Archive: October 2026

Optimization plays a pivotal role in a diverse array of real-world applications. Nevertheless, traditional optimization algorithms often demand substantial manual intervention to tailor them to specific tasks, grappling with the intricacies posed by the decision space and performance landscape. To tackle this challenge head-on, a Google DeepMind research team has introduced a groundbreaking approach in their recent paper titled “Large Language Models as Op

NVIDIA wants AI agent safety enforced in silicon, not left to the agent NVIDIA has introduced an open software platform and a hardware-based reference design intended to keep AI agents within the limits set by the organizations that use them. The Open Agent Safety Platform includes OpenShell, software that controls what an agent can access, and Sentry, a watchdog in the reference design that monitors agent activity from separate hardware. Organizations can

To validate the use of drones for collecting GHG data, the researchers conducted tests around the USP campus in São Carlos. Credit: Antonio Daud Forest fire prevention and control agencies in São Carlos, in the interior of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, will soon have help from the sky to detect fires more quickly and combat them before they grow out of control and cannot be extinguished. Researchers at the University of São Paulo's São Carlos Engineering

Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images/Futurism During the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference on Wednesday, OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar hinted at the possibility that the government could “backstop the guarantee that allows the financing to happen” as the AI industry continues to take on even more debt. Friar regretted her comment almost immediately, clarifying in a subsequent post on LinkedIn that “OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop

The ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency didn’t actually save the American taxpayers any money, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t accomplish anything. For instance, it seems at least some of them figured out that there is a lot of money to be made by securing contracts with the Pentagon. According to a report from Reuters, a startup founded by several former DOGE employees just completed a funding round that values their company at $1.4 billion

Using autonomous drones, researchers are able to create a 3D reconstruction of the smoke plume and improve analysis of flow patterns. Credit: Jiarong Hong Lab Researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have developed aerial robots equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) to detect, track and analyze wildfire smoke plumes. This innovation could lead to more accurate computer models that will improve air quality predictions for a wide range of

Getty / Futurism Researchers have found that if you tone down a large language model’s ability to lie, it’s far more likely to claim that it’s self-aware. Very few serious experts think today’s AI models are conscious, but many regular people feel differently about the bots, which are designed to foster emotional connection to keep engagement up. Users across the world have reported that they think they’re talking to conscious beings trapped within AI chat

Right Wing Cope As travel vloggers go, South African Kurt Caz has never exactly trafficked in highbrow content. His career as an influencer began about six years ago, through YouTube videos with simple but effective titles like “What is Bologna, Italy Like?” But as Caz got more travel time under his belt, his videos quickly devolved into the exploitative fare typical of most poverty vloggers: “Don’t Visit This Egyptian Ghetto!” and “Avoiding Guerillas on P

The field of text-to-image synthesis has advanced rapidly, with state-of-the-art models now generating highly realistic and diverse images from text descriptions. This progress largely owes to diffusion-based architectures trained on vast datasets containing billions of image-text pairs. The capability to create high-resolution, photorealistic images from text has transformative potential across fields like content creation, gaming, synthetic data generati

Credit: AI-generated image A £150 billion technology prosperity deal between the US and the UK was announced during President Donald Trump's recent state visit to the UK. But what kinds of technologies could it advance and how will these benefit the British public? The Conversation asked Dr. Dan Nicolau, who researches the interface of biology and computing, medical science and artificial intelligence (AI), at King's College London for his thoughts. AI has

Getty Images / Bulgac If we’re to believe Yoshua Bengio, one of the so-called “godfathers” of AI, some advanced models are showing signs of self-preservation — which is exactly why we shouldn’t endow them with any kind of rights whatsoever. Because if we do, he says, they may run away with that autonomy and turn on us before we have a chance to pull the plug. Then it’s curtains for this whole “humankind” experiment. “Frontier AI models already show signs o

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images It’s bad enough that ChatGPT is prone to making stuff up completely on its own. But it turns out that you can easily trick the AI into peddling ridiculous lies — that you invented — to other users, a tech journalist discovered. “I made ChatGPT, Google’s AI search tools and Gemini tell users I’m really, really good at eating hot dogs,” Thomas Germain for the BBC proudly shared. The hack ca

Americans are categorically pissed off about the 130,000 automated license plate readers (ALPRs) Flock and its competitors have erected across the nation, seemingly overnight and with little to no public approval. Things have gotten so hostile toward Big Tech leering that a Sullivan County, Tennessee, commissioner was recorded publicly calling for Flock’s CEO to be hanged for treason during a recent planning session. It’s no wonder ALPRs have rocketed up t

Americans’ hatred towards AI data centers is big business for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. San Francisco-based tech startup Together AI announced on Monday that it’s partnering with Humain, the Saudi Arabian AI company founded last year by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The deal will give Together AI access to 250 megawatts of electricity from data centers located inside Saudi Arabia. It’s the Kingdom’s latest move to cement itself as an epicenter for t

Mostly Human via YouTube OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reacted awkwardly to a viral video of a ChatGPT issue. In the video, the TikTok creator known as Husk asks ChatGPT’s voice mode to start a timer for his mile run. When Husk tells it to stop the timer only seconds later, the AI claims he took over ten minutes — and then confidently insists that it’s Husk, not itself, that’s mistaken. Altman’s reaction will raise eyebrows. After being shown the clip during an in