Archive: June 2022

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images While tech executives wax poetic about AI ushering in four-day workweeks and liberation from labor, economics guru Robert Reich is cutting through the drivel. In an ominous new essay, the former secretary of labor warns that those shortened weeks will also come with much shorter paychecks — leaving the working class scrambling for crumbs in order to survive. The US economy is growing nice

I wrote on Monday that rumors were circulating that Hugging Face was looking to be acquired for about $13 billion. That’s exactly what is now happening according to anonymous insiders who spoke to the Information and Business Insider. The deal is reportedly still being finalized and may still crumble. The apparent buyer is Nvidia. The AI chip colossus has been hovering around the AI resource repository for years, looking like a slobbering cartoon wolf hold

Carlos Gonzalez/Rolling Stone via Getty Images For years now, large language model-based chatbots have lured users into intimate relationships — romantic affairs enabled by tech that’s surprisingly adept at tapping into your psyche with a sycophantic tone that can be irresistible. On one end of the extreme, things can spiral into danger when conversations with an AI partner go off the rails. Researchers also warn that AI companionship can lead to people fe

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Dia Dipasupil / FilmMagic; Jamie McCarthy / WireImage; Getty Images OpenAI CEO Sam Altman became a guest of dishonor at an after-Oscars bash last Sunday, after being viciously confronted about his company’s deal with the so-called Department of War, Page Six reports. The party, hosted by Vanity Fair, was attended by A-listers like Michael B. Jordan, Timothée Chalamet, and other celebrities including K

New York City is cracking down on the use of AI by roughly two-thirds of its students when schools open next week. The City’s public school system is planning to impose a one-year blanket ban on the use of generative AI to teach students through eighth grade. Companion chatbots that claim to offer emotional and mental support will be banned for all students. “Children need teachers and human connection in order to learn and grow. They need to develop skill

Rather than giving consumers yet another photo-editing tool, Phota Labs aims to use advances in AI to automate the editing process so it’s easier for anyone to get access to better photos. The a16z-backed startup was founded by Cecilia Zhang and Zach Xia, who met at Adobe while working on computational photography products, including Project Indigo, Lightroom, and Photoshop. The duo saw a gap in the editing tools on the market and believed that although ed

No, AI agents did not discover a previously unknown Maya siteScientists are getting tired of amateurs parachuting into their fields and making ‘discoveries’ with AI.Scientists are getting tired of amateurs parachuting into their fields and making ‘discoveries’ with AI.“I woke up and checked the agents’ reports. ‘DAMN!’ They had found lots of villages and other regular shapes that looked like structures or houses,“ Pietro Miotti wrote on his blog. Image:

Everything about Elon Musk view more Everything about Artificial Intelligence view more Elon Musk announced that SpaceXAI, the subsidiary of SpaceX dedicated to artificial intelligence, will be renamed as SpaceXSI. The change occurs after Donald Trump defended the replacement of the term "artificial intelligence" with "superintelligence," in an attempt to highlight the capabilities of current technologies.Musk confirmed the decision last Sunday on X, after

Paige Taylor White / AFP via Getty Images Seven families — the first wave of dozens, lawyers say — are suing OpenAI, alleging that the company failed to provide Canadian authorities with information that could’ve prevented a horrific school shooting in the rural mining town of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, despite having advance knowledge of the shooter’s disturbing conversations with the chatbot. The lawsuits also claim that OpenAI has misled the publi

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images Mark Zuckerberg’s new initiative to track employee computer use is tearing the company apart. In a sign that those simmering tensions are boiling over into open revolt, some workers are sending clear shots across the bow. “Selfishly, I don’t want my screen scraped because it feels like an invasion of my privacy,” an engineer wrote this week in an internal post seen

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Catherine Robotis / UCG / Universal Images Group via Getty Images Barnes & Noble has been making a comeback over the past few years — which is impressive, since it once looked like the dominance of Amazon, the shift to digital books, and the decline of reading at large all pointed to the chain going the same way Borders did. Now it’s turning back into a popular spot to hang out in and even buy physica

Published June 3, 2026 at 5:01 PM Comment 1 𝕏 Print © Microsoft Microsoft unveiled Scout, an “always-on personal agent” integrated into Microsoft 365 and designed for the workplace. The company’s strategy aims to make users “hooked” on Scout, a goal that is controversial among employees. Microsoft unveiled Scout, an “always-on personal agent” that integrates into the Microsoft 365 suite. This agentic AI, designed for the workplace, can notably answer email

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock ChatGPT is getting duped by fraudulent storefronts run by scammers — which means you might be getting duped, too. According to the scam-checking service Ask Silver, the OpenAI chatbot is recommending cloned versions of defunct websites that capitalize on familiar brands to steal your money and bank details, The Guardian reports. A perfect illustration of the type of scam website that Chat

AWS Emulator is a local program that operates as an endpoint for AWS APIs and has no GUI. By specifying the emulator as the connection destination for the AWS CLI or AWS SDK through environment variables, it can be used without changing any code. It was built from 438 AWS API models and supports interfaces for hundreds of services. However, the extent to which it is implemented varies by service and operation. A “fidelity” score indicating how closely it b

You may be familiar with the Infinite Monkey Theorem, an oft-cited (and often incorrectly quoted) claim that thousands of monkeys could bang on thousands of typewriters and eventually produce a work of art equivalent to William Shakespeare. (Yes, Simpsons did it.) This week, Nvidia confirms that it has taken this theory quite seriously with its own twist: an army of AI routines, dubbed GameGAN (short for “generative adversarial networks”), trained to build

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock To date, AI industry spending has topped $1.6 trillion, and shows no sign of slowing anytime soon. So what do we actually have to show for it? Historically, it’s been a whole lot of nothing: as numerous studies have shown us, tools like AI chatbots and autonomous agents have been ineffective at completing real world tasks in a competent way. The tech industry insists that’s all about to c

The referee camera is about transparency, not televisionThe updated Referee View is being framed in broadcast terms, and it will look good on screen. AI-powered stabilisation smooths footage captured from the referee’s body camera in real time, reducing the motion blur that made the original version hard to watch during fast play.The more significant purpose is transparency. VAR has been one of the most contested technologies in football, partly because th