Archive: December 2018

In a blog post on Thursday, Anthropic wrote that it “has raised $65 billion in Series H funding led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.” The most recent blog post along similar lines from OpenAI places its valuation at $852 billion. That means the top of the leaderboard has flipped. Among AI-first tech companies, Anthropic, “the Claude one,” is now technically more valuable than O

The sticker-like patch tracks a range of physiological responses, such as skin temperature, humidity, heart rate and blood oxygen levels, that are associated with emotional states. Credit: Yangbo Yuan / Penn State Saying one thing while feeling another is part of being human, but bottling up emotions can have serious psychological consequences, such as anxiety or panic attacks. To help health care providers tell the difference, a team led by scientists at

Large language models (LLMs) have proven to be versatile tools across various domains, including natural language processing, biological studies, and chemical research. In a new paper Autonomous chemical research with large language models, a research team from Carnegie Mellon University and Emerald Cloud Lab introduces an innovative system named Coscientist. This intelligent agent, powered by multiple LLMs, autonomously designs, plans, and executes comple

The European Union flag stands inside the atrium at the European Council building in Brussels, June 17, 2024. Credit: AP Photo/Omar Havana, file The European Union on Thursday released a code of practice on general purpose artificial intelligence to help thousands of businesses in the 27-nation bloc using the technology comply with the bloc's landmark AI rule book. The EU code is voluntary and complements the EU's AI Act, a comprehensive set of regulations

Nearly 70 percent of US agencies use generative AI, and unions are finally catching up with guardrails Nov 13, 2026 US public-sector unions are winning more protections against AI surveillance and automation-driven job losses. The issue is growing more urgent as nearly 70 percent of US government agencies already use generative AI, according to an Ernst and Young survey. The wins are piling up nationwide. After a strike vote in October, IFPTE Local 21 in O

RemoveMacAI turns off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and deletes its models A developer has released RemoveMacAI, a free command-line tool that turns off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and deletes about 12 GB of downloaded AI models. It requires a Mac with Apple silicon. macOS 27 doesn’t have a switch for Apple Intelligence, and the models stay on disk after you disable the features. If that matches your machine, you are holding 12 GB for software you swit

3D screens have really struggled to take off. Neither bulky 3D televisions that require cheap-looking glasses nor VR headsets have ever caught on in the mainstream. Movies projected in 3D have plummeted in popularity after hitting their peak in the early 2010s. But that doesn’t mean there are other clever ways to trick your brain into thinking you’re looking through a three-dimensional window instead of a flat screen. In a fun proof of concept, True3D Labs

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images When former OpenAI safety researcher Stephen Adler read the New York Times story about Allan Brooks, a Canadian father who had been slowly driven into delusions by obsessive conversations with ChatGPT, he was stunned. The article detailed Brooks’ ordeal as he followed the chatbot down a deep rabbit hole, becoming convinced he had discovered a new kind of math — which, if true, had grave i

No one has been more patient with director Neill Blomkamp than me. Not only do I love District 9. I love Chappie, and will defend it to the bitter end (Admit you haven’t seen it, and you only know the famous tweet). I thought Elysium was a flawed success. I showed kindness to Gran Turismo by, um, not watching it. That way I can pretend forever that it might be good. But this? This is unforgivable: Blomkamp generated this… whatever it is, and posted a link

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images With more money flowing into AI development than ever before, web browsers powered by autonomous “AI agents” are hitting the market like crazy. One of the most popular is Comet, offered by the startup Perplexity. Though Comet promises to organize your emails, summarize webpages, and automate your searches, it’s not without some glaring ethical and security flaws. And if you are reckless e

The five senses. Credit: Modified by Nicolas Posunko/Skoltech from image generated by Deep Style (Abstract) model on Deep Dream Generator Skoltech scientists have devised a mathematical model of memory. By analyzing its new model, the team came to surprising conclusions that could prove useful for robot design, artificial intelligence, and for better understanding of human memory. Published in Scientific Reports, the study suggests there may be an optimal

What AI-generated malware looks like under the microscope In this Help Net Security interview, Lindsay Kaye, VP of Threat Intelligence at HUMAN Security, talks about what AI-generated malware looks like on the bench. She points to tidy comments, uniform logging messages, and emojis as signs a script came from a model, and notes that decompiled code strips much of that away. Kaye also covers how AI is squeezing the time teams have to patch, where it helps c

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images McDonald’s has become corporate enemy number one after its hideous AI holiday commercial went viral across numerous social media platforms for all the wrong reasons. TBWA and The Sweetshop — the agency and production company behind the turd of an ad — have since tried to scrub it from the net, along with a bizarrely defensive statement by Sweetshop CEO, which is now unavailable. “For seve

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI’s use in the legal sphere is the gift that keeps on giving. This time, it’s the sobering sense of disappointment that set in after a team building an AI chatbot for Alaska’s court system actually tested it and found out it was a hallucinating disaster, NBC News reports. The chatbot, dubbed the Alaska Virtual Assistant, was designed to help people handle forms and other procedures invol

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images In 2026, Google’s AI is embracing that oldest and noblest of internet traditions: sponsored content. Over the weekend, Google released a tiny memo on its Ad & Commerce Blog, announcing a new type of sponsored content marketers can purchase, the Washington Post observed. This new type of ad will be featured in Google’s “AI mode” — the AI chatbot which users can open on the side of a Google

However, wearing a camera as part of daily life can pose a risk to the privacy of people around. According to Sharam Izadi, vice president of the XR division and general manager at Google, during the development of the smart glasses, they listened to opinions from wearers, people around them, and privacy experts, and it was noted that there was particular concern about being photographed without their knowledge. To address these concerns, Google has equipp