Archive: June 2022

Jun.-Prof. Edoardo Milana, Junior Professor for Soft Machines at the University of Freiburg. Credit: Lucia Brunold Thanks to artificial intelligence, robots can already perform many tasks that would otherwise require humans. In this interview, Edoardo Milana, a junior professor of soft machines in the Department of Microsystems Engineering at the University of Freiburg, explains how improved design and innovative mechanics are broadening the range of appli

Remember when there was that stretch of time where people were leaving AI companies and every one of their farewell messages boiled down to, “This is going to kill us all?” Lun Wang, a researcher at Google’s DeepMind, recently announced he was departing from the company and may have reignited the trend by warning that current benchmarking tests aren’t capable of truly evaluating risks presented by evolving AI models. On X, Wang noted that before deciding t

Don’t play innocent. If you’re a non-lawyer in the 2020s, you’ve at least had the passing thought that you could use an LLM to help you generate a killer lawsuit against someone who pissed you off. Or at least now I know it’s not just me. Thanks to AI, plaintiffs representing themselves, also known as “pro se” plaintiffs, are changing the legal landscape for the worse, according to a new study by MIT’s Anand Shah and USC’s Joshua Levy, reported on by the N

On Thursday, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.8, the latest and most advanced version of its flagship AI model. It’s available everywhere at the same price as its predecessor, Opus 4.7 ($5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens). Opus 4.8 boasts industry-leading scores on tasks like agentic coding and agentic computer use, which is par for the course for a new Anthropic model. The key differentiator that’s being underscored by the compa

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Create a watch on this topic Receive upcoming developments if any, with an AI watch configured from this article. Create my free watch On June 11, OVH Groupe announced entering exclusive negotiations to acquire Gladia, the French startup specializing in speech recognition and audio intelligence. The general press treated the operation as a dispatch; it deserves more attention. This is one of the few observed model-infrastructure vertical integration moveme

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a powerful catalyst for transforming enterprise productivity. A new study analyzing data from more than 27,000 Chinese listed firms finds that AI significantly enhances what are termed "new quality productive forces"—advanced capabilities built on innovation, digitalization, and industrial upgrades. The researchers identified innovation-drivenness as the key pathway linking AI t

Sora / Futurism It didn’t take long for OpenAI’s new text-to-video app, Sora 2, to devolve into a tasteless deluge of AI slop. Besides blatantly copyright-infringing videos of SpongeBob SquarePants cooking up blue crystals or entire episodes of South Park, users found that it’s never been easier to generate photorealistic AI slop videos puppeting the likenesses of deceased celebrities to mock them years or decades after their deaths. It’s a disappointing n

Getty / Futurism The owner of a shore-facing restaurant in South Wales potentially saved the lives of two swimmers who ventured out into unsafe waters — after consulting ChatGPT to find tide times. As local news outlet WalesOnline reports, the swimmers attempted to wade back from Sully Island, a rocky outcropping thousands of feet offshore, shortly before the tide came back in. The restaurant owner, Gordon Hadfield, got out his megaphone and yelled at them

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins. Source: Paul Harris / Getty Images Elon Musk has long made a habit of hyper-focusing on a specific project, forcing an entire team to attend to his every whim while letting his other responsibilities fall by the wayside — whether it’s his obsession with Robotaxis impacting Tesla or his weird procreation kink disrupting the private messages of countless women. The latest object of Musk’s obsession? According to new repor

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images For the tech of the future, generative AI sure is making a lot of enemies in a very short time. If 2023 was the year of AI’s awakening and 2024 the year of its frantic adoption, then it’s safe to say 2025 will be remembered as the year it all came crashing back down to reality. From boardrooms to classrooms, from game studios to Senate committees, this will be the year many remember as th

An anonymously sourced report from Semafor about Demis Hassabis’s departure from his Google DeepMind CEO role, and his transition to a new role as chief scientist at parent company Alphabet, seems eager to clarify that he left of his own volition, and that he had apparently wanted out for a while. Alphabet announced the move as part of a wider leadership shakeup on Wednesday. Sources Semafor calls “two people familiar with [Hassabis’s] thinking” apparently

stclairashley via Instagram Elon Musk’s Grok AI kicked off a massive scandal over the past month when users started using it to digitally undress both adults and even children, triggering a widespread outcry and wave of criticism. The fallout led Musk’s social media platform, X, to announce that it was implementing “technical measures” to prevent users from using the AI to undress real people or place them in revealing clothing like bikinis — once again hi