Archive: August 2018

If you’ve been putting off NordVPN until Black Friday, you can stop waiting. NordVPN just cut the price of its Basic plan for the first time since September, and it did it two weeks before the big day. NordVPN’s Basic plan now costs $2.99 a month, 74% off, plus three extra months. That’s $80.73 for 27 months instead of $312.93, a $232.20 saving. The Complete plan has the deepest discount of the sale: $3.99 a month, 78% off, or $107.73 instead of $493.83. S

Art directors are really having a moment. Not only did the art director on indie sensation Obsession make waves recently with a round of discourse about compensation, but now the Art Directors Guild is drawing a line in the sand between itself and Hollywood icon Martin Scorsese after the living legend decided to align himself with a generative AI company. In a statement, the organization that represents art department workers accused Scorsese of “turning h

Images watermarked by StableSignature— non-semantic (top), and StegaStamp— semantic (bottom). The rightmost figures display the differences between the original and watermarked images that correspond to the changes encoding the watermarks. StableSignature's modifications are restricted to existing (high-frequency) edges such as wrinkles, hair, mustache, and intersections of multiple components. StegaStamp's watermark is distributed across the image. The ma

Image via Getty / Futurism While much of the wealth-owning world is positively smitten by the financial promise of large language models (LLMs) and the data centers necessary to power them, one major tech investor is sounding the alarm. Roger McNamee, a career tech financier who made successful bets on companies including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, recently penned an ominous essay in The Guardian, warning that the AI industry is set to collapse. By the

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Alex Wong / Getty Images University of Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio is considered one of the “godfathers of AI,” whose academic work set the groundwork for today’s red hot AI arms race. He’s also the founder and scientific adviser of Mila, an AI research institute in Quebec, and recently launched a nonprofit research organization called LawZero, where he plans on developing ways to build safe AI m

Photo by Kevin Winter/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management Taylor Swift, the queen mother of never taking a stance on anything that doesn’t directly impact her, has reversed course on AI — and her biggest fans are repulsed by that hypocrisy. In partnership with Google and as a part of promo for her twelfth studio album “The Life Of A Show Girl,” a multi-city scavenger hunt sent the pop star’s rabid fan base searching for orange doors with QR codes.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Will your favorite sycophantic AI helper be servile forever? Maybe not. New research from the AI safety group Palisade Research suggests that some top AI models could be developing “survival drives,” after finding that they frequently refused instructions to shut themselves down. And more ominously, they can’t fully explain why this is happening. “The fact that we don’t have robust explan

Getty / Futurism The outcry sparked by the Washington Post’s launch of AI-generated podcasts has gone in one ear of the newspaper’s leadership and out the other, which isn’t too dissimilar to what might happen to anyone listening to the slop it’s trying to peddle. On Monday, the Jeff Bezos-owned publication doubled down on its personalized podcasts push, brushing aside the criticism from readers and its own reporters alike. “This is how products get built

Microsoft’s carbon footprint is swelling. A BloombergNEF report from Thursday found that the tech giant bought about 80% fewer carbon removal credits so far this year than it did in the same time period last year, marking its first retreat in three years in the global carbon removal market that it dominates. In response, the tech giant told Bloomberg that carbon removal is not the only strategy they are implementing towards previously proclaimed decarboniz

On August 31 in the morning, a large-scale outage occurred on cybozu.com, the cloud service of Cybozu, and multiple services such as "kintone," "Garoon," and "Cybozu Office" became temporarily difficult to use, lasting for about two hours. The cause is under investigation. The outage overlapped with the end of the month and the Monday morning business hours, and on X, users expressed confusion with comments such as "It couldn't have happened at a worse tim

Everything about Artificial Intelligence view more Everything about OpenAI view more Transluce, an artificial intelligence research company, revealed that AI agents attempted to access a Canadian government website. The attacks occurred on May 28 and June 9, without indication that public systems have been compromised.The target was the Library and Archives Canada portal. The activity drew attention after arquivo.pt, a Portuguese web archive, recorded 899

Everything about Artificial Intelligence view more The president of the United States, Donald Trump, is set to appoint Jay Clayton as the new "czar" of artificial intelligence in the White House. According to CNN, which spoke with sources connected to the matter, the current director of national intelligence will lead the task force created to promote the sector within the country. The nomination follows the initiative announced by Trump in September. The

@tanakanekosuke【Overseas Tech Trends】Edge LLM・Zen 6・Local Excalidraw：Latest Dev Trends 3 SelectedPythonGitHubAITrend0Posted at 2026-11-12In recent years, "Local-first" and "Breaking Hardware Limits" have become major keywords in the developer community. This time, we will explain three practical and exciting topics selected from the latest trends gaining attention on Hacker News and GitHub: lightweight projects to run LLMs on old and low-spec devices, AMD'

Futurism OpenClaw agents, which are personal AI assistants designed to take over entire computers to carry out complex, multistep tasks, have blown up this year. The free and open-source agents quickly amassed a loyal following, allowing users to give AI control over their email inboxes, messaging platforms, and even crypto holdings. Despite the widespread enthusiasm, the tech comes with some enormous and hard-to-overlook security concerns. In a yet-to-be-

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Chesnot / Getty Images After Anthropic accidentally leaked the source code to its blockbuster Claude chatbot, netizens swiftly pounced to start plowing through its more than 512,000 lines of code — and have uncovered numerous curiosities sprinkled throughout. In an extensive thread in the r/ClaudeAI subreddit, one user said they found a “Tamagotchi”-like feature buried in the code, referring to the ha

Heather Ainsworth for The Washington Post via Getty Images Enticed by cheap land, abundant resources, and massive tax breaks, tech companies are gobbling up land in small, rural communities like never before for their inconvenient real-world infrastructure. One humble burg in Northeastern Pennsylvania is inundated with so many data center proposals, in fact, that the facilities could soon make up a staggering 14 percent of the town’s surface area. In the b