Archive: August 2023

In a new study, Assistant Professor Vlad Ayzenberg and other researchers found preschoolers’ visual object recognition to be much better than AI’s capabilities. Credit: Joseph V. Labolito As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly grows—a recent UN Trade and Development report projects the global AI market soaring to $4.8 trillion by 2033—the technology seems equipped to handle any task. Driving cars. Analyzing medical images. Making music. Having a conversat

Published on August 20, 2025 at 06:28 CommentShare 0 𝕏 Print © Shutter Speed (Unsplash) After several months of spending without limits to attract the best talent, Meta is reorganizing its new AI lab by splitting it into four teams, each responsible for a specific part of the initiative. The goal is to achieve "superintelligence," an AI more capable than humans. Mark Zuckerberg has put a lot of money on the table to poach top AI talent from companies like

On June 2, about a week before Anthropic released its Claude Fable 5 model, it announced it had added 150 new organizations to Project Glasswing, the program that allowed (theoretically) trustworthy companies, governments, and other entities to try out the cybersecurity capabilities of Anthropic’s (theoretically) too-dangerous-to-release AI model, Claude Mythos Preview. This, according to a new report from the Washington Post, was part of the move that pla

Half the AI bot traffic hammering your website comes from Meta AI agent traffic across DataDome’s network grew 41.5% quarter over quarter to nearly 25 billion requests in Q3 2026, according to the company’s AI Traffic Report Q3 2026. Meta’s Muse generated 29.1 million requests between September 22 and October 3, its first 12 days of full availability. In a sample of Muse traffic, 99.3% of requests came from cloud and CDN infrastructure. Nearly half of the

AI coding agents fall for malicious instructions planted in the Downloads folder A file that a website saves to the Downloads folder without approval can trick AI coding agents into installing a malicious npm package or handing over the user’s login token when they’re opened in that folder, Forever Security has found. The file is called AGENTS.md, a plain text document developers place in a project folder with instructions for coding agents, the AI tools t

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images There’s no question that the job market is a mess. According to Labor Department data, nearly two million Americans have been without a job for 27 weeks or more, the highest figure since 2022. And it’s hitting white collar jobs hard: this week alone, Amazon cut its corporate workforce by 14,000 jobs, UPS cut 34,000 operational workforce positions, and Target and Paramount axed 1,800 and 1

AI Generated Images (Screenshots) via Sora2 If you thought traditional gender reveals were bad for the environment, wait until you get a load of the ones powered by OpenAI’s Sora 2. Ever since its release in late September, lifelike AI gender reveal clips have been popping up like weeds on social media. A compilation reel uploaded to Reddit shows just how tasteless the reels are getting. In one snippet, a couple cheers for joy as a baby-blue mushroom cloud

Vanity Fair via YouTube During a new video with Vanity Fair that challenges celebrities to answer probing questions while taking a lie detector test, reality TV star Kim Kardashian admitted that she used ChatGPT for “legal advice” — causing her to fail tests in her ongoing quest to become a Bar-certified attorney. “So, when I am needing to know the answer to a question, I’ll take a picture and snap it and put it in there,” she explained in the video. “They

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Librarians, and the books they cherish, are already fight a losing battle for our attention spans with all kinds of tech-enabled brainrot. Now, in a further assault to their sanity, AI models are generating so much slop that students and researchers keep coming into libraries and asking for journals, books, and records that don’t exist, Scientific American reports. In a statement from the

Satellite image shows three tropical waves in the Atlantic on June 28, 2024. The wave to the far right developed into Hurricane Beryl, which became the earliest Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record. Credit: NOAA A research team has developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool that can automatically identify and track tropical easterly waves (TEWs)—clusters of clouds and wind that often develop into hurricanes—and separate them from two major tropic

Getty / Futurism The advent of generative AI has turned much of the internet into an unrecognizable flood plain of mind-numbing slop. In the latest sign of the times, the Economic Times — the second most widely-read English-language newspaper in the world, as of 2012 — picked the word “Kafkaesque” as its “Word of the Day” earlier this week. But even the briefest glance at the accompanying illustration reveals that the piece involved little, if any, human o

Chris Jung/NurPhoto via Getty Images Just over three years ago, OpenAI opened the floodgates with the launch of ChatGPT. The frantic industry-wide race that followed has resulted in soaring valuations for AI companies, tens of billions of dollars invested in data center infrastructure — and plenty of skepticism as well. For one, experts have pointed out that OpenAI’s business fundamentals are inherently different from those of its competitors like Google.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Still think getting a job in 2026 is as easy as walking in with a résumé and a firm handshake? You might want to read on. In the United States, at least, the employment outlook is rough. After a horrendous year for employment, US jobs growth stalled out in December as layoffs and hiring freezes in areas like construction and manufacturing take their toll on job growth numbers. And beneath

Getty / Futurism Over the last couple of months, the AI industry’s obsession with building out costly data centers has sent the price of RAM skyrocketing, turning a simple computer upgrade into a costly investment. And while there are some early glimmers of hope, with RAM prices now falling across the pond, the next AI price hike could affect a different component instead: hard drives. During a recent company earnings call, Irving Tan, the CEO of hard driv

Clouds provide specially protected environments for confidential data. However, even these can be vulnerable to security breaches. ETH Zurich researchers are helping to identify and close these vulnerabilities. Credit: Image generated with AI; Florian Meyer / ETH Zurich Some data is so sensitive that it is processed only in specially protected cloud areas. These are designed to ensure that not even a cloud provider can access the data. ETH Zurich researche

Despite tech and economics commentator Tyler Cowen professing his undying love for it in the Free Press last year, the AI-generated gooning prop known as “Tilly Norwood” seems destined to collect dust in a curio cabinet marked “Notable Garbage From the 2020s AI Boom.” Unless there’s a large, secret fandom waiting with bated breath for the release of the Tilly Norwood movie, it would seem that improv comedian Eline Van Der Velden’s quest for fame as an AI p

JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP via Getty Images Anti-AI sentiment surged over the last year as the hype surrounding the tech showed no signs of slowing down. Industry’s obsession with the tech has driven up electricity bills, been used to justify mass layoffs, and even helped the US military determine where to drop bombs on Iran. It’s also quickly become an insufferable and practically inescapable part of everyday life, minting plenty of critics who range from averag