a particular capability not present in other PCs. Intel used the "Centrino" brand to distinguish Wi-Fi-enabled PCs, and did likewise by giving home entertainment PCs the "Viiv" moniker. Chipzilla still uses the tactic with "vPro" -- a brand that denotes processors that include manageability and security for business users. But AI PCs are neither a brand nor a spec. "The reason we have not created a category for it like Centrino is we believe this is simply what a PC will be like in four or five years time," Hallock told The Register, adding that Intel's recipe for an AI PC doesn't include specific requirements for memory, storage, or I/O speeds. "There are cases where a very large LLM might require 32GB of RAM," he noted. "Everything else will fit comfortably in a 16GB system."

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China is using AI in the operation of its 45,000km (28,000-mile) high-speed rail network, with the technology achieving several milestones, according to engineers involved in the project. From a report: An AI system in Beijing is processing vast amounts of real-time data from across the country and can alert maintenance teams of abnormal situations within 40 minutes, with an accuracy as high as 95 per cent, they said in a peer-reviewed paper. "This helps on-site teams conduct reinspections and repairs as quickly as possible," wrote Niu Daoan, a senior engineer at the China State Railway Group's infrastructure inspection centre, in the paper published by the academic journal China Railway. In the past year, none of China's operational high-speed railway lines received a single warning that required speed reduction due to major track irregularity issues, while the number of minor track faults decreased by 80 per cent compared to the previous year. According to the paper, the amplitude of rail movement caused by strong winds also decreased -- even on massive valley-spanning bridges -- with the application of AI technology. [...] According to the paper, after years of effort Chinese railway scientists and engineers have "solved challenges" in comprehensive risk perception, equipment evaluation, and precise trend predictions in engineering, power supply and telecommunications. The result was "scientific support for achieving proactive safety prevention and precise infrastructure maintenance for high-speed railways," the engineers said.

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Swedish music streaming company Spotify is rolling out full-length music videos in a limited beta launch for premium subscribers, venturing into an arena that YouTube has dominated for nearly two decades. From a report: Music videos will be available to premium users in the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya, in beta starting on Wednesday, the company said, as it attempts to grow its user base. While it aims to reach 1 billion users by 2030, Spotify's new plan faces competition from Apple Music and Alphabet's YouTube, which allows users to watch music videos for free.

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European lawmakers approved the world's most comprehensive legislation yet on AI (non-paywalled link), setting out sweeping rules for developers of AI systems and new restrictions on how the technology can be used. From a report: The European Parliament on Wednesday voted to give final approval to the law after reaching a political agreement last December with European Union member states. The rules, which are set to take effect gradually over several years, ban certain AI uses, introduce new transparency rules and require risk assessments for AI systems that are deemed high-risk. The law comes amid a broader global debate about the future of AI and its potential risks and benefits as the technology is increasingly adopted by companies and consumers. Elon Musk recently sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman for allegedly breaking the company's founding agreement by prioritizing profit over AI's benefits for humanity. Altman has said AI should be developed with great caution and offers immense commercial possibilities. The new legislation applies to AI products in the EU market, regardless of where they were developed. It is backed by fines of up to 7% of a company's worldwide revenue. The AI Act is "the first regulation in the world that is putting a clear path towards a safe and human-centric development of AI," said Brando Benifei, an EU lawmaker from Italy who helped lead negotiations on the law. The law still needs final approval from EU member states, but that process is expected to be a formality since they already gave the legislation their political endorsement. While the law only applies in the EU it is expected to have a global impact because large AI companies are unlikely to want to forgo access to the bloc, which has a population of about 448 million people. Other jurisdictions could also use the new law as a model for their AI regulations, contributing to a wider ripple effect.

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The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill on Wednesday that would give TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance about six months to divest the U.S. assets of the short-video app used by about 170 million Americans or face a ban. From a report: The bill passed 352-65, with bipartisan support, but it faces a more uncertain path in the Senate where some favor a different approach to regulating foreign-owned apps that could pose security concerns. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not indicated how he plans to proceed. TikTok's fate has become a major issue in Washington. Democratic and Republican lawmakers said their offices had received large volumes of calls from teenaged TikTok users who oppose the legislation, with the volume of complaints at times exceeding the number of calls seeking a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The measure is also the latest in a series of moves in Washington to respond to U.S. national security concerns about China, from connected vehicles to advanced artificial intelligence chips to cranes at U.S. ports. The vote comes just over a week since the bill was proposed following one public hearing with little debate, and after action in Congress had stalled for more than a year. Last month, President Joe Biden's re-election campaign joined TikTok, raising hopes among TikTok officials that legislation was unlikely this year.

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Rates of more than a dozen cancers are increasing among adults under 50 worldwide, with the number of early-onset cancer cases predicted to rise by around 30% between 2019 and 2030. Investigators are searching for explanations, considering factors such as obesity, early-cancer screening, gut microbiome, and tumor genomes. Despite increased screening and awareness, mortality from early-onset cancers has risen by nearly 28% between 1990 and 2019 globally.

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Will Knight, writing for Wired: Goat Simulator 3 is a surreal video game in which players take domesticated ungulates on a series of implausible adventures, sometimes involving jetpacks. That might seem an unlikely venue for the next big leap in artificial intelligence, but Google DeepMind today revealed an AI program capable of learning how to complete tasks in a number of games, including Goat Simulator 3. Most impressively, when the program encounters a game for the first time, it can reliably perform tasks by adapting what it learned from playing other games. The program is called SIMA, for Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, and it builds upon recent AI advances that have seen large language models produce remarkably capable chabots like ChatGPT. [...] DeepMind's latest video game project hints at how AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini could soon do more than just chat and generate images or video, by taking control of computers and performing complex commands. "The paper is an interesting advance for embodied agents across multiple simulations," says Linxi "Jim" Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia who works on AI gameplay and was involved with an early effort to train AI to play by controlling a keyboard and mouse with a 2017 OpenAI project called World of Bits. Fan says the Google DeepMind work reminds him of this project as well as a 2022 effort called VPT that involved agents learning tool use in Minecraft. "SIMA takes one step further and shows stronger generalization to new games," he says. "The number of environments is still very small, but I think SIMA is on the right track." [...] For the SIMA project, the Google DeepMind team collaborated with several game studios to collect keyboard and mouse data from humans playing 10 different games with 3D environments, including No Man's Sky, Teardown, Hydroneer, and Satisfactory. DeepMind later added descriptive labels to that data to associate the clicks and taps with the actions users took, for example whether they were a goat looking for its jetpack or a human character digging for gold. The data trove from the human players was then fed into a language model of the kind that powers modern chatbots, which had picked up an ability to process language by digesting a huge database of text. SIMA could then carry out actions in response to typed commands. And finally, humans evaluated SIMA's efforts inside different games, generating data that was used to fine-tune its performance. Further reading: DeepMind's blog post.

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You'll soon get to try out OpenAI's buzzy text-to-video generator for yourself. From a report: In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati says Sora will be available "this year" and that it "could be a few months." OpenAI first showed off Sora, which is capable of generating hyperrealistic scenes based on a text prompt, in February. The company only made the tool available for visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to start, but that didn't stop some Sora-generated videos from making their way onto platforms like X. In addition to making the tool available to the public, Murati says OpenAI has plans to "eventually" incorporate audio, which has the potential to make the scenes even more realistic. The company also wants to allow users to edit the content in the videos Sora produces, as AI tools don't always create accurate images. "We're trying to figure out how to use this technology as a tool that people can edit and create with," Murati tells the Journal. When pressed on what data OpenAI used to train Sora, Murati didn't get too specific and seemed to dodge the question.

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Ethereum has successfully completed a major software upgrade that should make using the blockchain network ecosystem cheaper. The update enables transactions that previously cost $1 on linked Layer 2 networks such as Arbitrum, Polygon, and Coinbase's Base to be executed for just a cent. The Dencun upgrade, a combination of the "Deneb" and "Cancun" portions of the update, introduces a new data storage system for Ethereum. Currently, most Layer 2 blockchains store data on Ethereum, and because this data is stored permanently on every Ethereum node, storage costs often account for around 90% of Layer 2 expenses. These costs are typically passed on to applications, which in turn charge consumers. With Dencun, Layer 2s can now store data in a new type of repository called blobs, which will be cheaper as the data will only be stored for approximately 18 days.

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