Archive: July 2024

Getty / Futurism The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma just became the first Indigenous nation to officially ban data center construction from lands under its jurisdiction. After a tech startup approached Seminole leaders asking to allow a data center on their lands, the Tribal Council voted 24 to 0 to enact a “moratorium on the advancement of generative artificial intelligence technology and hyperscale data center development within the Seminole Nation and with

The Saffir-Simpson scale classifies hurricanes solely by sustained wind speed, ranging from Category 1 to Category 5. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology As climate change continues to reshape the intensity and behavior of hurricanes, meteorologists and researchers are examining whether the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, a decades-old classification system, still adequately communicates the full scope of hurricane hazards. While the scale remains

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Spencer Platt / Getty Images Vibe coding often gets a bad rep. “Vibe” is a euphemism for “not really thinking,” and that “not really thinking” part is accomplished by letting an AI spit all the code out in response to natural language prompts. Inexperienced programmers use it to push out half-baked apps and sabotage their own projects, and experienced ones get lulled into making rookie mistakes. Enter

Getty / Futurism It doesn’t take much to impress an AI chatbot. Tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have long garnered a reputation for being ludicrously sycophantic. Despite AI companies publicly promising to address the problem, researchers recently found that the bots still have a strong tendency to flatter and affirm in response to virtually any kind of prompt. In the latest preposterous example of this impulse, philosophy YouTuber and writer Jonas Čeika “sent

Getty / Futurism As fear over an AI-driven jobs apocalypse continues to simmer, some tech leaders remain adamant that the wide proliferation of AI will lead to more employment opportunities, not fewer. Consider a recent panel at Stanford University, when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang painted an unusual picture of an AI agent-dominated future. Instead of getting ready to clear their desks, the centibillionaire argued that instead, human workers’ productivity will

On September 12, 2026, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging frontier AI companies, including his own, to slow down development for fear of destroying human life as we know it in ways that we can’t even conceive of. On September 14, 2026, Anthropic posted a job listing looking for a policy design manager to handle conventional weapons, one of the ways we can very clearly conceive of how it destroys human life. The job listing, spotted on Day

The enterprise communication blind spotFor years, corporate communications were treated as either static records – emails stored in archives – or ephemeral exchanges that disappeared after use. The rise of AI has changed that. Tools like Microsoft’s Copilot and Zoom’s AI Companion now interpret tone, context, and intent in real-time, turning chat history into searchable knowledge. But for many companies, that same intelligence is emerging in silos, without

Getty / Futurism Last year, a San Francisco-based AI company called Mercor exploded onto the tech scene, just as US workers were buckling under the grip of unemployment. The online job marketplace connects contractors — often struggling unemployed workers — with companies like OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. The gigs have a ghoulish tint, since the basic idea is for former employees to teach AI how to do their old jobs. Adding insult to injury, Mercor is k

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Data shows that more and more people are self-filing lawsuits with the help of AI chatbots. Experts warn that the influx of sometimes-dubious cases could have real consequences on the court system. Back in March, a pair of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of South California published a study showing that according to millions of administrative r

In the latest study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, over 700 technology experts were asked to evaluate an assortment of scenarios in an attempt to determine potential trends for the year 2020. With responses from representatives of the World Wide Web Consortium, ICANN, the Association of Internet Researchers, and major corporations like Google and IBM, the report reflects the perceptions of “Internet pioneers,” more than half of wh

SAN FRANCISCO—Speaking at the Noisebridge hackerspace Tuesday evening, Chelsea Manning implored a crowd of makers, nerds, and developers to be ethical coders. “As a coder, I know that you can build a system and it works, but you’re thinking about the immediate result, you’re not thinking about that this particular code could be misused, or it could be used in a different manner,” she said, as part of a conversation with Noisebridge co-founder Mitch Altman.

United Airlines, a major U.S. airline, announced on November 11 (local time) that it would prohibit the use of its services by unauthorized third-party personal AI agents or AI assistants. In addition to directly restricting their use on its website and app, it will also restrict use through travel agencies and booking sites (aggregators). It will also revise its policies on reservations, ticket issuance, and sales. The company did not specify which AI age

Elon Musk’s xAI is suing a man for using its flagship chatbot, Grok, to create nonconsensual sexual deepfakes of women and children. The Grok user, a 67-year-old in South Carolina named Terry Wayne Harwood, was arrested in March on multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. According to the allegations, Harwood possessed and distributed child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. Filed earlier this week in Texas, xAI’s lawsuit accuses Harwood of using Gr

Health insurance companies cannot use algorithms or artificial intelligence to determine care or deny coverage to members on Medicare Advantage plans, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) clarified in a memo sent to all Medicare Advantage insurers. The memo—formatted like an FAQ on Medicare Advantage (MA) plan rules—comes just months after patients filed lawsuits claiming that UnitedHealth and Humana have been using a deeply flawed AI-powered

All eyes are on Jensen Huang after it was revealed the Nvidia CEO had an extramarital affair with a woman who’s alleged to be a spy for China. Will Huang step aside, amid calls from both Democrats and Republicans for him to do just that? Nobody knows for sure at this point. What’s been getting less attention, however, are the behind-the-scenes battles within the federal government. What did members of the Trump regime know about the affair, and when did th

South Korea's President Lee Jae Myung (R) meets with Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Masayoshi Son (L) at the Presidential House in Seoul on December 5, 2025. SoftBank CEO and AI investor Masayoshi Son said Friday that advanced artificial intelligence could surpass humans to the extent that "we become fish" and could even win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Meeting South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in Seoul, Son, whose SoftBank is a major backer of ChatGPT

AI_API_URL is set to https://ai.api.cloud.yandex.net/v1.The Yandex API supports OpenAI-compatible calls, so we use the `openai` library while specifying the Yandex service endpoint. Requests are sent to the selected models in Yandex’s cloud.With this setup, we do not need to deploy the models on our own server. However, operation depends on the availability of the external service, and requests require an API key and cloud environment settings.The model UR

UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Asst. Prof. Jie Xu, who has a joint appointment with Argonne National Laboratory, and Argonne staff scientist Henry Chan look at Polybot, a "self-driving lab" that uses AI to help researchers guide the materials discovery process. Credit: Yukun Wu "Self-driving" or "autonomous" labs are an emerging technology in which artificial intelligence guides the discovery process, helping design experiments or perfec