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In June 2020, OpenAI, an independent artificial-intelligence research lab based in San Francisco, announced GPT-3, the third generation of its massive Generative Pre-trained Transformer language model, which can write everything from computer code to poetry.

A year later, with much less fanfare, Tsinghua Universitys Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence released an even larger model, Wu Dao 2.0, with 10 times as many parametersthe neural network values that encode information. While GPT-3 boasts 175 billion parameters, Wu Dao 2.0s creators claim it has a whopping 1.75 trillion. Moreover, the model is capable not only of generating text like GPT-3 does but also images from textual descriptions like OpenAIs 12-billion parameter DALL-E model, and has a similar scaling strategy to Googles 1.6 trillion-parameter Switch Transformer model.

Tang Jie, the Tsinghua University professor leading the Wu Dao project, said in a recent interview that the group built an even bigger, 100 trillion-parameter model in June, though it has not trained it to convergence, the point at which the model stops improving. We just wanted to prove that we have the ability to do that, Tang said.

This isnt simple one-upmanship. On the one hand, its how research progresses. But on the other, it is emblematic of an intensifying competition between the worlds two technology superpowers. Whether the researchers involved like it or not, their governments are eager to adopt each AI advance into their national security infrastructure and military capabilities.

That matters, because dominance in the technology means probable victory in any future war. Even more important, such an advantage likely guarantees the longevity and global influence of the government that wields it. Already, China is exporting its AI-enabled surveillance technologywhich can be used to quash dissentto client states and is espousing an authoritarian model that promises economic prosperity as a counter to democracy, something that the Soviet Union was never able to do.

Ironically, China is a competitor that the United States abetted. Its well known that the U.S. consumer market fed Chinas export engine, itself outfitted with U.S. machines, and led to the fastest-growing economy in the world since the 1980s. Whats less well-known is how a handful of technology companies transferred the know-how and trained the experts now giving the United States a run for its money in AI.

Blame Bill Gates, for one. In 1992, Gates led Microsoft into Chinas fledgling software market. Six years later, he established Microsoft Research Asia, the companys largest basic and applied computer-research institute outside the United States. People from that organization have gone on to found or lead many of Chinas top technology institutions.

China is a competitor that the United States abetted. A handful of U.S. tech companies transferred their know-how and trained some of China's top AI experts.

Ever hear of TikTok? In 2012, Zhang Yiming, a Microsoft Research Asia alum, founded the video-sharing platforms parent company, ByteDance, which today is one of the worlds most successful AI companies. He hired a former head of Microsoft Research Asia, Zhang Hongjiang, to lead ByteDances Technical Strategy Research Center. This Zhang is now head of the Beijing Academy the organization behind Wu Dao 2.0, currently the largest AI system on the planet. That back-and-forth worries U.S. national-security strategists, who plan for a day when researchers and companies are forced to take sides.

Todays competition has roots in an incident on 7 May 1999, when a U.S. B-2 Stealth Bomber dropped bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, killing three people.

That's when the Chinese started saying, We're moving beyond attrition warfare to what they referred to as systems confrontation, the confrontation between their operational system and the American operational system, says Robert O. Work, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense and vice chairman of the recently concluded National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Their theory of victory is what they refer to as system destruction.

The Chinese and the Americans see this much the same way, says Work, calling it a hot competition. If one can blow apart their adversarys battle network, the adversary won't be able to operate and won't be able to achieve their objectives.

System-destruction warfare is part and parcel of what the Peoples Liberation Army thinks of as intelligentized warfare, in which war is waged not only in the traditional physical domains of land, sea, and air but also in outer space, nonphysical cyberspace, and electromagnetic and even psychological domainsall enabled and coordinated with AI.

Work says the first major U.S. AI effort toward intelligentized warfare was to use computer vision to analyze thousands of hours of full-motion video being downloaded from dozens of drones. Today, that effort, dubbed Project Maven, detects, classifies, and tracks objects within video images, and it has been extended to acoustic data and signals intelligence.

The Chinese have kept pace. According to Georgetown Universitys Center for Security and Emerging Technology, China is actively pursuing AI-based target recognition and automatic-weapon-firing research, which could be used in lethal autonomous weapons. Meanwhile, the country may be ahead of the United States in swarm technology, according to Work. Georgetowns CSET reports that China is developing electromagnetic weapon payloads that can be attached to swarms of small unmanned aerial vehicles and flown into enemy airspace to disrupt or block the enemy's command and decision-making.

I worry about their emphasis on swarms of unmanned systems, says Work, adding that the Chinese want to train swarms of a hundred vehicles or more, including underwater systems, to coordinate navigation through complex environments. While we also test swarms, we have yet to demonstrate the ability to employ these types of swarms in a combat scenario.

Chinese firm Baiduwhose comparatively modest Sunnyvale, Calif. office is pictured here in 2018is one of the largest Internet companies in the world. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

This type of research and testing has prompted calls for preemptive bans on lethal autonomous weapons, but neither country is willing to declare an outright prohibition. Barring a prohibition, many people believe that China and the United States, along with other countries, should begin negotiating an arms-control agreement banning the development of systems that could autonomously order a preemptive or retaliatory attack. Such systems might inadvertently lead to flash wars, just as AI-driven autonomous trading has led to flash crashes in the financial markets.

Neither of us wants to get into a war because an autonomous-control system made a mistake and ordered a preemptive strike, Work says, referring to the United States and China.

All of this contributes to a dilemma facing the twin realms of AI research and military modernization. The international research community, collaborative and collegial, prefers to look the other way and insist that it only serves the interest of science. But the governments that fund that research have clear agendas, and military enhancement is undeniably one.

Geoffrey Hinton, regarded as one of the godfathers of deep learning, the kind of AI transforming militaries today, left the United States and moved to Canada largely because he didnt want to depend on funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The agency, the largest funder of AI research in the world, is responsible for the development of emerging technologies for military use.

Hinton instead helped to put deep learning on the map in 2012 with a now-famous neural net called AlexNet when he was at the University of Toronto. But Hinton was also in close contact with the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond, Wash., before and after his group validated AlexNet, according to one of Hintons associates there, Li Deng, then principal researcher and manager and later chief scientist of AI at Microsoft.

In 2009 and 2010, Hinton and Deng worked together at Microsoft on speech recognition and Deng, then Editor-In-Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, was invited in 2011 to lecture at several academic organizations in China where he said he shared the published success of deep learning in speech processing. Deng said he was in close contact with former Microsoft colleagues at Baidu, a Chinese search engine and AI giant, and a company called iFlyTek, a spin off from Dengs undergraduate alma mater.

When Hinton achieved his breakthrough with backpropagation in neural networks in 2012, he sent an email to Deng in Washington, and Deng said he shared it with Microsoft executives, including Qi Lu who led the development of the companys search engine, Bing. Deng said he also sent a note to his friends at iFlyTek, which quickly adopted the strategy and became an AI powerhousefamously demonstrated in 2017 with a convincing video of then-president Donald Trump speaking Chinese.

Qi Lu went on to become COO of Baidu where Deng said another Microsoft alum, Kai Yu, who also knew Hinton well, had already seized on Hintons breakthrough.

Chinas theory of victory is what they refer to as system destruction.

Robert O. Work, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense

Literally within hours of Hintons results, according to Deng, researchers in China were working on repeating his success.

Had they not learned of Hintons work through the research grapevine, they still would have read about it in published papers and heard about it through international conferences. Research today has no borders. It is internationally fungible.

But the United States has since tried to limit this crosspollination, barring Chinese nationals known to have worked for Chinas military or intelligence organizations from working with U.S. research institutions. Yet research continues to flow back and forth between the two countries: Microsoft maintains its research lab in Beijing, and the Chinese Internet and AI giant Baidu has a research lab in Silicon Valley, for example.

Tsinghua Universitys Tang said decoupling the two countries would slow Chinas AI researchnot because it would stop the flow of ideas, but because it would cut China off from the advanced semiconductors needed to train AI models. He said his group is working on chip designs to speed AI training. China, meanwhile, is working to build extreme ultraviolet lithography machines and upgrade its semiconductor foundries to free itself from Western control.

While the U.S. government must negotiate with private sector organizations and researchers to participate in its military modernization, Chinas National Intelligence Law compels its companies and researchers to cooperate when asked.

China began pouring billions of dollars into AI research in 2017, following Google subsidiary DeepMinds success at defeating the world Go champion with its AI model AlphaGo. Among the organizations set up with that funding was Tsinghuas Beijing Academy, where Tang and his team built Wu Dao 2.0.

We hope that we can do science for the world, not just the one country, Tang says. But, he added, we should do something on demand based on the national project research plan.

By most metrics, Wu Dao 2.0 has surpassed OpenAIs GPT-3. Tang says it was trained on 4.9 terabytes of clean data, including Chinese-language text, English-language text, and images. OpenAI has said that GPT-3 was trained on just 570 gigabytes of clean, primarily English-language text.

Tang says his group is now working on video with the goal of generating realistic video from text descriptions. Hopefully, we can make this model do something beyond the Turing test, he says, referring to an assessment of whether a computer can generate text indistinguishable from that created by a human. That's our final goal.

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U.S. vs. China Rivalry Boosts Techand Tensions - IEEE Spectrum

An eighth round of talks on reviving the Iran nuclear deal has begun in Vienna, with Iran saying participants have been largely working from an acceptable common draft text and that its team was willing to stay as long as it takes to reach an agreement.

The Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said he wanted the focus of the coming round of talks to be on how Tehran could verify US sanctions had genuinely been lifted. The landmark 2015 deal, from which Donald Trump withdrew the US, had lifted sanctions on Iran in return for controls on its civilian nuclear programme.

We must reach a point where Iranian oil can be sold easily and without any restrictions so money for that oil can be transferred in foreign currency to Irans bank accounts, Amir-Abdollahian said.

He said the negotiators were working from two joint draft texts. The first broadly covers the nature of all the sanctions related to the nuclear deal that the US must lift and the second is on the staging and details of the steps Iran must reverse to come back into compliance with the deal, such as reducing its nuclear stockpile and ending the use of advanced centrifuges.

In terms of the third paper on the verification of the lifting of sanctions, Iran has spoken in terms of a fixed volume of oil and industrial exports that must be completed before it need take reciprocal action by returning fully to its compliance with its side of the deal.

Iran is concerned western companies will be reluctant to invest in Iran because of fears that a future Republican US president could reimpose sanctions in 2025, putting their investments in jeopardy, as happened in 2018 when Trump pulled out of the deal.

Irans supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a speech in February that sanctions had to be lifted in practice, not just on paper. Research from the Iranian parliament set out the number of barrels of oil to be exported a day and the required value of transactions taking place in Iranian controlled banks in Europe.

Although the talks will be difficult, Iran seemed intent on injecting some optimism into a process that began in April.

In an important announcement the day before the eighth round, Irans atomic energy authority gave a public pledge that it would not seek to enrich uranium above 60%, a promise that came as a relief to Russian negotiators concerned that if Tehran pushed ahead to nuclear weapons-grade 90% enrichment, the European and US delegations would abandon the talks.

Western diplomats have said they will not allow the talks to drag on much longer, possibly with early February as the final deadline. They point out the talks first started and were then paused for three months while a new Iranian government reviewed its negotiating position. Israel meanwhile claims Iran is procrastinating while its scientists take Iran secretly closer to a nuclear bomb. Western diplomats accept Iran is closer to breakout time than ever before, but this is not the same as being close to possessing a nuclear weapon.

Iran, China, Russia, France, Germany, the UK and the EU attended the talks, with a US delegation indirectly involved a cumbersome procedure upon which Tehran has insisted even though it has delayed progress. Iran has complained in recent weeks that the European countries, especially France, have taken a position that is indistinguishable from the US.

The degree to which Iran needs western sanctions to be lifted to be able to produce a viable budget is contested within the country. The leadership team around the new president, Ebrahim Raisi, claims it can avoid lifting costly subsidies on petrol and still produce a viable budget, a claim rejected by many Iranian economists.

Continued here:
Iran nuclear deal: eighth round of talks begins in Vienna ...

Progress has been made in Vienna, but both sides still need to make difficult decisions if an agreement is to be reached.

Tehran, Iran The eighth and possibly final round of talks in Vienna to restore Irans landmark 2015 nuclear deal with world powers has commenced on a cautiously hopeful note.

A Joint Commission meeting of the remaining participants of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the nuclear deal is formally known, concluded on Monday night in the Austrian capital, with a slew of bilateral and trilateral meetings between the different delegations.

There was, however, no direct meeting between Iranian and United States representatives as Tehran refuses to talk directly with Washington after the US in 2018 unilaterally abandoned the accord.

Following the main meeting at the Palais Coburg, Irans chief negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani said the delegations agreed that good progress was made during the seventh round that ended 10 days earlier, and there is now a suitable framework to take the talks forward.

The important thing in this Joint Commission meeting was that different sides emphasised on the importance of prioritising the lifting of sanctions, and also verification and guarantees during the eighth round, he said.

Bagheri said the negotiations will continue on Tuesday. The Iranian delegation has previously said it is ready to remain in Vienna until a deal acceptable to Tehran is reached.

Due to the US exit from the JCPOA under former President Donald Trump, Iran is now demanding the full lifting of the sanctions, guarantees the US will not leave again, and a period to verify sanctions are effectively lifted.

The JCPOA provided sanctions relief to Iran in exchange for curbs on its nuclear programme. But after the US withdrawal and imposition of sanctions, Iran abandoned those curbs and is now using advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium up to 60 percent.

Enrique Mora, the European Unions coordinator in the meeting, told reporters outside the venue that time is limited due to Irans nuclear advances, but all delegations wish to end the talks successfully.

We have come a long, long way since the beginning of the negotiation. We have incorporated sensitivities of a new Iranian government. So from the point of view of the coordinator, we are exactly at the point where we should be if we want to get the final successful result, he said, referring to the government of conservative President Ebrahim Raisi that came to power in August.

If we work hard in the days and weeks ahead, we should have a positive result. It is going to be very difficult. Difficult political decisions have to be taken both in Tehran and in Washington.

Russias chief negotiator Mikhail Ulyanov described the meeting as businesslike and result-oriented with the aim of achieving an agreement as soon as possible, and described the eighth round as presumably final round of the negotiations.

Earlier on Monday, Irans Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said the eighth round will move forward revolving around a new and acceptable joint document.

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Delegates at new round of Iran nuclear talks strike ...

U.S. President Joe Bidens administration opened big-power talks this week in Vienna to determine whether steady advances to Tehrans nuclear program render the landmark Iran nuclear deal a corpse that cannot be revived, as one senior U.S. official recently put it to reporters, or if theres still a chance to salvage the accord.

The United States has cast the eighth and latest round of negotiations as a last chance for achieving a diplomatic settlement of its nuclear dispute with Iran. U.S. officials warn that the window for reviving the 2015 nuclear pactknown as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)is nearly shut. Iran has weeks, not months, to strike a deal or curtail its nuclear activities to avoid facing the prospect of stepped-up coercive measures, from additional sanctions to the threat of military action, a senior U.S. official told Foreign Policy.

Either we reach a deal quickly or they slow down their program, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity given the negotiations confidential nature. If they do neither, [its] hard to see how [the] JCPOA survives past that period.

U.S. President Joe Bidens administration opened big-power talks this week in Vienna to determine whether steady advances to Tehrans nuclear program render the landmark Iran nuclear deal a corpse that cannot be revived, as one senior U.S. official recently put it to reporters, or if theres still a chance to salvage the accord.

The United States has cast the eighth and latest round of negotiations as a last chance for achieving a diplomatic settlement of its nuclear dispute with Iran. U.S. officials warn that the window for reviving the 2015 nuclear pactknown as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)is nearly shut. Iran has weeks, not months, to strike a deal or curtail its nuclear activities to avoid facing the prospect of stepped-up coercive measures, from additional sanctions to the threat of military action, a senior U.S. official told Foreign Policy.

Either we reach a deal quickly or they slow down their program, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity given the negotiations confidential nature. If they do neither, [its] hard to see how [the] JCPOA survives past that period.

Weve seen modest steps in recent weeks, but the Iranians are not working at a pace required to get a breakthrough in the coming weeks, the U.S. official added.

Russia and Iran pushed back on the need to establish a fixed deadline for the talks to conclude, with Moscow contending Iran is still far enough away from developing a weapon capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. (Iran claims it has no intention of pursuing nuclear weapons.)

This sense of urgency is a little bit exaggerated, said Mikhail Ulyanov, Russias chief nuclear negotiator and ambassador to Vienna. Yes, its urgent, but lets be prudent; lets [not] set up artificial deadlines.

In recent weeks, the Biden administration has been signaling its intention to tighten the economic screws on Iran if the talks, which resumed on Dec. 27, cant bring Iran back into full compliance with the pact. Andrea Gacki, head of the Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control, led a delegation to the United Arab Emirates as part of an effort to strengthen the enforcement of existing U.S. sanctions, warning banking and petroleum executives in the UAE to abide by the sanctions or face U.S. penalties.

Biden cited restoring the Iran nuclear pact as one of his top foreign-policy priorities, appointing Robert Malley as special envoy for nuclear talks during his first eight days in office. The 2015 deal was the singular diplomatic achievement of the Obama administration, a painstakingly negotiated pact that imposed a complex series of constraints on Irans nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

But then-U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, allowing Iran to rebuild and accelerate some of the most sensitive elements of its nuclear program, including the installation of more advanced centrifuges and the production of highly enriched uranium, while restricting international scrutiny of the program.

The day after the seventh round of nuclear talks resumed in Vienna on Nov. 29, Iran began enriching a higher-grade uraniumsome 20 percent puritywith a cascade of more advanced IR-6 centrifuges than permitted by the pact. Irans breakout timethe amount of time it would take to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bombhas shrunk from about 12 months at the time the nuclear pact was concluded to about one month, experts said. It could take Iran another two years to produce a nuclear warhead.

Israel recently pressed Bidens national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, to either negotiate more far-reaching constraints on Irans nuclear program or tighten the economic noose. In an interview with the New York Times, Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Yair Lapid said the best outcome would be a stronger deal than the JCPOA, which could ensure Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon, and the worst would be a bad deal that provides Tehran enough wiggle room to build a nuclear weapons program at some stage in the future. Second best would be no deal but tightening the sanctions and making sure Iran cannot go forward, he told the Times.

The Biden administration has focused on simply returning to the original deal, but that effort has been strained by even more than Irans nuclear advances. The United States carried out several rounds of talks with the Iranian government of former President Hassan Rouhani, who struck the original agreement with the Obama administration. But the start of a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, has scrambled those calculations. Iran replaced its nuclear negotiating team and appointed a hard-liner, Ali Bagheri Kani, to lead talks. He has backtracked on commitments his predecessors made.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, recently accused Irans new negotiating team of staking out vague, unrealistic, maximalist, and unconstructive positions on sanctions, reneging on compromises it made during the previous six months of talks.

We are fully prepared to lift sanctions inconsistent with our JCPOA commitments, which would allow Iran to receive the economic benefits of the deal, Thomas-Greenfield told the United Nations Security Council on Dec. 14. And were convinced that, if Iran approaches talks in Vienna with urgency and good faith, we can quickly reach and implement an understanding on mutual return [to the JCPOA]. We cannot, however, allow Iran to accelerate its nuclear program and slow-walk its nuclear diplomacy.

European powers have been losing patience with Iran but said they are reluctant to dump the diplomatic track. In mid-December, representatives from Britain, France, and Germany blamed Irans new negotiating team for the new unreasonable demands. Time is running out, they said in a joint statement. Without swift progress, in light of Irans fast-forwarding of its nuclear program, the JCPOA will very soon become an empty shell.

In recent weeks, European diplomats have received instructions from their capitals to be prepared, in the event of a breakdown in talks, for the possible reimposition of sanctions on Iran. The so-called snapback provision of the 2015 nuclear pact permits signatories to reimpose a wide range of U.N. sanctions if they deem Iran is in breach of the agreement.

Since then, Iran has taken a number of steps to ease diplomatic pressure, including meeting a demand by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to provide access to video cameras installed in an Iranian reprocessing facility in Karaj, Iran. That agreement, negotiated with Russias help, headed off an immediate collision with the United States, which threatened to seek formal censure of Iran at the IAEA, a move Tehran said would drive it out of the deal for good.

The process ebbs and flows for us, one European diplomat said. There has been slightly better mood music over the last couple of weeks, citing the Karaj agreement, a bit more flexibility over the scope of nuclear talks, and Irans acting somewhat less troublesome in the region by refraining from attacks on vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran is being as reasonable as one can ever expect the Iranians to be, the diplomat added. The alternative is worse. We are still pretty open-eyed about what Iran is up to, but the cost of dropping out and making it all about confrontation is not in anyones interest.

Bagheri Kani, Irans chief negotiator, opened talks Monday with representatives of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security CouncilBritain, China, France, Russia, and the United Statesas well as Germany and the European Union, which is serving as facilitator of the talks. The talks could continue through the end of January or early February 2022.

The Iranian delegation is seeking a sweeping rollback of sanctions and demanding assurances from the Biden administration that any agreement it strikes will be honored by future U.S. administrationsan assurance the president may not have the power to grant.

Despite the obstacles, Russias Ulyanov said: Frankly, Im rather optimistic at this stage. I see no objective reasons for being skeptical.

I cannot guarantee that an agreement will be reached, but I believe that chances are very, very high as the main prerequisite for success is already there, Ulyanov added. All countries, all participants, including Iran and the United States, look for the restoration of the nuclear deal.

Ulyanov said China and Russia persuaded Iran to back away from some of its maximalist positions, including its insistence that the talks focus only on sanctions, not the nuclear issue. In the end, he said, the Iranians agreed to begin negotiations on the basis of a draft hammered out by the previous Iranian government this past spring.

Ulyanov said now is not the time to threaten Iran with greater pressure. Even if they produce a significant amount of nuclear material, so what. It cannot be used without a warhead, and the Iranians do not have warheads.

Meanwhile, there is a risk of dangerous miscalculations on both sides. Ali Vaez, the Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, said although China and Russia have urged the United States and European powers to give Irans negotiating team more time and show greater flexibility, it is difficult for the West to show flexibility. There is fear on the Western side that Iran is not serious about the talks, that its wasting time.

From a technological standpoint, the Iranian nuclear program is reaching the point of no return, Vaez added. If Iran walks away from the deal and ratchets up its nuclear program, then I think the gloves will come off quicklyin a matter of days. The United States will switch to coercive diplomacy, and we might see the reimposition of U.N. sanctions and, shortly after, the specter of war.

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US Gives Iran Weeks to Strike Nuclear Bargain or Slow Its Nuclear Program - Foreign Policy

Dec 28 (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday expressed caution over upbeat comments by Iran and Russia about talks in Vienna to salvage the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, saying it was still too soon to say if Tehran had returned to the negotiations with a constructive approach.

Iran and Russia both gave upbeat views on Tuesday about talks that kicked off this week to salvage Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal with global powers, although Western nations have said the negotiations are going too slowly.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said a deal was possible in the near future if other parties showed "good faith" while Russian envoy Mikhail Ulyanov said a working group was making "indisputable progress" in the eighth round of talks.

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Speaking at a telephonic press briefing, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said there was some progress in the last round of talks but it was too soon to tell whether Tehran, in the current round, returned to the table to build on those gains.

"It's really too soon to tell whether Iran has returned with a more constructive approach to this round," Price said. "We are now assessing, in the course of these talks, whether the Iranians came back with an agenda of new issues or preliminary solutions to the ones already presented," Price said.

The original agreement lifted sanctions against Tehran in exchange for restrictions on its atomic activities but Donald Trump pulled Washington out of the deal in 2018, a year after he became U.S president. Iran later breached many of the deal's nuclear restrictions and kept pushing well beyond them.

The latest round of indirect talks between Iran and the United States resumed on Monday in Vienna, with Tehran focused on getting U.S. sanctions lifted again, as they were under the original bargain, despite scant progress on reining in its atomic activities. read more

Iran refuses to meet U.S. officials directly, meaning other parties to the deal besides the United States and Iran --- Russia, China, France, Britain, Germany and the European Union -- must shuttle between the two sides.

The seventh round of talks, the first under Iran's new hardline President Ebrahim Raisi, ended 11 days ago after some new Iranian demands were added to a working text.

"The Vienna talks are headed in a good direction," Iranian Minister Amirabdollahian said in comments to reporters broadcast by state media. "We believe that if other parties continue the round of talks which just started with good faith, reaching a good agreement for all parties is possible."

The U.S. delegation, led by Special Envoy Rob Malley, will be in a better position in the coming days to determine whether Iran has to come to the latest round of talks with a 'fundamentally different position," Price said.

Iran insists all U.S. sanctions must be lifted before steps are taken on the nuclear side, while Western negotiators say nuclear and sanctions steps must be balanced in the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA).

URGENT NEGOTIATIONS

European negotiators also said some technical progress had been made in the last round of talks to accommodate Iranian requests, but warned that the parties only had weeks, not months, to salvage the deal.

France, Germany and the United Kingdom said in a statement on Tuesday that technical progress had been made in the last round and the parties now needed to fully focus on the key outstanding issues, particularly nuclear and sanctions.

They said while they were not setting an artificial deadline, there were weeks not months left to strike a deal.

"The negotiation is urgent - and our teams are here to work swiftly and in good faith towards getting a deal."

Ulyanov, the Russian envoy, said on Tuesday that a working group was making progress. "Sanctions lifting is being actively discussed in informal settings," he wrote on Twitter.

The 2015 deal extended the time Iran would need to obtain enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb - if it chose to - to at least a year from about two to three months. Most experts say that time is now less than before the deal, although Iran says it only wants to master nuclear technology for civil uses.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Israel would not automatically oppose a nuclear deal but world powers must take a firmer position.

Israel says it will never allow Iran to get nuclear weapons and that all options are on the table. Israeli leaders have said that a nuclear Iran would pose an existential threat to Israel.

(This story refiles to fix spelling of word 'too' in first paragraph)

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Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Daphne Psaledakis in Washington, Miranda Murray in Berlin, Jeffrey Heller, Dan Williams and Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem, and Dubai newsroom; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by David Clarke and Alistair Bell

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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U.S. sounds caution against optimism by Iran, Russia over nuclear talks - Reuters