Archive: July 2015

Pretein design researcher Yulai Liu holds an enlarged 3D printed model from his team's efforts to design functioning calcium channels entirely from scratch. He is standing in David Baker's lab at the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design. Credit: Ian Haydon/UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design. The design of new calcium channels, built bottom-up from scratch, was reported last week in Nature. Ion channels generate electrical impulses produced by liv

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: David Dee Delgado / Getty Images for The New York Times Anthropic is calling for a global “pause” on AI development, claiming that the technology is nearing a point where it can spiral out of human control. In a lengthy blog post published Thursday, the world’s most valuable AI startup made the case that its Claude family of models were on the path to achieving “recursive self-improvement,” or the abi

A team of researchers at Penn State recently developed an AI-powered smartphone application capable of helping visually impaired people navigate day-to-day tasks. Credit: Caleb Craig/Penn State Over the last few years, systems and applications that help visually impaired people navigate their environment have undergone rapid development, but still have room to grow, according to a team of researchers at Penn State. The team recently combined recommendation

Biz & IT Google brings 45 teraflops tensor flow processors to its compute cloud Up to 256 chips can be joined together for 11.5 petaflops of machine-learning power. Ars Staff – May 17, 2017 2:04 pm | 69 The 180 TFLOPS Cloud TPU card. Credit: Google The 180 TFLOPS Cloud TPU card. Credit: Google Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Google has developed its

Antonello Marangi / Shutterstock / Futurism Late last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon that raising a child was now impossible without constantly turning to AI for advice — despite humans managing just fine without ChatGPT since the dawn of time. His comments painted a dystopian picture of the future of parenting in which human connection is supplanted by AI-powered nannies and chatbots. And as children unfortunate enough t

Published on August 19, 2026 at 08:05 Comment 2 𝕏 Print Bedrock is Amazon’s generative AI platform and the first beneficiary of the training data acquired by digitizing these books. © Amazon An AirTag tucked between two pages, weeks of travel, and a discovery at the end: the former online bookseller is buying rare books in bulk to feed its models. Anthropic had paved the way; Amazon is industrializing it. Booksellers specializing in old books had been seei

Published on August 24, 2026 at 11:00 Comment 2 𝕏 Print © Unsplash A streamer filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon and Twitch, accusing them of using Twitch users’ data without their consent to train a new artificial intelligence model from the e-commerce giant. A Twitch streamer filed a class-action lawsuit against Twitch and Amazon, accusing them of not asking platform users for permission to use the content from their channels to train various ar

Like the parent of a teen who ordered a box of illegal peptides for looksmaxxing purposes, Anthropic says that as far as internal evaluations are concerned, it has cut off its models’ internet access until it’s satisfied that they can stay out of trouble. Anthropic announced this in a report published Friday called “Investigating unintended model actions in our evaluations and internal use.” It’s not a surprising title given all the attention model misalig

Google’s antitrust remedy trial started this week, and the Department of Justice has produced several witnesses to testify about how Google’s stranglehold on search has slowed their innovation. On day three, Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko told the court that Google blocked Perplexity from being the default on Motorola phones, which is precisely the kind of anticompetitive behavior that got it in hot water. It would appear there is some

Marketers promote AI-assisted developer tools as workhorses that are essential for today’s software engineer. Developer platform GitLab, for instance, claims its Duo chatbot can “instantly generate a to-do list” that eliminates the burden of “wading through weeks of commits.” What these companies don’t say is that these tools are, by temperament if not default, easily tricked by malicious actors into performing hostile actions against their users. Research

The previous Gemini 2.5 Pro release, known as the I/O Edition, or simply 05-06, was focused on coding upgrades. Google claims the new version is even better at generating code, with a new high score of 82.2 percent in the Aider Polyglot test. That beats the best from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek by a comfortable margin. While the general-purpose Gemini 2.5 Flash has left preview, the Pro version is lagging behind. In fact, the last several updates have

Published September 15, 2026 at 12:57 Comment 4 𝕏 Print © The White House While appearing on a podcast on stage at the All-In Summit, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang received a call from Donald Trump. As calls to slow the pace of AI development have multiplied in recent times, the Nvidia chief took a contrarian stance: “We are not going to let that happen.” While attending a conference focused on the various calls to slow the pace of AI development, Nvidia CEO Jen

Credit: AI-generated image Artificial intelligence (AI) isn't just made up of data, chips and code—it's also the product of the metaphors and narratives we use to talk about it. The way we represent this technology determines how the public imagination understands it and, by extension, how people design it, use it, and its impact on society at large. Worryingly, many studies show that the predominant representations of AI—anthropomorphic "assistants," arti

Published on September 29, 2026 at 10:00 Comment 0 𝕏 Print © 01net OpenAI has decided not to launch GPT-6.1 Astra, the next major AI model set to power ChatGPT, scheduled for October. According to the AI giant, it did not meet its safety requirements. The announcement comes amid growing concerns over autonomous AI, which has been involved in several security incidents. OpenAI hits the brakes. The AI giant has abandoned plans to launch GPT-6.1 Astra, its ne

Shutterstock / Futurism Parenting is hard. Why not let an AI model take over some of your childrearing duties? It may come at the expense of forming lasting emotional bonds with your progeny, but that’s a tradeoff that some AI adherents, evidently, have calculated to be worth it. OpenAI Sam Altman has bragged about how much he relies on ChatGPT to raise his son, and also thinks it’s a good idea to let an AI-generated podcast replace the “so how’d your day

Screenshot from the real version of one of the videos that the team used in their study, showing Amelia Palmer, a fictional vegan influencer. Credit: Clark & Lewandowsky. Generative deep learning models are artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can create texts, images, audio files, and videos for specific purposes, following instructions provided by human users. Over the past few years, the content generated by these models has become increasingly rea

Published on October 23, 2026 at 4:12 p.m. Comment 5 𝕏 Print © Unsplash In 20 months, Coral Hart has written 371 novels using artificial intelligence and claims to have generated $1 million in revenue in 2026. The South African novelist even offers to generate books to order. Thélyson Orélien finally admitted that “part of the writing process [of the novel It Was That or Die] relied on AI”. Coral Hart, for her part, fully embraces using AI to write her nov

Built on a licence signed in MarchThe Agentforce Coworker rollout follows a multi-year agreement the Adecco Group signed with Salesforce in March, running through 2027, for unlimited global access to Agentforce 360. The group noted that the “unlimited” access is subject to the terms of its Agentic Enterprise License Agreement. At the time, the group said the agreement supported its target for more than half of Adecco revenues to be powered by agentic AI by