Archive: April 2020

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Erman Gunes / Shutterstock Google’s electricity use and emissions skyrocketed last year due to its aggressive AI infrastructure buildout, according to the company’s most recent environmental impact report. “The biggest change to our environmental impact is the expansion of our technical infrastructure — and the energy needed to operate it,” reads the report. The report adds that in the years since 201

Matthew G Eddy / Shutterstock / Futurism Google’s notorious AI Overview just handed would-be Flock vandals a perfect excuse to carve into the company’s controversial AI-integrated license plate readers (ALPRs). ALRPs are wildly unpopular, especially online, where privacy-minded communities trade memes and videos cheering on destruction of the surveillance equipment. One of the more popular bits in this space centers on the idea that Flock’s ALPR’s are supp

Shutterstock / Futurism If you feel like the internet is turning into a place for bots — not to mention by bots — you’re not alone. Social media platforms have been flooded with low-effort AI slop, while even once renowned publications are doubling down on the tech by outsourcing writing and editing responsibilities to the tech. In June, Cloudflare found that website traffic from AI agents and bots had overtaken human-generated traffic for the first time —

Shutterstock / Futurism A TikTok video shows a teenage girl walking through the front doors of a large high school. It’s filmed point-of-view style using smart glasses, and a hashtag in the caption reads “#metaglasses.” “Excuse me, could I get your Roblox?” the adolescent boy wearing the head-mounted camera badgers the girl. “No,” she responds, glaring unhappily as she quickly moves past him. She keeps walking, but the boy filming follows her. “Come back!

Datasets used to train AI algorithms may underrepresent older people. Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Artificial intelligence boosters predict that AI will transform life on Earth for the better. Yet there's a major problem: artificial intelligence's alarming propensity for sociopathic behavior. Large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI's ChatGPT sometimes suggest courses of action or spout rhetoric in conversation that many users would consider amoral or

Getty / Shutterstock / Futurism Let Elon Musk never be accused of not leading by example. Last week, the world’s richest man sung the praises of his new Grok Bot AI agent, encouraging his followers to let it control their credit cards and shop for them. “To buy stuff, you can just take a picture of your credit card, drop it in the chat and Grok @Bot will scour the Internet for the best deal on the item you want and order it,” he wrote. The next day, he pos

A tech startup is offering New York City residents free home cleaning with a twist—it will send “professional cleaners” wearing cameras to record everything they do. All that data will supposedly be used to train AI-driven robots. The unusual pitch comes from the German startup MicroAGI, whose website describes the company as a “team of engineers, researchers, and operators on a mission to accelerate embodied AI.” It began publicizing the free home-cleanin

Another day, another AI model from Google. This time, Google DeepMind has released a new member of the Gemma 4 open model family, but it’s fundamentally different from the rest of the lineup. DiffusionGemma doesn’t generate outputs linearly like most AI models. Instead, it can produce an entire block of text in parallel. Google says this makes it faster and more efficient when running on local hardware like an Nvidia DGX or a humble gaming GPU. Most AI mod

AI summaries in AI Overviews cards are still being tested and are not visible for every querySummaries in source cards are still being tested. Topvisor Journal writes that Google has not announced an official launch, and the feature does not appear in every search. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable also saw summaries only for some of his test queries. The countries, languages, and devices included in the test were not specified in the publications

Google got a slow start with generative AI after seemingly being caught flat-footed by Microsoft’s Copilot reveal. What a difference a few years make. Now, Google is at the forefront of AI development (for better or worse), but new cracks are beginning to show. The company’s string of high-profile personnel departures continues, and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has now said he will hand off day-to-day responsibilities to take on an oversight role at parent

Google DeepMind announced the robotics AI model “Gemini Robotics 2.5” on November 10, 2026. It learns faster in the real world and can be adapted to a wide range of settings, from everyday life to factory work. Gemini Robotics 2.5: Accelerating Physical Intelligence — Google DeepMind https://deepmind.google/blog/gemini-robotics-2-5-accelerates-real-world-physical-intelligence/ The Gemini Robotics series consists of AI that determines a robot’s movements. R

Boston Dynamics has unveiled the humanoid robot “Atlas” with its feet replaced by wheels, demonstrating rapid driving and a 360-degree spinning jump. It applied reinforcement learning (RL)-based control technology to learn a new mode of locomotion in a research experiment designed to verify the performance of the robot’s actuators and AI control model. Boston Dynamics showed wheeled Atlas driving quickly and changing direction in a real test space through

The U.S. company OpenAI began a limited preview of its next-generation “GPT-5.6” model series on June 26 (local time). It consists of three models: the flagship “Sol,” “Terra” for everyday business tasks, and the fast, inexpensive “Luna.” The names are said to represent a “hierarchy of capabilities” (OpenAI has not explained the origins of the names, but Sol, Terra, and Luna are Latin words referring to the sun, Earth, and moon, respectively). The models a

Voucher purchase screen (Source: PayPay official website; the same applies below) Vouchers are purchased in units of ¥10,000. Users can choose from ¥10,000, ¥30,000, ¥50,000, ¥100,000, and ¥200,000, and can purchase up to ¥250,000. A cardholder authentication service (3D Secure) is required when registering a third-party credit card and purchasing a voucher. From July 1 onward, the company plans to gradually expand the number of users who can use the vouch

The DHS raised concerns about DeepSeek’s handling of user data, warning that sensitive information from U.S. government users could potentially be accessible to Chinese authorities under Chinese law, the order said. The move comes amid intensifying tech competition in AI between the U.S. and China. The Chinese AI model challenges its U.S. rivals, including OpenAI and Meta, with low-cost open-weight models. China pushed back against the U.S.’s move. Foreign

A Brand-New Computer Virus ay, posted from Aofeisi QbitAI | WeChat Official Account QbitAI Uh-oh. AGENTS.MD is becoming a computer virus of the AI era. You were just casually opening a webpage. You didn’t click any pop-ups, didn’t click any “Download” prompts, and barely moved your hands. The moment you switched away from the webpage, a plain-text file called AGENTS.md had already silently landed in your computer’s “Downloads” (~/Downloads) folder. But at