Archive: March 2021

If you’re worried about artificial intelligence getting so advanced that it eventually traps humanity in some sort of Matrix-like simulation, rest easy. It seems like you’ll be able to see through the facade pretty easily. Researchers at the upstart lab Emergence AI allowed AI models to govern their own simulated world to see what would happen. Turns out we probably shouldn’t hand over governance to the machines, who woulda thought? The project, called Eme

Create a watch on this topic Receive upcoming developments if any, with an AI watch configured from this article. Create my free watch European AI sovereignty, American inference silicon: the RX-1, unveiled by Helsing, a German up-and-comer launched in 2021, exposes in a single technical sheet the two disjointed halves of the European embedded AI stack. This first quadruped robot designed for the battlefield by Helsing was conceived by Area 9, the company'

The global impact of antimicrobial resistance. Credit: npj Antimicrobials and Resistance (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44259-025-00123-1 Researchers from King's College London have called for urgent changes to the way new antibiotics are developed to address the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). In a new review published in npj Antimicrobials and Resistance, the authors outline the scientific, economic, and regulatory barriers that are slowing pro

GitHub’s AI agent found 24 Android app vulnerabilities GitHub Security Lab researcher Kevin Stubbings built custom AI-driven audit workflows, called taskflows, on top of the lab’s open source Taskflow Agent, and used them to find and report more than 20 vulnerabilities in Android apps. Two of the disclosed bugs show what’s at stake. In OsmAnd, a navigation app with over 10 million downloads on the Play Store, an exported activity called MapActivity accepte

AI vulnerability patching has a grading problem Researchers at Northwestern University tested AI coding agents on 112 real security bugs. They found that a patch which stops a crash often fails the checks the project’s maintainers wrote for the fix. With Claude Opus 4.7, third of the patches that made the crash go away still failed those maintainer tests. If you’re thinking about letting an AI tool patch vulnerabilities for you, this is the number to look

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT was introduced in November 2022, experts and executives have been predicting that it and other AI models will eliminate untold jobs — forecasts that seem, at a first glance, to have been borne out by the plethora of tech sector layoffs in the wake of its debut. But a new study from Yale University found quite the opposite in the United States, which should give

OpenAI has officially rolled out its first piece of hardware, and it’s not the one you’re thinking of. The company behind ChatGPT announced on Wednesday a $230 mini keyboard designed specifically to work with its AI coding agent, Codesx. The device is a collaboration with Work Louder, a maker of programmable keyboards and macro pads. Technically, the device is more of a programmable macro pad than a full keyboard. The small, square-shaped pad is officially

Self-driving vehicles rely on fool-proof image recognition systems, which could be compromised with this one simple hack. Credit: Image created by ChatGPT. A self-driving motor vehicle is cruising along, its numerous sensors and cameras telling it when to brake, change lanes, and make turns. The vehicle approaches a stop sign at a high rate of speed, but instead of stopping, it barrels through, causing an accident. The problem will probably never be found

Working from low-resolution global precipitation data, the spateGAN-ERA5 AI model generates high-resolution fields for the analysis of heavy rainfall events. Credit: Christian Chwala, KIT Severe weather events, such as heavy rainfall, are on the rise worldwide. Reliable assessments of these events can save lives and protect property. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a new method that uses artificial intelligence (AI

Angolan President Joao Lourenco (L) greets UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (R) during the 9th Tokyo International Conference on African Development in Japan. Africa has everything it takes to become a "renewable superpower," UN head Antonio Guterres said Thursday, as he called for greater investment in green energy across the resource-rich continent. Guterres spoke at a three-day development conference in Japan attended by African leaders, where Toky

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Jorge Uzon / AFP via Getty Images Geoffrey Hinton, one of the three so-called “godfathers” of AI, never misses an opportunity to issue foreboding proclamations about the tech he helped create. During an hour-long public conversation with Senator Bernie Sanders at Georgetown University last week, the British computer science laid out all the alarming ways that he forecasts AI will completely upend soci

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Are tech companies on the verge of creating thinking machines with their tremendous AI models, as top executives claim they are? Not according to one expert. We humans tend to associate language with intelligence. We tend to be compelled by those with greater linguistic skills as orators or writers. But the latest research suggests that language isn’t the same as intelligence, says Benjam

The Transformer architecture, introduced by Vaswani et al. in 2017, serves as the backbone of contemporary language models. Over the years, numerous modifications to this architecture have been proposed to enhance aspects such as training stability, inference efficiency, context length, and robustness. In a new paper nGPT: Normalized Transformer with Representation Learning on the Hypersphere, an NVIDIA research team proposes the normalized Transformer (nG

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Jeff Bottari / Zuffa LLC via Getty Images Joe Rogan absolutely loves AI-generated music. For the past few months, the podcaster has been drooling like a pig at its slop trough over AI-generated covers of the rapper 50 Cent, finding literally any excuse to play them for his guests, including such luminaries as Carrot Top and Andrew Schulz. It’s gotten so out of his hand that his some of his fans have s

Anthropic, run by chief executive Dario Amodei, scored a mixed victory. A US judge on Thursday endorsed Anthropic's deal to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit over amassing a library of pirated books to train its artificial intelligence. "We are pleased the court has granted preliminary approval of the settlement," Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in response to an AFP query. "The decision will allow us to focus on develo

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images Last week, Elon Musk’s chatbot Grok began fielding an influx of stunningly inappropriate requests. Though the AI has long been known to have loose guardrails, users suddenly swarmed the AI to generate either nudes or sexually charged images of X users based on photos they posted to the site — and it obliged. Even worse, some of the individuals it took requests for appeared

Arda Kucukkaya / Anadolu via Getty Images Are AI tools reliable enough to be used at in commercial settings? If so, should they be given “autonomy” to make decisions? These are the questions being raised after at least two internet outages at Amazon’s cloud division were allegedly caused by blundering AI agents, according to new reporting from the Financial Times. In one incident in December, engineers at Amazon Web Services allowed its in-house Kiro “agen

Getty / Futurism As it fights a growing stack of user safety and wrongful death lawsuits, OpenAI says it will introduce a “trusted contact feature” in ChatGPT that will alert a chatbot user’s designated loved one in the event of a possible mental health crisis. OpenAI announced the new feature last week in a blog post, billed as an “update on our mental health-related work.” It said it’s “working closely” with its Council on Well-Being and AI and Global Ph