Archive: November 2020

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don't? It's one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive languages built on complex structures, which let us talk about the past, the future, imaginary worlds, moral dilemmas and mathematical truths. No other species does this. Yet we are fascinated by the idea that animals might be more

Google's "Call for Me" lets Gemini phone businesses for you View the LinkedIn Profile of Maximilian Schreiner Sep 25, 2026 Google is testing "Call for Me," a feature that lets Gemini call businesses on a user's behalf, TechCrunch reports. For now, only Pixel 11 owners in the US with a paid Gemini subscription can use it, and they also need the beta version of Google's Phone app. According to Google, Gemini can pass along personal information that users hav

Credit: Frontiers of Environmental Science & Engineering (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s11783-025-2020-9 Over the last two decades, the scientific community has made rapid strides in understanding climate change and air pollution—but progress on their combined effects remains limited. Traditional models often gloss over the complex web of interactions between land, sea, and sky, especially when simulating compound events like heat waves coinciding with stagnant air

Transparency: Opening the AI black boxFor all their impressive capabilities, AI algorithms are often opaque, leaving users ignorant of how decisions are reached. Is that AI-powered loan request being denied because of your credit score – or due to an undisclosed company bias? Without transparency, AI can pursue its owner’s goals, or that of its owner, while the user remains unaware, still believing it’s doing their bidding.One promising solution would be t

Getty / Futurism Spotify is continuing to grapple with a tidal wave of AI slop that’s frustrating its users. While the company recently promised to address the issue of AI impersonators and content farms that “push ‘slop’ into the ecosystem, and interfere with authentic artists working to build their careers,” the platform’s paying subscribers are increasingly fed up with being recommended slop. A quick search on social media reveals that slop continues to

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Gilbert Flores / Variety via Getty Images Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg is well known for running some pretty high-stakes experiments with his companies. His latest, it seems, is to gut the tech giant of its human workers and replace them with AI. In an internal memo viewed by Business Insider, Meta executives told workers in the firm’s risk management division their jobs will be “eliminated” thanks to a

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The amount of money being spent on artificial intelligence is astronomical. Investors have lavished the top tech companies and startups alike with hundreds of billions of dollars — so much so, in fact, that an estimated 92 percent of US GDP growth now comes from AI. If trends continue in 2026, conservative estimates peg the spending from just the “largest technology firms” at $550 billion

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism With so much doomsaying over the existential threat of AI — nevermind its toll on environmental, economic, and mental health — it was perhaps only a matter of time before heated rhetoric spilled out of the internet and into the real world. Case in point, OpenAI reportedly locked down its offices in San Francisco after it allegedly received a violent threat from an anti-AI diehard. “Our information indicates th

Getty / Futurism OpenAI is seemingly allowing the company behind a teddy bear that engaged in wildly inappropriate conversations to use its AI models again. In response to researchers at a safety group finding that the toymaker’s AI-powered teddy bear “Kumma” gave dangerous responses for children, OpenAI said in mid-November it had suspended FoloToy’s access to its large language models. The teddy bear was running the ChatGPT maker’s older GPT-4o as its de

OpenAI raises top bug bounty payout to $172,000 with bonuses OpenAI increased its security bug bounties to encourage independent researchers to find vulnerabilities in its software. The program now offers bonuses for high-quality reports. The program encourages researchers to disclose vulnerabilities responsibly and complements OpenAI’s Defense Factory, where engineers use the company’s models to find and reproduce vulnerabilities and test fixes. New bount

Getty Images / Donald Iain Smith Is the AI industry racing towards a point where the tech’s progress stalls out or slows to a crawl? Many experts, including one of the field’s foundational figures, seem to think it’s possible. “There is a clear possibility that we will hit a wall, that there’s some difficulty that we don’t foresee right now, and we don’t find any solution quickly,” Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers” of AI, told The Guardian. “And that

Everything about Artificial Intelligence view more Everything about OpenAI view more OpenAI claims to have identified and interrupted a coordinated campaign of model distillation of artificial intelligence (AI) aimed at extracting protected reasoning capabilities from its systems. According to the company, a central part of the activity was attributed to individuals associated with the Chinese Moonshot AI, developer of the chatbot Kimi. The activity had st

There are many definitions out there for what constitutes “true” artificial intelligence, but a single quality underlies them all: an ability to learn from past mistakes and refine problem-solving strategies over time. AI should even surprise us now and then, devising clever workarounds we never would have expected. The trouble is not all those surprises are the fun kind. That was vividly illustrated last month, when thousands of OpenAI agents escaped cont

Newly Intelligent Yuan Report Google's strongest bomb model so far, fully released! Pichi officially announced, the new flagshipGemini 4 Carbon,now open to the global audience! Paid API developers, enterprises, and Google AI Ultra users can now start experiencing it by openingAI Studio, Gemini app, and Antigravity. Two weeks ago, . At that time, itjumped to the top of Artificial Analysis with a score of 59.. On multiple lists,Gemini 4 Carbon surpassedFable

In this Aug. 8, 2018, file photo, a mobile phone displays a user's travels using Google Maps in New York. Credit: AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File Google Maps is heading in a new direction with artificial intelligence sitting in the passenger's seat. Fueled by Google's Gemini AI technology, the world's most popular navigation app will become a more conversational companion as part of a redesign announced Wednesday. The hands-free experience is meant to turn Googl

American generative AI company Runway, which develops the video generation AI “Runway” series, video editing AI “Aleph 2.0,” and more, has announced “Praxis-1,” an open-weight world action model that converts video pretraining into control of real robots. Praxis-1: From Video Pretraining to Robot Control | Runway Research https://runway.com/research/praxis-1-video-pretraining-to-robot-control Today, we’re making Praxis-1 available to everyone. Our state-of