Western leaders often use it to describe a framework of rules, norms and institutions designed to guide state behavior. Advocates argue that this framework has provided the foundation for decades of stability and prosperity, while critics question its fairness and relevance in today's multipolar world. The rules-based international order, initially known as the 'liberal international order,' emerged from the devastation of World War II. The vision was ambitious and universal: to create a global system based on liberal democratic values, market capitalism and multilateral cooperation. Central to this vision was the establishment of institutions such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These institutions, alongside widely accepted norms and formalized rules, aimed to promote political cooperation, the peaceful resolution of disputes, and economic recovery for countries damaged by war. However, the vision of a truly universal liberal international order quickly unraveled. As the Cold War set in, the world split into two competing blocs. The Western bloc, led by the United States, adhered to the principles of the liberal international order....

'Over the past 2 years we've built 3 video foundation models as a small team ' Hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One, and Hotshot,' Sastry wrote. 'Training these models has given us a look into how global education, entertainment, communication, and productivity are about to change in the coming years. We're excited to continue scaling these efforts on the largest cluster in the world, Colossus, as a part of xAI!' Hotshot, which is based in San Francisco, was founded several years ago by Sastry and John Mullan. The startup initially focused on developing AI-powered photo creation and editing tools, but eventually pivoted in favor of text-to-video AI models. Hotshot managed to attract investments from VCs including Lachy Groom, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and SV Angel prior to its exit. The company never publicly disclosed the size of its funding rounds. xAI's acquisition of Hotshot could indicate that the former plans to build its own video generation models to compete with the likes of Sora, Google's Veo 2, and others. Musk has previously hinted that xAI is developing video-generating models to add to its Grok chatbot platform. During a livestream in January, Musk said that he expects a 'Grok Video' model to be released 'in a few months.'...

Since Amazon announced plans for a generative AI version of Alexa, we were concerned about user privacy. With Alexa+ rolling out to Amazon Echo devices in the coming weeks, we're getting a clearer view of the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices. In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon's cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with 'Do Not Send Voice Recordings' enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of every command spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud. Attempting to rationalize the change, Amazon's email said: 'As we continue to expand Alexa's capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon's secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature.'...

We move thanks to coordination among many skeletal muscle fibers, all twitching and pulling in sync. While some muscles align in one direction, others form intricate patterns, helping parts of the body move in multiple ways. In recent years, scientists and engineers have looked to muscles as potential actuators for 'biohybrid' robots ' machines powered by soft, artificially grown muscle fibers. Such bio-bots could squirm and wiggle through spaces where traditional machines cannot. For the most part, however, researchers have only been able to fabricate artificial muscle that pulls in one direction, limiting any robot's range of motion. Now MIT engineers have developed a method to grow artificial muscle tissue that twitches and flexes in multiple coordinated directions. As a demonstration, they grew an artificial, muscle-powered structure that pulls both concentrically and radially, much like how the iris in the human eye acts to dilate and constrict the pupil. The researchers fabricated the artificial iris using a new 'stamping' approach they developed. First, they 3D-printed a small, handheld stamp patterned with microscopic grooves, each as small as a single cell. Then they pressed the stamp into a soft hydrogel and seeded the resulting grooves with real muscle cells. The cells grew along these grooves within the hydrogel, forming fibers. When the researchers stimulated the fibers, the muscle contracted in multiple directions, following the fibers' orientation....