Archive: October 2021

Jeff Bezos says utopia is right around the corner; we should just keep pushing and, importantly, keep funding companies like the ones he runs. In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin didn’t deny that artificial intelligence will be disruptive; he just happens to think that it’ll be in a way that creates endless abundance. Easy for a guy who already has infinite wealth to say. “If you’ve been digging out a basement for y

Decode natural resistance against citrus greening disease and Develop AI-designed disease treatment. Credit: Ye Jian's group In a study published in Science, a research team led by Prof. Ye Jian from the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has identified the first mechanism of citrus resistance to citrus greening disease, or huanglongbing (HLB). Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), the team has also developed antimicrobial pepti

Bernie Sanders might be 84 years old, but he sure acts more in touch with the general public’s views on AI than most other lawmakers, including those in the party he caucuses with. In an op-ed published by the New York Times on Monday, the Independent Senator from Vermont called for the government to take a 50% ownership stake in the frontier AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic. Sanders’ plan will manifest in the form of the American AI Sovereign Wealt

Published on July 29, 2025 at 08:02 Comment 0 𝕏 Print © Microsoft Would you let Edge browse your tabs and the websites you visit? That's Microsoft's (decent) proposal with its brand-new Copilot Mode, which gives the web browser unprecedented capabilities to answer internet users' questions. Web browsers are likely at the dawn of a profound transformation. With Comet, Perplexity has started the trend of AI-infused search engines; it will (surely) be followe

Neuromotor Interface. Credit: Reality Labs, Meta Could Meta be on the verge of transforming how we interact with our digital devices? If the company's latest innovation takes off, we might soon be controlling our computers, cell phones and tablets with a simple flick of the wrist. Researchers at Meta's Reality Labs division have unveiled an experimental wristband that translates hand gestures and subtle finger movements into commands that interact with a c

Google’s SynthID Bio can watermark AI-designed protein binders without breaking them Google DeepMind has built SynthID Bio, a watermark for AI-designed proteins, and shown in wet-lab tests on protein binders that it leaves their function intact. The method hides a signature in the amino acid sequence of a designed protein and in the atomic coordinates of a predicted 3D structure. DeepMind says the signature can be checked on the physical protein after synt

Rogue OpenAI agents made unauthorized Wikipedia edits and millions of requests to Wikimedia Rogue OpenAI agents made unauthorized edits on Wikimedia wikis and sent millions of automated requests to Wikimedia’s public APIs, traffic that may have contributed to a partial outage of the Wikidata Query Service in May, the Wikimedia Foundation said on Monday. “The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation to see whether Wikimedia websites had been sim

Understanding AI in financial servicesAI is changing the landscape of the financial services sector, as in other industries. The integration of AI in the financial services industry extends to changes in how companies operate, customer interactions, agentic AI, and risk management.The three core AI-related technologies that play an important role in the finance sector, are:Natural language processing (NLP): The NLP aspect of AI helps companies understand a

Tesla is eyeing robotaxi operations in New York and other American cities. Tesla is recruiting a motorist to test its driver-assistance technology in New York with an eye toward autonomous driving, according to a job listing reviewed by AFP on Wednesday. The role of "Vehicle Operator, Autopilot" involves the driving of an "engineering vehicle" for extended periods, "conducting dynamic audio and camera data collection for testing and training purpose," acco

Security pros reckon the biggest AI risk comes with an employee badge Employees pasting company data into AI tools worry security teams more than AI-powered attacks do. Most-concerning risks of AI agents (Source: O’Reilly) AI-generated phishing, the attack they run into most often, made the list of top concerns for only a quarter of the 209 security professionals O’Reilly surveyed in September. Mike Loukides, VP of content strategy at O’Reilly Media, belie

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Time Magazine It may not surprise you that Time magazine has elected to highlight the AI industry in its annual “Person of the Year” issue. Or should we say persons: the collective billionaire “architects of AI,” it announced. But what may surprise you is a new feature prominently displayed on Time’s website: a window for an AI chatbot. “Ask me anything,” it reads. It does not go away. Instead, the ch

In cognitive science, human thought processes are commonly divided into two systems: the fast, intuitive System 1 and the slower, analytical System 2. Recent research has shown that incorporating System 2-style processing into Transformers, including large language models (LLMs), can significantly improve their reasoning abilities. However, models that fully emulate System 2 thinking tend to demand substantial computational resources and exhibit slower res

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the US military had used Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot for its invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of the country’s president Nicolás Maduro. The exact details of Claude’s use remain hazy, but the incident demonstrated the Pentagon’s prioritization of the use of AI, and how tools available to the public may already be involved in military operations. And when Anthropi

Ryan Lim / AFP via Getty Images Earlier this week, Iranian drones hit three Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, triggering global outages in online services. Experts believe the strikes were the first instance of American big tech companies being targeted in a military operation. The strikes caused “structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activi

Credit: Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2025). DOI: 10.1002/anie.202513147 Everyday items like car tires, plastic bags and foam cushions come from materials called polymers that can take years to develop and test. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a new approach to create better rubber-like materials more quickly by combining artificial intelligence with human expertise. Ty

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images AI agents — AI systems designed to complete digital tasks without much supervision — may be everywhere, but they’re not exactly ready for primetime. Over the last year, they’ve been caught slandering people, deleting user emails, and wiping out entire hard drives. Most recently, a free-spirited AI agent was caught moonlighting as a crypto miner — a behavior which startled its keepers, Axi