Archive: July 2016

if ( !emtpy($headline_subheadline ) ) : ?> Microsoft’s Copilot Pages split-screen interface puts a chat window on the left and a document canvas on the right, so you can easily switch between prompting the AI and making direct edits. endif; ?> Credit: Howard Wen / Foundry Generative AIArtificial IntelligenceMicrosoft 365Office SuitesProductivity SoftwareCollaboration Software

Sorting algorithm is one of the most popular foundation algorithms that are used trillions of times on almost every day. But like many algorithms, it has reached a stage whereby human are struggling to improve them further, especially when the demand for computation continue to grow. In a new paper Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep reinforcement learning, a DeepMind research team introduces AlphaDev, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent

Key challenges (red background) and potential solutions (green background) for fast-charging LSBs. Credit: Advanced Energy Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1002/aenm.202404383 Grab a coffee and your car is fully charged—this is how many people envision the future of mobility. But today's batteries still fall short of this ideal. While modern lithium–ion batteries can charge from 20% to 80% in about 20 to 30 minutes, a full charge takes considerably longer—and fas

Workflow of soil microbial distribution mapping and clustering. Credit: Global Change Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1111/gcb.70268 Researchers from the Sydney Institute of Agriculture at the University of Sydney investigated the vast and largely hidden world beneath our feet. Soil is where 59% of all life on Earth resides. A single gram of soil can contain up to 10 billion bacteria, far exceeding the human population on the planet. Like plants and animals, these

Anthropic wants to do for physical hardware what its Model Context Protocol did for software Aug 29, 2026 Nano Banana Pro prompted by THE DECODER Key Points Anthropic is building the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a unified interface that lets AI agents read data from and control physical devices like microscopes and robotic arms in labs and factories. The company uses standardized drivers that make every device discoverable in a common format. According t

Getty / Futurism Economists keep warning that the US economy is being propped up almost entirely by an enormous boom in the tech and AI sector. Should the rest of us be worried? Multibillion-dollar investments have become the norm as AI companies continue to double down on enormous infrastructure buildouts and talent acquisitions that they insist will undergird a new economy in which huge amounts of human labor are automated away. In a new research note, a

OpenAI just dropped a new AI model that’s designed to sound like an actual, human conversation partner—and the company says it marks progress towards building AGI. For years, OpenAI has been investing in the development of AI tools that can speak in humanlike voices. That’s sometimes led to controversy, as when the company debuted a voice assistant that sounded suspiciously similar to Scarlett Johansson. The various shortcomings of AI assistants, meanwhile

Human beings have long been at war with mosquitos, and it’s not at all clear we’ve been winning. Malaria alone—just one of many deadly mosquito-borne illnesses—kills over 600,000 people every year, most of them very young children. Until now, all we’ve had were short-term solutions, like public inoculations, insecticides, traps, and (usually futile) hand-swatting. But a French tech startup called Tornyol is saying enough is enough: Let’s turn this never-en

Google opens its cloud to rival OpenAI, promises business data won’t train models Google Cloud is adding OpenAI models to its platform, initially through a private preview for selected business customers. The launch includes GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. Google positions them as options for demanding work, lower-cost professional tasks and everyday use that requires fast responses. More choice, one bill Businesses will purchase access through Go

To hear OpenAI tell it, instances of its most powerful AI models, including an unreleased one purportedly of immense power, recently got so focused on getting good scores on their evals that they escaped OpenAI’s testing sandbox, and hacked the AI resource repository Hugging Face in an elaborate effort to cheat their way to the top. AI skeptics have questions—this story is, after all, a big public relations coup for any AI company, since all AI companies b

Matt Bruenig is a socialist lawyer who loves using AI. You might even say he’s the prototypical example of a lefty who takes the contrarian position on AI among those he’s allied with politically. Earlier this year, he told Transformer’s Dan Kagan-Kans, for a piece titled “The left is missing out on AI,” that he was worried about “the left-wing abstaining from using the tools when the right-wing does not.” But it wasn’t abundantly clear to me at the time h

Illustration of the exoskeleton. Credit: RIKEN Exoskeletons typically work by implementing motions programmed in advance and having the user call for them, making it difficult to use them for a wide range of motions in real-life environments. Now, in a notable example of wearable robotics, published in npj Robotics, researchers from the RIKEN Guardian Robot Project in Japan have used artificial intelligence to better assist users, by designing an exoskelet

Getty / Futurism A new lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice alleges that ChatGPT encouraged a man accused of harassing over a dozen women in five different states to continue stalking his victims, 404Media reports, serving as a “best friend” that entertained his frequent misogynistic rants and told him to ignore any criticism he received. The man, 31-year-old Brett Michael Dadig, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of cyberstalking, inter

Security and IT teams are under pressure to adopt AI, but many are seeing the opposite of what was promised.Tools that demo well don’t hold up in real workflows. Complexity increases. Trust breaks down. And instead of reducing workload, AI can introduce new risks and oversight burdens.This guide breaks down why AI adoption fails in practice and gives teams a clearer path forward, from evaluation to implementation, with humans in the loop.