Archive: September 2018

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain One company offers Bay Area employers artificial intelligence that filters potential hires by combing through 10,000 public online sources looking for references to violence or illegal drugs. Another uses the technology to scan workers' office emails for signs of dissatisfaction or burnout. Others offer AI analysis of workers' every online action in the workplace. As artificial intelligence gives new, powerful tools to em

Credit: University of Michigan Detecting writing via artificial intelligence is a tricky dance: Doing it right means being effective at identifying it while being careful not to falsely accuse a human of employing it. And few tools strike the right balance. A team of researchers at the University of Michigan say they have devised a new way to tell whether a piece of text written by AI passes both tests—something that could be especially useful in academia

Google says Gemini 4 Argon can find and patch critical software flaws Google announced Gemini 4 Argon, its new frontier AI model, and is rolling it out to a set of trusted cyber defenders through its Fairwind Program. Google says the model can locate critical software vulnerabilities, validate them, and patch them without human help, and it will release a version without cyber guardrails to those defenders and to its own internal teams. Developers, enterpr

Supermicro is a legitimate hardware company based in San Jose, California that nonetheless has a long list of brushes with legal controversy. And today, according to Bloomberg, it had its Taiwan office and about eight other locations raided as part of a U.S. federal case over alleged AI chip smuggling—or to put it another way, noncompliance with U.S. export controls. Shares closed down about 8% if you care about that sort of thing. Bloomberg notes that the

Self-assembled Maxwell lattice from gold nanocubes with structural degeneracy. Credit: Nature Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-025-02253-3 A research team including members from the University of Michigan have unveiled a new observational technique that's sensitive to the dynamics of the intrinsic quantum jiggles of materials, or phonons. This work will help scientists and engineers better design metamaterials—substances that possess exotic properties

In 1820, a larger-than-life bronze boot was pulled from a Scottish bog. For centuries, experts assumed it was looted from a Roman settlement, perhaps as an odd spoil of war. But a new analysis challenges that theory, suggesting that Rome’s own soldiers deliberately dismantled the statue. In a recent statement, National Museums Scotland announced that its team had reconstructed the full statue that once included the boot known as the Milsington Leg. During

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Mark Ralston / AFP via Getty Images When talking about the giants dominating the AI game, people tend to consider OpenAI, the massive private company behind ChatGPT, or else Google’s Gemini, or perhaps Microsoft’s Copilot. In other words, no one really thinks about Elon Musk as an AI leader. Evidently, that’s a perception he’s hoping to change with the construction of an enormous computing complex in

Credit: AI-generated image Artificial intelligence is a lively topic of conversation in schools and workplaces, which could lead you to believe that only younger people use it. However, older Americans are also using AI. This raises the questions of what they're doing with the technology and what they think of it. I'm a researcher who studies older age, disability and technology use. I partnered with the University of Michigan's National Poll on Healthy Ag

Sometimes the actions of gross dweebs cross a line. I don’t believe in capital punishment. No, you shouldn’t actually die for nerdiness-related crimes, but sometimes a sort of execution should be staged anyway. You should be marched down a sort of death row. You should be made to say your last words. Your crying family members should sob, and you should be lifted in the air by two grave-looking high school football players in varsity jackets, turned upside

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. Character.AI, the chatbot platform accused in several ongoing lawsuits of driving teens to self-harm and suicide, says it will move to block kids under 18 from using

Stolen AI access leaves companies with cloud bills of up to $1 million Criminals who break into corporate cloud accounts are using the stolen access to run AI models at the victim’s expense, in some cases racking up more than $100,000 in charges in a single day, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant researchers have found. Usage chart showing LLMJacking generating a spike in API requests (Source: Google) In 2026, Mandiant responded to severa

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has sparked questions about their computational abilities compared to traditional models. While recent research has shown that LLMs can simulate a universal Turing machine by using an external memory through prompting, this setup often relies on external controls, which shift much of the computational load away from the LLM itself. Until now, it has remained an open question whether an LLM, unaided by such external

Screenshots from AI-generated videos on Sora On Thursday, Disney announced a landmark partnership with OpenAI to license its iconic characters and properties to be used to generate clips on Sora, OpenAI’s video generating app, starting in 2026. It’s the first major licensing deal between OpenAI and a major Hollywood studio, and will include more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar characters. But consequential as it is, it’s simply putting the ru

AI Generated Image On December 11, OpenAI release ChatGPT 5.2, the latest version of the widely used AI chatbot. As it does every time it releases a minor update, the company hailed its latest version as a “significant improvement in general intelligence,” calling it the “best model yet for real-world, professional use.” In a further display of hubris, OpenAI even went so far as to claim 5.2 is their “first model that performs at or above a human expert le

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images As corporate consolidation and ideological capture continue to wreak havoc on journalism across the world, some might be wondering if the dire media landscape could get any worse. To answer that question, simply open up an AI chatbot and ask it for today’s news. In a fascinating experiment fit for 2026, Jean-Hugues Roy, a journalism professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal, decid

Australia's proposed AI safety bill would force frontier model makers to open up to independent testing Nov 12, 2026 Australia's government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, has announced a law that would impose mandatory safety rules on frontier AI companies operating in the country for the first time. The rules target the most advanced models with the highest risk profiles and fall under the government's "AI in Australia's Interests" agenda. A new

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