Archive: September 2024

Layoffs have already come for tens of thousands of tech workers this year, and more are on the way. For the workers who remain, their work is increasingly about training AI models and justifying the massive investments corporations have made in the technology. No better time than now to unionize the workforce, don’t you think? Unions in tech are rare (to be fair, they’re unfortunately rare everywhere). And while their absence is often attributed to the big

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Imagine if your next job interview included a round of video games with your potential new colleagues. Nonsense? No. According to game researcher Tobias Michael Scholz, gaming is an effective way to spot skills that job seekers didn't know they had. "By observing how people play and interact with others in the game, we can get a good picture of who they really are. It can make it easier to see if they will fit into the wo

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Ad blockers, the digital shields that nearly one billion internet users deploy to protect themselves from intrusive advertising, may be inadvertently exposing their users to more problematic content, according to a new study from NYU Tandon School of Engineering. The study, which analyzed over 1,200 advertisements across the United States and Germany, found that users of Adblock Plus's "Acceptable Ads" feature encountered

With open-weight AI, more of the security burden falls on enterprises Organizations that run open-weight AI models on their own infrastructure may have to supply safety and security controls that an AI provider would otherwise handle for them, Microsoft and NVIDIA warn in a joint paper on managing the risks of these models. Open-weight models are AI models whose weights, the values a model learns during training, are published so that anyone can download,

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The tech billionaires are still doomsday prepping. And as the BBC reports, it seems that AI is making some of them more paranoid than ever that society as we know it might soon crumble. For years now, reports of the wealthiest bracing for the end of the world have dominated headlines. In 2023, Wired reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was breaking ground on a roughly 5,000 square foot

@tombibbys via X Sam Altman just got served. On Tuesday, the OpenAI CEO was abruptly issued a subpoena while giving a talk in San Francisco with basketball coach Steve Kerr. Footage of the incident, which took place at the Sydney Goldstein Theater, shows a man climb onto the stage and declare that he has a “subpoena for Sam Altman,” before being loudly booed by the crowd. Altman does not physically take the document, and the seeming intruder is ushered awa

Meta’s financial metrics have taken a notable punch due to its AI spending. In the company’s earnings report on Wednesday, Meta executives shared that free cash flow for the past quarter was down to only $784 million, a major drop compared to the $8.55 billion number for the same time period last year. Revenue for the entire fiscal year is also looking likely to come below market expectations. Meta is the second AI hyperscaler in a week to receive investor

Amazon If you watched the English-dubbed version of one of several popular anime on Amazon Prime Video lately, like “Banana Fish,” and “No Game, No Life,” you may have noticed something strange. The voices were generic, unexpressive, and at times robotic, completely disconnected from the action unfolding on screen. Some lines even sounded a little glitchy. In a word: it was a disaster. The embarrassing English voices it turned out, were AI-generated. An en

@whitemarshallI compared six LLM APIs with the same prompt: speed difference of 30 times, four traps in implementationAILLMPythonAPI0Posted at 2026-11-12To put it simply, as of November 2026, the six main models are nearly equal in terms of handling everyday tasks, but the differences lie in response time, output token count, and whether the request returns filled content. Even with just three questions, there's a 30x gap between the fastest and slowest. T

Getty / Futurism What would you do if you found out a for-profit AI assistant had been trained on your work — and was using your name — without your permission? The company formerly known as Grammarly, Superhuman, has forced many writers to ask that precise question. Last August, it quietly debuted a feature called “Expert Review,” through which users could get feedback on their writing from what the company styled as AI clones of professional writers. The

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the FBI all released a statement on Tuesday accusing China-based AI companies of “Industrial-Scale Distillation Campaigns Against U.S. AI Companies.” “Likely with Chinese government awareness, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens across millions of exchanges/requests from U.S. frontier AI models, including

Credit: AI-generated image Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can write an essay or plan a menu almost instantly. But until recently, it was also easy to stump them. The models, which rely on language patterns to respond to users' queries, often failed at math problems and were not good at complex reasoning. Suddenly, however, they've gotten a lot better at these things. A new generation of LLMs known as reasoning models are being trained to solve c

@CodeNest_mediainHatch-IT Co., Ltd.Ask AI a question in CodeNest and test the fix: An example where the sum of strings comes out as “01020”JavaScriptNode.jsdebugAI0TAG39@@Last updated at 2026-11-12Posted at 2026-11-12When you apply the fix suggested by the AI, a different error appears this time. If you paste in additional logs, you get a different fix than before. After a few back-and-forth exchanges, you can no longer even trace which change was necessar

Shutterstock / Futurism Out of all the big AI players, Anthropic is the one that likes to doomsay about AI the most — because it’s also the most concerned about AI safety, of course. So you’ll never guess what kind of wacky stuff that its newly hired economist, Chad Jones, believes. As the Financial Times recently highlighted, Jones — a longtime Stanford economics professor — once wrote a paper that weighed up what would be an acceptable risk level of huma

Credit: AI-generated image As the everyday use of AI has exploded in recent years, so have the energy demands of the computing infrastructure that supports it. But the environmental toll of these large data centers, which suck up gigawatts of power and require vast amounts of water for cooling, has been too diffuse and difficult to quantify. Now, Cornell researchers have used advanced data analytics—and, naturally, some AI, too—to create a state-by-state l

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images; Shutterstock These days, corporations aren’t just using AI as an excuse to justify layoffs, but are increasingly turning to their chatbots for advice deciding who to fire. As Reuters reports, 26 Meta employees filed a lawsuit accusing the company of using an internal AI platform to select targets for the thousands of jobs cut earlier this year. Per the suit, Meta used its