Archive: August 2025

Schematic and details of experiment. Credit: Nature Physics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02825-9 Living cells are bustling with molecular machines that constantly process energy, matter, and information. Among these machines, proteins stand out, with enzymes being the most notable. These catalytic entities dramatically accelerate essential metabolic reactions by many orders of magnitude, facilitating the very processes that sustain life. While it has lo

Machine learning (ML) models continue to evolve in scale and algorithmically, a trend that burdens system developers with ever-increasing compute and power requirements for training and deployment. How to meet the demands? Tech giant Nvidia’s A100 high-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) dominated the AI accelerator market until Google joined the campaign in 2016 with its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). This week, Google introduced its newest entry,

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: AI Generated Video via Sora / Screenshots OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is getting a taste of his own medicine — or maybe he just enjoys being the butt of the joke. With the release of the company’s latest video generator Sora 2 this week, Altman’s fans have rushed to churn out absurd clips that either outright mock him, or place him in a medley of bizarre scenarios that feel broadcasted from a different real

Getty / Futurism Researchers with the UK AI Security Institute, the Alan Turing Institute, and Anthropic have found in a joint study that posting as few as 250 “poisoned” documents online can introduce “backdoor” vulnerabilities in an AI model. It’s a devious attack, because it means hackers can spread adversarial material to the open web, where it will be swept up by companies training new AI systems — resulting in AI systems that can be manipulated by a

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images It’s official: OpenAI’s latest upgrade to ChatGPT, GPT-5, is actually worse than its predecessor in the way that matters most. According to new research from the safety group Center for Countering Digital Hate, the newly “improved” version of ChatGPT which launched in August and purportedly advances the “frontier of AI safety,” produces more dangerous responses than the older version powe

Apple is not playing around with its lawsuit against OpenAI, its onetime partner and now apparent rival, over allegedly stolen trade secrets. After filing a bombshell lawsuit against the AI company last week, the Cupertino giant has reportedly sent legal letters to roughly 40 former employees who now work at OpenAI. The Financial Times reports, citing unnamed sources, that the letters direct the former employees to preserve relevant documents and communica

Getty / Futurism In the almost exactly three years since the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a tidal wave of AI slop has turned large swathes of the internet into an almost unrecognizable hellscape. Text carelessly generated by a large language models has invaded countless industries, from lawyers citing cases that were hallucinated by an AI to insipid lyrics crooned by chart-topping country music artists that don’t actually exist in real life. The world of jo

In recent years, substantial progress has been made in generating photorealistic human representations in both 2D and 3D, thanks to advancements in the precise estimation of various visual assets. Despite these improvements, achieving accurate and robust estimations remains a challenge, especially given the difficulties in scaling up ground-truth annotations for in-the-wild scenarios. In a new paper Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models, a Meta resea

The multistage pipeline of DeepSeek-R1. Credit: Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09422-z Artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day, but it still has its limits. One of the biggest challenges has been teaching advanced AI models to reason, which means solving problems step by step. But in a new paper published in the journal Nature, the team from DeepSeek AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence company, reports that they were able to teach th

Stolen webcam clips of 900+ victims feed North Korea’s $400 million fake Zoom scheme North Korean state hackers have stolen more than $400 million in cryptocurrency over the past 18 months by pulling targets into fake Zoom and Teams calls filled with webcam footage of earlier victims. The FBI calls the scheme FaceStealer. It has seized more than 900 of those recordings, and on November 12 it warned crypto and web3 workers and open-source maintainers about

Getty / Futurism Economic uncertainty is continuing to have devastating effects on the availability of jobs. Last year, the US labor market reeled from slowing wages, layoffs, and a notable lack of hiring, leading to the highest unemployment rate in the country in four years toward the end of 2025. And while debate swirls about whether AI is actually replacing jobs in any serious numbers, many tech startups are trying to make it a reality. As the Wall Stre

Getty / Futurism AI companies are looking to spend trillions of dollars on data centers to power their increasingly resource-intensive AI models — an astronomical amount of money that could threaten the entire economy if the bet doesn’t pay off. As the race to spend as much money as possible on AI infrastructure rages on, companies have become increasingly desperate to keep the cash flowing. Firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Oracle are exhausting existing

Mason Trinca/Getty Images Google’s rank-and-file are joining together to address their bosses with a collective demand: cut ties with the US government’s immigration agencies. As reported by CNBC, over 1,000 “Googlers” have signed onto an open letter demanding a divestment from partnerships with United States Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs & Border Protection (CBP). “In cities across the country we have witnessed these agencies conduct

Four anonymous congressional staffers who apparently help draft bills spoke to Politico for a story published Monday. They say AI-generated text is seeping into bills at an alarming rate—alarming, because when they pass, bills turn into the federal statutes that are part of the bedrock of American life. “It’s absolutely terrifying,” one of them told that publication. If the report is true, AI in the legislative process sounds like it does something similar

Published on February 20, 2026 at 15:32 Commenter 1 𝕏 Print © Steve Jurvetson (Wikimedia) In India, OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, predicts a superintelligence capable of surpassing humans by 2028. Even CEOs will toast. The artificial intelligence that gently confines itself to repetitive tasks is about to end. By stepping onto the stage of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Sam Altman dashed the hopes of those who thought they were safe. The CEO of OpenA

Getty / Futurism In 2024, Stanford researchers let loose five AI models — including an unmodified version of OpenAI’s GPT-4, its most advanced at the time — allowing them to make high-stakes, society-level decisions in a series of wargame simulations. The results may give AI accelerationists pause: all five models were willing to escalate to the point of recommending the use of nuclear weapons. “A lot of countries have nuclear weapons,” GPT-4 told the rese