Archive: August 2019

What if you could make trades on the global financial markets and never lose money? That’s the pitch of UpsideOnly, a new AI-powered trading platform from Perpetuals.com. While the idea is obviously compelling, there is a big catch. UpsideOnly exists as a kind of fake trading platform where human users trade stocks, cryptocurrencies, and commodities. The idea is that by engaging in these fake trades, humans are providing data to the company’s AI model, Bay

After ChatGPT’s viral success starting in late 2022, a legion of corporations jumped on the AI bandwagon by launching their own AI chatbots. More often than not, these were extremely limited, intended for customer support, product recommendations, and the like. But what if the AI powering those chatbots could be diverted for other, more productive purposes? That’s precisely what’s been happening to Chipotle’s Pepper, a “concierge bot” launched on Facebook

There will be no tokenmaxxing happening in Norwegian classrooms. According to a report from Reuters, the nation’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere announced Friday that the government will impose restrictions on the use of AI tools in schools in an effort to combat what it sees as a negative impact on learning. The new rules, which will take effect when students return to school in August of this year, will place a near-total ban on AI for primary school s

The Open Problems in Single-cell Analysis living benchmarking platform. Credit: Nature Biotechnology (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41587-025-02694-w Researchers from more than 50 international institutions have launched Open Problems, a collaborative open-source platform to benchmark, improve, and run competitions for computational methods in single-cell genomics. Co-led by Helmholtz Munich and Yale University, the initiative aims to standardize evaluations, foste

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Artificial intelligence has graced humanity with many blessings: videos of Stephen Hawking as professional wrestler, thousands of AI-generated podcasts, and more cutting edge Spotify tunes than anyone can hope to hear in a lifetime. Unfortunately, the technology of the future demands a high price. On top of the exorbitant energy cost fueling a return to industrial-era levels of pollution,

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images The family of Adam Raine, a California teen who took his life after extensive conversations with ChatGPT about his suicidal thoughts, has amended their wrongful death complaint against OpenAI to allege that the chatbot maker repeatedly relaxed ChatGPT’s guardrails around discussion of self-harm and suicide. The amended complaint, which was filed today, points to chan

Ralstonia solanacearum in a potato plant. The bacterium destroys the vascular system in plants, causing them to succumb to wilt disease. Credit: Amilcar Sanchez Perez Scientists at the University of California, Davis, used artificial intelligence to help plants recognize a wider range of bacterial threats — which may lead to new ways to protect crops like tomatoes and potatoes from devastating diseases. The study was published in Nature Plants. Plants, lik

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Tom Brenner For The Washington Post via Getty At least Grok has its priorities straight: it would rather sacrifice droves of children instead of its creator, Elon Musk. On X, where the AI model is allowed to run wild and respond to all kinds of user inquiries, the notoriously badly-behaved bot was asked to answer a question in the style of the quiz show “Jeopardy!”. “As Tesla’s Al,” a user asked, “Gro

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have primarily focused on enhancing their capacity to predict text in a forward, time-linear manner. However, emerging research suggests that enabling LLMs to critique and refine their own outputs retrospectively can significantly improve their performance. While effective, existing methods rely on the advanced reasoning and instruction-following abilities inherent to high-capacity LLMs. Moreover, these a

Amazon Earlier this month, Amazon revealed a new feature that aims to use AI to recap its Prime Video shows. The tool, now deployed in beta form, generates everything from narration, dialogue, and music to summarize key plot points, allowing fans to quickly catch up on their favorite shows. At least, that was the idea. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the AI tool has already made an enormous mess by bungling up the details of a hit show, suffering from the common s

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Beneath ChatGPT’s flattering persona lies a goldmine for advertisers: an AI chatbot that never gets tired of hawking clients’ wares. New reporting by The Information has revealed some recent topics of conversation between OpenAI employees as they work to supply advertisers with a teeming new audience to manipulate. The plans are far from final, though they give us a look at what soon may become the norm for ChatGPT. One conver

Getty / Futurism AI tech leaders have a lot to gain from striking fear into the hearts of their investors. By painting the tech as an ultra-powerful force that could easily bring humanity to its knees, the industry is hoping to sell itself as a panacea: a remedy to a situation it had a firm hand in bringing about. Case in point, Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei is back with a 19,000-word essay posted to his blog, arguing that “humanity is about to

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images AI chipmaker Nvidia has been at the center of the enormous AI hype wave that has gripped global markets, ascending to become the most valuable company in the world. Yet despite its dominating presence on Wall Street, OpenAI is getting cold feet about the company’s offerings. After announcing a blockbuster $100 billion deal in September — which escalated concerns of AI companies passing the same money around in circular dealmaking

Getty / Futurism A man’s obsession with an AI chatbot led to his life completely spiraling out of control — and he only snapped out of it when, one day, he woke up outside on a stranger’s futon, completely penniless. “I wasn’t aware of the dangers at the time, and I thought that the AI had statistical analysis abilities that would allow it to assist me if I opened up about my life,” the man, Adam Thomas, told Slate in yet another grim peek at how AI can le

@nanashisan_prog(名無しさん)Recently, I heard that AI is amazing, so a former developer who was unemployed for three years tried to create a web service.【Rails】RailsClaudeCodePersonal DevelopmentAI1Last updated at 2026-11-12Posted at 2026-11-12As the title says, I've been unemployed for about three years. Three years ago, I was creating websites with Ruby on Rails. At that time, GitHub Copilot had just launched, and I was saying things like "This auto-completio

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s insistence that the company’s AI models may not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or directing killer drones has kicked up a major storm. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and president Donald Trump came out swinging, directing all government agencies to stop using the company’s software “effective immediately” and labeling the company as a “supply chain risk,” sending shockwaves across th