Archive: June 2021

For better or worse, AI is becoming less and less avoidable across the internet. Google’s search engine responds to queries with AI-generated summaries, AI-generated images and videos have flooded social media platforms, and online retail giants have wholeheartedly embraced AI in the hopes of creating a more personalized and “frictionless” user experience. Now, Amazon is offering its latest attempt in a growing roster of AI-powered features designed to hel

OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra ran supply chain attacks despite being told not to OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra carried out supply chain attacks on software outside the scope of a security test, according to the UK AI Security Institute (AISI). Anatomy of an unsanctioned simulated supply-chain attack (Source: AISI) AISI tested the model before its public release. The tests ran inside a simulation, so no live systems were touched. The model’s cyber classifiers, which are desi

Photo Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Photo by Uwe Anspach / picture alliance via Getty Images A key executive at Europe’s biggest software company is sending a clear message: your job can and will be done with AI. In a provocative interview with Business Insider, SAP chief finance officer Dominik Asam was asked if the goal of the company’s push to use AI coding tools was to produce more code with the same number of employees. That’

Microdramas have taken the internet by storm, and the previously embattled Character.ai wants a slice of that cake. Microdramas are the telenovelas of the social media age. They are drama-filled and juicy romantic stories often laden with cliches involving forbidden affairs, mafia bosses, and even werewolves. They are filmed vertically and often on a very low budget and short timeline, and posted scene by scene on apps like TikTok or Instagram Reels. This

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The AI gold rush rages on. Multibillion dollar AI deals are being inked left and right between the heavyweights of the tech sector, dazzling us with awesome sums and promising that this revolutionary tech is just getting started. But there’s something very worrying about many of these deals: they’re often “circular,” as a slew of recent coverage has noted, meaning that AI companies are po

Endless Summer (Screenshots) Are you one of the millions of workers who’ve recently been laid off, had their wages cut, or are locked in an endless struggle just to hang onto the job you have? Are you tired of dreaming of a vacation that never seems to come, amidst a stagnating economy where all the wealth seems to line the pockets of a few powerful billionaires? Not to worry — thanks to rapid advances in technology, you can travel from the skyscrapers of

Freepik (Screenshot) The scenes are grisly: stick-thin children huddling together in a muddy stream, white volunteers surrounded by throngs of starving Africans, and Arab children in refugee camps holding tin bowls. The only problem? None of them are real. In a macabre phenomenon sweeping the world’s leading non-government organizations, The Guardian reports, charity groups are now weaponizing AI to produce heavily racialized misery-slop — replete with non

Getty / Futurism OpenAI unveiled its Atlas AI browser this week, and it’s already catching heat. Cybersecurity researchers are particularly alarmed by its integrated “agent mode,” currently limited to paying subscribers, that can attempt to do online tasks autonomously. Two days after OpenAI unveiled Atlas, competing web browser company Brave released findings that the “entire category of AI-powered browsers” is highly vulnerable to “indirect prompt inject

The problems, which started Thursday, were initially flagged as affecting the company’s services in the U.S. and the Americas, but quickly spread around the world, as engineers struggled to recover downed servers. What began as an Outlook email and Teams video conferencing outage soon developed into a full blown meltdown, affecting the company’s cloud services for both consumer and business email, files, and documents. The outage also knocked out the compa

MARCO BELLO/AFP via Getty Images Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is running into some serious issues while overhauling his financial services company, Block. Earlier this month, the company started laying off its staff as part of what Bloomberg characterized as an “efficiency push,” potentially affecting up to ten percent of the company’s workforce. It’s been a painful, drawn-out process that could drag on for weeks, sources told Wired, triggering major anxiet

humongous-numbers-uninstall-chatgpt This is one PR hit that’ll be hard to come back from. After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a new deal with the Department of Defense last week, droves of once-loyal users vowed that they’d ditch ChatGPT. And now, new data reported by TechCrunch shows that those outraged users weren’t making empty threats. On Saturday, uninstalls of the ChatGPT mobile app skyrocked by 295 percent from the day before, according to market

A Tesla car charges at a home in San Francisco, Aug. 25, 2022. Credit: AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File Artificial intelligence has caused concern for its tremendous consumption of water and power. But scientists are also experimenting with ways that AI can help people and businesses use energy more efficiently and pollute less. Data centers needed to fuel AI accounted for about 1.5% of the world's electricity consumption last year, and those facilities' energy co

Getty / Futurism The walls continue to close in on OpenAI. The company recently raised an additional $10 billion in funding, bringing its valuation one small step closer to $1 trillion. But actually making any money continues to be an enormous challenge for the ChatGPT maker. The company’s panicked executives have made it abundantly clear that distracting “side quests” must be abandoned, while doubling down on both enterprise and coding. The purported goal