Archive: April 2024

This week, I finally finished Marvel’s Wolverine. I kind of had to. With a brand new copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake staring me in the face, and a download code for Grand Theft Auto VI on the way, I wanted to at least see how the game I’d been struggling to get through ended before moving on to other things. “Struggling” not because the game was particularly challenging in any way, though it could be at times. No, I was “struggling” bec

Futurism via Sora 2 (and also Jim Davis) Forget Sora for just a second, because it’s still ludicrously easy to generate copyrighted characters using ChatGPT. These include characters that the AI initially refuses to generate due to existing copyright, underscoring how OpenAI is clearly aware of how bad this looks — but is either still struggling to rein in its tech, figures it can get away with playing fast and loose with copyright law, or both. When asked

Win McNamee/Getty Images OpenAI has long made it its number one goal to realize artificial general intelligence, which it described in a 2023 blog post as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans,” and which will benefit “all of humanity.” Since then, experts have often accused the company of repeatedly shifting the goalposts, greatly watering down its original goal of an AI truly capable of surpassing the intellect of a human being. And now, Ope

Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance across a diverse array of tasks. However, their use in high-stakes or computationally constrained environments has highlighted the need for more interpretable and efficient alternatives. While traditional n-gram models are fully interpretable and much more computationally efficient, they typically fall short of LLMs in predictive accuracy, especially for tasks like next-token prediction.

The remarkable success of OpenAI’s o1 series and DeepSeek-R1 has unequivocally demonstrated the power of large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) in eliciting sophisticated reasoning behaviors and significantly enhancing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the core training methodologies behind these groundbreaking reasoning models often remain veiled in their technical reports. Recent community efforts have predominantly focused on m

The legal battle between OpenAI and Apple just got (even more) personal. In response to a bombshell lawsuit accusing the startup’s employees of stealing Apple’s trade secrets, OpenAI called the case “meritless” and requested that it be tossed out by a federal judge. The response also suggested that Apple’s accusations were motivated in part by jealousy of OpenAI’s success. “Apple should not be permitted to use a baseless and pretextual lawsuit to make up f

Getty / Futurism Fears over a growing AI bubble that could wipe out the entire economy if it were to burst continue to mount. For many months now, investors and even tech leaders have openly been discussing the possibility — but if or when such a collapse could take place remains a subject of heated debate. Nonetheless, investors are already preparing for that type of major tech sell-off, the Financial Times reports. The reporting shows that plenty of fear

Published on February 23, 2026 at 14:00 Comment 1 𝕏 Print © TechCrunch, CC BY 2.0 Generative artificial intelligence consumes as much electricity as a small country. For Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT and founder of OpenAI, critics must also take into account all the energy required to 'train' a human brain. Determined to defend the energy footprint of AI, he didn't hesitate to compare his chatbot's consumption to that of a human being. Altman even poi

Long-horizon agents are moving from "fixing a bug" to performing terminal and programming tasks for several hours continuously, but their reinforcement learning training is also exceptionally expensive: leading laboratories can scale RL across thousands of GPUs, while for most teams, a single training sample is often a complete attempt lasting three hours with hundreds of tool calls. Any mistake in any step wastes hours of GPU time. Recently, researchers W

In today's era, where all data and systems that a company possesses are digitized and the use of AI is advancing, data centers that store massive amounts of data have become the core of the company.Michael Bacarella, who worked at the financial trading company Jane Street, recounts a near-miss incident where the data center was almost flooded due to a "false alarm" from the sprinkler system. How a false smoke alarm almost drowned Jane Street’s only NYC dat

What’s on offer exactly?The cluster has is high density by design, and is the foundation for traditional enterprise workloads and the projects of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, a decentralised AI ecosystem spearheaded by SingularityNET. It offers flexible access modes that mirror the needs of modern AI developers in which companies can rent whole bare metal machines, spin up GPU-powered virtual machines, or tap into dedicated API endpoint

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Being a straight-A student doesn’t mean what it used to. Today, widely available AI chatbots make cheating on your homework and churning out entire essays easier than ever. If students don’t outright ask an AI for answers, then they’re asking one for tips and inspiration, or to double-check their work. The result, besides a damaged generation of kids being robbed of their own education? G

“This is the end,” the pioneering roboticist and artificial intelligence researcher Hans Moravec wrote in 1987. Humanity, he believed, was on the cusp of transcending the cumbersome process of Darwinian evolution—and with it, mortality itself. Our physical bodies would be discarded, and in their place would rise robotic übermenschen. Our minds, so tragically prone to decline as we age, would be transferred to flawless, immortal code. Machines were about to

The spread is almost fivefold, and it is all about a single search engine. AI answers appear for more than 80% of queries only in Semrush’s commercial dashboard.Long and informational queries are the ones most likely to receive AI answers in Google Search.At Pew, query length noticeably changes the picture. AI summaries appear for 8% of one- to two-word queries, but for 53% of queries of 10 words or more. SE Ranking’s data shows a similar pattern with freq

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock The head start that the US companies enjoyed in the AI race is quickly vanishing. Chinese competitors are now nipping at their heels, and it’s causing a wave of anxiety in the American sector. Over a year ago, DeepSeek spurred an existential crisis — and a mass stock selloff — in the US tech industry when it released a competitive AI model created for a fraction of the cost of the leading