Archive: October 2020

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain When we write something to another person, over email or perhaps on social media, we may not state things directly, but our words may instead convey a latent meaning—an underlying subtext. We also often hope that this meaning will come through to the reader. But what happens if an artificial intelligence (AI) system is at the other end, rather than a person? Can AI, especially conversational AI, understand the latent meani

if ( !emtpy($headline_subheadline ) ) : ?> No strangers to stress, security execs recognize cutting-edge AI capabilities as a harbinger of challenges that will make the top cyber role untenable unless liability, authority, and alignment issues are quickly addressed. endif; ?> Credit: Viktor Forgacs / Shutterstock Artificial IntelligenceC-SuiteCareersCSO and CISOIT LeadershipRisk ManagementSecurity

if ( !emtpy($headline_subheadline ) ) : ?> Cartographer uses AI to capture the undocumented exceptions and judgment calls that have kept enterprises from transforming and automating their messiest processes — but analysts and customers say execution and organizational discipline will be key. endif; ?> Credit: Foundry / Peter Sayer Artificial IntelligenceRobotic Process AutomationEnterprise ApplicationsRolesCareers

It was only a matter of time. Elon Musk, inveterate inventor and the erstwhile world’s first trillionaire, is reportedly working on a smartphone-like device designed to facilitate communication between humans and AI. If that last sentence confused you, you’re in good company: Almost nothing is known about the mysterious device, which first surfaced in a report Wednesday afternoon from The Wall Street Journal. According to the paper, the device is being bui

Advancing protein evolution with inverse folding models integrating structural and evolutionary constraints. Credit: IGDB A team of researchers has developed a method that could transform the field of protein engineering. The new approach, called AI-informed Constraints for protein Engineering (AiCE), enables rapid and efficient protein evolution by integrating structural and evolutionary constraints into a generic inverse folding model—without the need to

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Research in the International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems has shown how artificial intelligence can be used to make personal recommendations on stopping-off places when one is traveling. The approach could optimize the route one takes and so reduce travel times and fuel consumption if traveling by road, for instance, while at the same time offering surprising and interesting places one might visit that

Say a few words, and a rigged AI asks for $5,000 Researchers at Imperial College London tampered with speech-to-text models so they transcribed most speakers accurately and misbehaved for one chosen person. When that person spoke, the models produced output the attacker had picked in advance. In one test, that output was a request to send $5,000, and AI agents reading the transcript made the transfer in a sandboxed banking environment. The attacker needs a

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Over two decades ago, the New Oxford American Dictionary wanted to see if any of its competitors were cribbing its definitions. So it set up a trap. In its first edition, published in 2001, NOAD included a word called “esquivalience,” which it defined as the “willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.” The word was a fake. And the bait worked: the word reference website Diction

It turns out Claude may not be the best confidant (well, at least if you’re not careful with your privacy settings). Over the weekend, we got yet another reminder that conversations with chatbots are not guaranteed to stay within the chat box. Some users on Twitter and Reddit showed that conversations with Anthropic’s Claude can be crawled and made searchable on Google, essentially readable by anyone who comes across them. The conversations that show up in

Framework of GeneAgent for gene-set analysis. Credit: Nature Methods (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41592-025-02748-6 Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) agent powered by a large language model (LLM) that creates more accurate and informative descriptions of biological processes and their functions in gene set analysis than current systems. The work is published in the journal Nature Methods. The sys

Getty Images Chinese hackers used Anthropic’s Claude AI model to automate cybercrimes targeting banks and governments, the company admitted in a blog post this week. Anthropic believes it’s the “first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention” and an “inflection point” in cybersecurity, a “point at which AI models had become genuinely useful for cybersecurity operations, both for good and for ill.” AI agen

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Pauline Lubens / MediaNews Group / The Mercury News via Getty Images Elon Musk is many things, but being a peak physical specimen rivaling that of elite athletes is not one of them. And there’s nothing wrong with that; most of us aren’t elite athletes. And successful businessman though he may be, most of us would also hesitate to put his intellect in the same bracket as, say, Isaac Newton. Ask his “ma

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images What does it take to become the most successful AI surveillance company in 2025? If you’re anything like Flock, the startup selling automatic license plate readers and facial recognition tech to cops, you don’t really need much AI at all — just an army of sweatshop workers in the global south. Bombshell new reporting from 404 Media found that Flock, which has its cameras in thousands of U

In 1908, a Columbia University psychiatry professor named Frederick Peterson claimed to have built a “psychometer”—a contraption which he said could read people’s thoughts using, among other components, a mirror and a lamp. “It is almost like sorcery to observe the behavior of the instrument with a series of words, some purposely chosen to be emotionally indifferent and others to strike some emotional complex deep in the soul of the individual experimented

Earthquakes that occurred in the Pozzuoli-Campi Flegrei region about 7 miles west of central Naples from 2022 to 2025 overlaid on Google Earth satellite imagery. Credit: Xing Tan Scientists are using artificial intelligence to understand escalating unrest in Italy's Campi Flegrei, a volcanic area that is home to hundreds of thousands of people. Like adjusting a camera lens so a blurry image becomes clear, the new approach makes it possible for researchers