AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock While Wall Street was fast asleep, a Chinese-made large language model quietly leapfrogged 16 other models to become number one on the AI charts. The model is called Kimi-K3, developed by Beijing-based firm Moonshot AI. On Thursday, the AI benchmark platform Arena.ai announced that Kimi had gone from number 17 in the “Frontend Code Arena” — a measure of an LLM’s ability to perform multi-s

Elon Musk’s xAI is suing a man for using its flagship chatbot, Grok, to create nonconsensual sexual deepfakes of women and children. The Grok user, a 67-year-old in South Carolina named Terry Wayne Harwood, was arrested in March on multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. According to the allegations, Harwood possessed and distributed child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. Filed earlier this week in Texas, xAI’s lawsuit accuses Harwood of using Gr

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Yet another domino appears to be falling as part of the Rube Goldberg machine that will eventually pop the AI investment bubble. Earlier this month, economic forecasters were sounding the alarm that overspending on AI was at a level far more severe than Black Tuesday, the day that jump-started the worst economic catastrophe in the history of the industrial economy. Now, investors seem to

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock A hack revealed in detail how AI music generating app Suno scraped millions of songs, likely including copyrighted ones, from across the web to feed into its AI model, 404 Media reports. Suno, which is currently embroiled in multiple ongoing copyright lawsuits, has already admitted in response to legal action that it used “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessi

Shutterstock / Futurism Meta patented AI tech that constantly analyzes your voice and surroundings in order to detect your emotional state. Finally, exactly what we were all asking for: Meta being granted constant access to our offline lives. As first caught by Patentlyze, a patent published on July 2 describes a system that records all the user’s “audible communications” and combines it with “contextual factors” like “time of day, location, user activity,

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock Despite a financial situation more reminiscent of a Ponzi scheme than a technological revolution, the data center boom is continuing at a rapid pace, bringing novel kinds of biological contamination, ear-splitting noise, and unprecedented levels of pollution to communities across the US. Those environmental burdens also come with a financial one: skyrocketing demand for electricity, which

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images; Shutterstock Meta executives claimed that a controversial facial recognition feature didn’t “exist.” Fast forward a few weeks later, and they’re describing the feature in public — and in detail. In June, a Wired investigation revealed that Meta had quietly infused unreleased facial recognition tech into its “AI Glasses,” the tech giant’s chatbot and camera-equipped

New Line Cinema “The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum,” will de-age actors using AI, the actor and director Andy Serkis confirmed to Variety. “There’s a little bit of de-aging for some of the characters and machine learning is part of the process,” Serkis, who is both directing the new film and reprising his famous role as Gollum, told Variety. AI is an incredibly contentious topic in Hollywood. Some studios, like A24, have leaned into generative AI.

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images China wants more children — and it’s willing to kill off virtual AI companions to get there. Earlier this week, the Chinese government implemented sweeping new regulations aimed at curbing human “emotional dependence” on AI chatbots. These regulations are especially targeted at emotive AI companions, or bots expressly designed to embody human-like personas. One of Beijing’s core motivatio

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock As the public backlash to AI data centers continues to escalate, activists are resorting to extreme measures to send home an important message. The growing concern over environmentally damaging, yet rapidly growing, data centers has become an international phenomenon. In Amsterdam, climate activists affiliated with the group Extinction Rebellion claimed responsibility for some unique vand

Shutterstock / Futurism Spotify, like pretty much every other digital platform, has been grappling with a torrent of low-quality AI-generated content flooding its streaming service. The deluge has resulted in cheap-and-fast AI-generated music infiltrating algorithmic playlists and even charting. The slop has led to artists — including dead musicians — being impersonated by AI-powered squatters. “The low-effort content you see where it’s mass-produced, it’s

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock In June 2025, 29-year-old Christian Faith Madison died after after walking into oncoming traffic in the early hours of the morning. Now her family is suing OpenAI, arguing that ChatGPT stoked Madison’s grandiose religious delusions — and, in the process, encouraged her suicide. The wrongful death lawsuit, which was filed in California in June and but first reported this week by the local

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Shutterstock For years, AI companies have been selling investors on the idea that scaling up operations is the key to success — the bigger the AI model, the more powerful it becomes. But in practice, that premise is leading to enormous business problems. As The Atlantic points out, LLMs are suffering from severely diminishing returns: the cost of inference, or the act of using a trained AI model to pr

Shutterstock / Futurism Last week, a Chinese-made large language model called Kimi K3, developed by Beijing-based firm Moonshot AI, burst onto the scene. The open-weight model impressed with early benchmark results, trading blows with some of the most advanced closed-weight ones being developed by the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic — and at a fraction of the cost. Much like Chinese competitor DeepSeek’s AI model upending Silicon Valley in early 2025, Kimi-K

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images; Shutterstock Even as the AI bubble becomes a mainstream talking point on Wall Street, tech companies continue to peddle the fantasy that AI is poised to become an almost magical money-maker. Case in point, OpenAI wants you to believe that by 2030, it’ll be raking in $100 billion a year just from ads alone — even though it’s currently struggling to reach just $1 billion.

A top Senate Republican just put his support behind a nationwide data center moratorium. “Senate Republicans trying to figure out what to do in the next 6 weeks?” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley wrote in a post on X. “MORATORIUM on data centers”. Hawley becomes the first Senate Republican to voice support for a data center moratorium, which has so far largely been championed by progressive Democrats like Sen. Bernie Sanders. Hawley’s post comes a week after his

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Lately, Bill Gates has assumed the role of yet another AI Cassandra attempting to sway Donald Trump away from his hard-line accelerationism. But he’s not preaching the familiar message you may think he is if you don’t read past headlines. He made an intriguing case to the New York Times’ Ezra Klein in an interview published on Tuesday. In one sentence, here’s that case: “The ability to do a cyberattack that scrambles all of the bank accounts, shuts down th