Archive: October 2017

New polling from Gallup shows that Americans really, really don’t like AI data centers being constructed in their neighborhoods. How much do they hate the rise of AI infrastructure? More Americans say they oppose data centers being built near them than oppose nuclear power plants in the same area. A whopping 71% of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their area, according to Gallup, with 23% somewhat opposed and 48% strongly opposed. Just

Credit: AI-generated image In documenting and recording society's collective data on an unprecedented scale, artificial intelligence is becoming humanity's historian—changing the way we record information for posterity. But AI's inadvertent role as memory-keeper raises profound concerns for today's historians. Unlike human historians who explicitly document their methodologies, AI systems are creating the historical archives of the future without crucial t

A commencement speech by yet another titan of industry has been met with disapproval from graduates. Google is, once again, the company associated with the speaker, but this time the issue isn’t AI per se, but company involvement with Israel. According to the Information’s Erin Woo, a speech by Google CEO Sundar Pichai was protested in the form of a walkout, along with chants of “free, free, Palestine” and “Shame on you.” Well over 100 Stanford students wa

Bernie Sanders is making the case in Washington that since modern AI systems were built using the intellectual and creative outputs of all of humanity, the revenues they generate should go directly to the people—not just to a small cohort of tech moguls. On Thursday, Senator Sanders—an Independent from Vermont—introduced a bill which, if passed, would create a sovereign wealth fund for the United States’ AI industry. The fund would be valued at roughly $7

Building on its predecessors’ strengthsGemini 2.5 builds upon the core strengths of earlier Gemini models, including native multimodality and a long context window. 2.5 Pro launches with a one million token context window, with plans to expand this to two million tokens soon. This enables the model to comprehend vast datasets and handle complex problems from diverse information sources, spanning text, audio, images, video, and even entire code repositories

Oracle was founded all the way back in 1977 as an enterprise software company. Since then, it has transformed into a cloud services giant. These days, it is trying to become one of the most important players in AI data centers. Now, Oracle itself is warning investors that this next act comes with some huge risks. The tech giant filed its annual report late in June, and it includes a long list of ways its massive AI infrastructure bet could fail to pay off.

Cryptomining botnet hides C2 addresses in GitHub poem, infects over 3,400 servers Thousands of hijacked servers have been looking up their command and control (C2) server in a poem posted on GitHub, according to Black Lotus Labs. The malware reading it, dubbed PoeLLM, breaks into exposed AI services and open-source tools, mines cryptocurrency on them and uses them to hunt for new victims. The researchers call the campaign Canto Incognito and believe it is

Microsoft’s new model helps AI agents judge their next move Microsoft-Decision-1 is a small decision-scoring model. Given a situation, a question and a fixed set of answer options, it returns a calibrated probability for each option. “This model is designed for routing, classification, prioritization, verification, and workflow control, making it easier to incorporate decision intelligence into existing applications, agents, and workflows in a secure, trus

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Macmillan Publishers / Getty Images If it were a “Black Mirror” episode it would be too on the nose. Renowned tech critic Cory Doctorow’s book “Enshittification” hasn’t even been out for a single day, and Amazon is already peddling AI-generated copycats. One was even listed days prior to the release of the genuine article, suggesting a well-timed effort to rip sales away from the author on the book’s

AI models tend to be black boxes, but it seems they do become a little less opaque if you forcibly crack them open. According to a report from 404 Media, a hacker who allegedly breached AI music generation platform Suno back in November 2025 was able to get a peek into the trove of training data that was used to build Suno’s models—and it contains lots of works from artists that the company seems to have scraped from streaming platforms. Per 404 Media, the

In a blog post from Thursday of last week, the AI software repository Hugging Face announced a bizarre cyberattack on the systems that run its services. “This one was different from anything we had handled before,” the post said, because “it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system.” In its own blog post on Tuesday, OpenAI said its own models were the culprits in the attack, and it’s coordinating with Hugging Face to address the situation.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Ebloma ; Getty Images Last week, OpenAI said it cut off the toymaker FoloToy’s access to its AI models after the AI-powered teddy bear “Kumma,” which ran GPT-4o, was found giving responses that were wildly inappropriate for children — including discussing sexual fetishes, and giving instructions on how to find knives and light matches. The move signaled that the ChatGPT-maker was clearly concerned abo

Insurers brace for millions in claims as AI agents spin out of control Oct 6, 2026 Insurers are bracing for claims worth millions from AI agents that have spun out of control. The Financial Times reports that the personal liability of executives like Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) is now in play, too. Incidents like the hack of AI platform Hugging Face by OpenAI agents are driving the shift. Tim Rayner, head of underwriting and claims at

worst-people-alive-obsessed-smart-glasses There’s something about smart glasses that bring out the worst in people. It’s really no mystery, though: they’re powerful little surveillance devices that let wearers secretly record anyone they’re looking at, uniting tech bros and vapid influencers under the same, obnoxious umbrella. The popularity of wearables like Meta Ray-Bans are quickly reminding us why the slang term “glasshole” was already a thing over a d

Published on November 12, 2026 at 11:50 AM Tech Artificial intelligence Nvidia without Jensen Huang? The succession puzzle A new era for Nvidia? 4 min Lisa Imperatrice 4 min 4 min Lisa Imperatrice Don't see this ad anymore Zen Reading Article summary Article summary Summarized by AI, checked by Numerama ? We generate for you a summary of the article using AI and verify it to ensure there are no errors, to guarantee the authenticity of the information. Lear