AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images OpenAI’s efforts to transform online shopping are faltering. According to new reporting from The Information, the company is walking back its plan to allow users to buy products suggested by ChatGPT directly inside the chatbot. Now, the company will route users to a connected third-party app, where they can input payment information and finalize the purchase. “We are evolving our commerce

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images The headlines warning about AI melting our brains usually point to students or workers, which — fair enough. But there’s a much more ironic victim hiding in the corner office: the very business executives who unleashed AI on us in the first place. A recent study conducted by market research agency 3Gem and flagged by The Register found that business leaders in the United Kingdom seem to b

Proponents of generative AI say the tech has greatly lowered the barriers of entry in the art world, allowing practically anybody with internet access to dream up competently-executed landscapes, portraits, sketches and comics — all without any talent whatsoever. Critics say it’s the lowest common denominator of human expression, outsourcing to bloated algorithms that feasted on copyrighted materials while exploiting human artists who have yet to be fairly

Jonathan Raa / NurPhoto via Getty Images / Futuism A top OpenAI executive has quit the company over its agreement with the Department of Defense that allows its tech to be deployed across the military. The employee, Caitlin Kalinowski, who led OpenAI’s hardware and robotics efforts, announced her resignation on social media Saturday. “This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security,” wrote Kalinowski in a tweet. “But surveillance of

Getty / Futurism Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei picked a major fight with the Department of Defense last month, asserting that his company’s AI models couldn’t be used for mass surveillance of Americans or direct autonomous weapons systems. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth and president Donald Trump lambasted Amodei for dictating what they could or couldn’t do with the company’s tech. They quickly announced that the company would be labeled a supply chain risk “

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images AI companies are spending vast sums of money on data centers — infrastructure expenditures that come with some hair-raising price tags. As Bloomberg reported last week, Larry Ellison’s Oracle may have spread itself a little too thin. The company is planning to cut thousands of jobs due to a “cash crunch” resulting from a massive AI data center expansion effort. Inside sources told the outlet that at least some of the cut jobs wil

AI agents were supposedly going to be game-changers for both sides of consumer transactions—agents would handle tasks like bookings, support, and services 24/7, freeing humans for other work. Turns out businesses don’t like dealing with AI agents, and consumers don’t want them handling their business. Earlier this week, United Airlines announced that it would ban AI agents from making bookings on behalf of customers, citing privacy concerns, the risk of ex

Much to the chagrin of many a city council member hoping to get their beak wet, Americans have a more-or-less universal antipathy for data centers that cuts across all demographics and has only grown more intense over time. So great is the hatred of these buzzing, energy-hogging buildings that the topic has quickly become one of the defining issues of the forthcoming midterm elections. And those who once thought this might be a seasonal wedge issue are now

The risks posed by AI—like climate change and nuclear proliferation—are global problems in need of global solutions. And according to Bill Gates, humanity can no longer afford to wait on that front. In an essay published early Wednesday morning, the Microsoft cofounder and billionaire philanthropist wrote that the AI boom is a technological revolution unlike any other in history, with huge implications for virtually every sector of human life—from healthca

I wrote on Monday that rumors were circulating that Hugging Face was looking to be acquired for about $13 billion. That’s exactly what is now happening according to anonymous insiders who spoke to the Information and Business Insider. The deal is reportedly still being finalized and may still crumble. The apparent buyer is Nvidia. The AI chip colossus has been hovering around the AI resource repository for years, looking like a slobbering cartoon wolf hold

Nvidia makes a lot of money from deals fueled by AI hype. It also spends a lot of money on deals that in turn fuel that same AI hype. But Nvidia executives want you to ignore how circular that might sound, because the companies they are investing in are going to “become the largest technology companies in history.” Nvidia has woven a tangled, and some argue dangerous, web of deals with frontier AI companies, one in which the chipmaker is slowly evolving fr

Everything about Google view more Everything about Artificial Intelligence view more Everything about OpenAI view more Artificial intelligence is starting to do more than answer questions. Systems capable of performing tasks on their own were the topic of the podcast Hard Fork from The New York Times, which discussed Meta and OpenAI's proposals for this new generation of tools.The change seems simple, but it has important consequences. When a system starts

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

Spotting videos made by generative AI used to be as simple as counting the fingers of the people depicted. But as with every other aspect of the technology, while AI video’s utility remains questionable, its ability to create a reasonably convincing facsimile of human-created footage has come a long way since the days of this sort of cursed nonsense. And yet. There’s still something off about a lot of AI-created video—if anything, it looks too real, too in

Since returning to office in early 2025, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs that have disrupted nearly every sector of the global economy. Now they’ve found an unlikely new target: artificial intelligence, an industry the president has vowed to protect. According to new reporting from Politico, the Trump administration is discussing a round of tariffs on semiconductors, despite objections from Silicon Valley. Citing anonymous sources, Politico reports that

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more than 100 other companies and organizations are calling for a major push to defend against cyber threats powered by the most advanced AI models that, somewhat ironically, the industry itself is racing to put out in the world. The companies, which also include Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, signed a joint letter published Thursday calling on industry leaders and governments to carry out a “global surge in cyber defense.” “