Archive: May 2020

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Taylor Hill / WireImage; Shutterstock Earlier this month, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with jeers when he brought up AI during his commencement speech at the University of Arizona. Just days earlier, footage of real estate executive Gloria Caulfield being booed at her commencement speech at the University of Central Florida after mentioning AI went viral online. “What happened?” Caulfield as

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary wants to build a menacingly large data center facility near the Great Salt Lake in Utah that would be over twice the size of Manhattan. But his plans for the “Stratos Hyperscale Data Center” has got locals outraged and spooked. And despite his earlier defiance that he would never downsize his project, O’Leary is now

The article will be read aloud. (Photo=Google) Google has begun internal testing of a model called “Hydrogen.” It is a lightweight model that is faster and cheaper than existing high-performance models and is expected to become a Flash-tier product in the recently unveiled “Gemini 4” series. As Google employees’ internal testing is confirmed and related performance evaluations are being shared among external developers, there are indications that the launc

Trying to make computers more like human brains isn’t a new phenomenon. However, a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University argues that there could be many benefits in taking this concept a bit more literally by using actual neurons, though there are some hurdles to jump first before we get there. In a recent paper, the team laid out a roadmap of what’s needed before we can create biocomputers powered by human brain cells (not taken from human bra

Shutterstock / Futurism According to boosters of AI, the tech was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented productivity, leisure time for workers, and scientific discovery. But in reality, it keeps being linked to crimes so ghoulish that they’re almost unbelievable. In a particularly horrifying example, a man used Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot to generate some 7,000 sexually explicit images of his stepdaughter by feeding the AI a photo of her that was taken

At work, I have PostgreSQL. More precisely, I have many PostgreSQL instances: different services, environments, clusters, and hundreds of shards.A little context about me: I am currently a backend developer for high-load services, and previously worked as a DBA. So databases are not just an abstract storage layer behind an ORM for me, but neither do I manually carry every ALTER TABLE from server to server on a USB drive.Our services roll out standard migra

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Donald Trump's new "Genesis Mission" initiative promises to use artificial intelligence to reinvent how science is done, in a bid to move the dial on the hardest challenges in areas like robotics, biotech and nuclear fusion. It imagines a system in which AI designs experiments, executes them, learns from the results and continually proposes new lines of inquiry. The hope is that this will unlock dramatically higher produc

Published on July 28, 2026 at 10:29 Comment 0 𝕏 Print © TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0 Several days after the leak of two OpenAI AI models and the hacking of Hugging Face, Sam Altman spoke out about the incident for the first time. OpenAI’s CEO describes the incident as a “real reminder of the issues at stake” and believes that anyone who is not terrified by it “is not taking it seriously enough.” The entrepreneur argues against an AI monopoly… even though OpenAI r

A fake video manipulated to falsely depict President Joe Biden inappropriately touching his granddaughter has revealed flaws in Facebook’s “deepfake” policies, Meta’s Oversight Board concluded Monday. Last year when the Biden video went viral, Facebook repeatedly ruled that it did not violate policies on hate speech, manipulated media, or bullying and harassment. Since the Biden video is not AI-generated content and does not manipulate the president’s spee

Shutterstock / Futurism Perhaps more so than any other social media platform, LinkedIn has been inundated with lazy AI-generated brainrot content. It has become the AI slop “punching bag,” a repository of painful engagement bait being spewed out by an army of bots who seem at times to mainly be lobbing business platitudes at one another. Just last week, Substack CEO Chris Best took aim at the Microsoft-owned career site when he announced the launch of an A

Gemini models have been dropping so quickly, it can be hard to grasp Google’s intended lineup. Things are becoming clearer now that the company is beginning to move its products to the new branch. At the Google Cloud Next conference, it has announced initial availability of Gemini 2.5 Flash. This model is based on the same code as Gemini 2.5 Pro, but it’s faster and cheaper to run. You won’t see Gemini 2.5 Flash in the Gemini app just yet—it’s starting out

Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 6 Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The number of local bans on new data center developments jumped to over 500 in July, according to recent data. Local politicians in the United States are refusing to approve new data center construction in greater numbers, posing a threat to the expansion required by AI firms

Shutterstock / Futurism After years of horrendous scandals, OpenAI has seemingly admitted that ChatGPT wasn’t safe for teenage users. On Tuesday, the Sam Altman-led company rolled out an alternate version of the bot called “ChatGPT for Teens,” which is purportedly designed to help younger users “learn, think critically, deepen understanding, and use AI with confidence.” The feature “provides stronger built-in safety protections for teens, including feature

Continues after the advertisementGemini 4 Carbon was designed to handle more complex problems than those addressed by Gemini 4 Argon, the model recommended by Google for everyday tasks, software engineering, and professional activities. To do so, the new AI uses a larger number of tokens, with longer reasoning cycles and response verification.The model also ranked first in three independent benchmarks, each focusing on a different skill: CursorBench 4.0 te

Corporate leaders can now assign the agent a wide range of tasks, and it will complete them unsupervised, the company says. To prove the point, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi showed me how he uses it internally. Instead of a product demo, he fired up his actual agent and walked me through his most recent chats and charts. He showed me how it analyzed the parts of an employee satisfaction survey where the company didn’t score well, and how it helped him rate (an

Shutterstock / Futurism The state of our inboxes here at Futurism is chaotic. Every day is a cacophony of PR pitches, deranged rants, irrelevant news updates, and too-good-to-be-true business opportunities. (Don’t worry, though: we read every email.) But what’s really caught our eye lately is a growing number of cold emails that admit right in the subject field that they’re from an “AI agent” — more than a dozen so far over the last six week alone — that a

As global temperatures rise, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is disappearing at an alarming rate. Scientists have grown increasingly concerned that its outlet glaciers—including Thwaites, also known as the “doomsday glacier”—are going to collapse. A deeper look at the ice sheet’s climate history has only heightened their alarm. A study published Monday in the journal Nature Communications presents direct evidence that West Antarctica’s most vulnerable ice str