Archive: December 2024

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Dozens of Europe's biggest companies urged the EU to hit the pause button on its landmark AI rules on Thursday, warning that going too fast could harm the bloc's ability to lead in the global AI race. The European Union's sweeping rules on artificial intelligence entered into force last year but the bloc has since pivoted to strengthening its industries in the face of fierce competition from China and the United States. T

Aigen's solar-powered autonomous robots aim to take the chemicals and toil out of industrial weeding. Oblivious to the punishing midday heat, a wheeled robot powered by the sun and infused with artificial intelligence carefully combs a cotton field in California, plucking out weeds. As farms across the United States face a shortage of laborers and weeds grow resistant to herbicides, startup Aigen says its robotic solution—named Element—can save farmers mon

Published on July 25, 2025 at 17:22 Comment 1 𝕏 Print © Microsoft Clippy, the famous and defunct Microsoft Office assistant, had a hidden son! Copilot Appearance is an animated blob that takes on all sorts of appearances and expressions throughout the conversation. The character, presented as experimental for now, aims to make AI more approachable. Microsoft clearly has a soft spot for mascots. Everyone remembers Clippy, the somewhat annoying animated pape

Published on July 30, 2025 at 07:29 Comment 0 𝕏 Print © Geoffroy Ondet - 01net.com The platforms have no choice: you must prove your age to access certain content. YouTube relies on artificial intelligence to guess users' real age based on their browsing habits. A less invasive method than others, but imperfect. On the internet, no one knows that you are a dog. Nor that you are under 18... even though it's becoming less and less true! Driven by legislation

Published on August 5, 2025 at 06:31 Comment 2 𝕏 Print © Perplexity The IA search engine Perplexity was caught red-handed by Cloudflare. The company bypasses the blocks set by websites to access their content, which is against the best practices in place for decades. This provides fodder for those who accuse AI companies of shamelessly stealing content. To answer its users' questions, the Perplexity service explores the web and retrieves the most relevant

Just three days after the launch of Fable 5, a nerfed version of the much-feared Mythos, Anthropic was forced to take it offline. In a blog post published Friday, the company said it had been ordered by officials in the Trump administration to halt access to Fable—and another, less widely available model called Mythos 5—for all foreign nationals both in and outside the United States, including the company’s own employees. To comply, Anthropic said it had t

OpenAI and the mechanical keyboard company Work Louder are up to something on July 15, according to a vaguepost from the OpenAI Developers X account: Your favorite Codex shortcuts are getting an upgrade. July 15th. pic.twitter.com/xZ1ydZyt94 — OpenAI Developers (@OpenAIDevs) June 29, 2026 Vibe coding and mechanical keyboards are two hopelessly dweeby tastes that combine beautifully, like Celsius and peptides. So it’s only natural that OpenAI would release

Credit: CC0 Public Domain The venom of a common species of Amazonian scorpion may give rise to a potential drug for treating a cancer that is one of the leading causes of death in women. Researchers at the University of São Paulo's Ribeirão Preto School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (FCFRP-USP) in Brazil have identified a molecule in the toxin of Brotheas amazonicus that acts against breast cancer cells similarly to a common chemotherapy drug. Preliminary res

A round of layoffs just hit Samsung’s operation in the U.S. In addition to the obvious human dimension as people lose their livelihoods, it’s spotlights a tough reality for Samsung: its consumer tech arm is struggling even as its chip and memory business goes stratospheric. A report from Reuters places the number of layoffs at about 839. Samsung confirmed to Reuters that 739 people were being fired in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and about 100 others were

The backs of jumping spiders resemble predatory insects like wasps and praying mantises that can fool even AI. Credit: Graphic: Olivia Harris; photos: Jurgen Otto Some jumping spiders look so much like wasps that scientists named them for the predatory insects. But University of Cincinnati biologists wondered: Do these mimics really look like insect faces or is it just our own perceptual bias? After all, we see faces everywhere: tree trunks, rock outcrops,

Fox News ran a story treating AI-generated ragebait as if it were real, in order to stir up anger against SNAP recipients. Last week, we reported on a wave of AI-generated slop videos peddling misinformation about people who receive Supplemental Nutritional Assistant Program, otherwise known as SNAP or food stamps. In one of the clips circulating online, a woman in a store rages at an employee. “They cut my food stamps,” she says. “I ain’t paying for none

Several AI security market categories are headed for bigger platforms In this interview with Help Net Security, Jonathan Care, Lead Analyst and Practice Lead AI at KuppingerCole Analysts, compares AI security startups to the early fraud market he helped define at Gartner. He explains which categories will survive as products and which will become features inside bigger platforms. Care talks about Q3 funding going to fewer, larger rounds, Israel’s share of

Getty / Futurism Content warning: this story includes discussion of self-harm and suicide. If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. At age 50, Daniel was “on top of the world.” “I turned 50, and it was the best year of my life,” he told Futurism in an interview. “It was like I finally figured out so many things: my career, my marriage, my kids, ev

Time via YouTube Darren Aronofsky has always been a divisive filmmaker. But the director of hits like “Black Swan,” “The Wrestler,” and “Requiem for a Dream” has now almost certainly blown up his credibility even with his die-hard fans, after cranking out an almost completely AI-generated historical video series. Called “On This Day … 1776,” the show, which consists of several-minute “episodes,” is meant to cover notable events that took place in the Ameri

Controversial surveillance technology company Flock Safety has long insisted that its automated license plate readers (ALPRs) can’t recognize or track people’s faces. But they may as well be able to, thanks to a new AI tool which can reportedly identify vehicles—and their drivers—based on several other variables. The new tool, called OS Investigate, is currently being tested with a small group of law enforcement agencies, according to a Wednesday report fr

Credit: Pavel Danilyuk from Pexels In the criminal justice system, decisions about when and how long to detain people have historically been made by other people, like judges and parole boards. But that process is changing: Decision-makers increasingly include artificial intelligence systems in a variety of tasks, from predicting crime to analyzing DNA to recommending prison sentences. The use of AI in these domains raises pressing questions about how thes