AI News

Microsoft is still scrambling to fully restore services as a massive outage stretched into its second day, disrupting operations at governments, hospitals, and businesses around the world. The tech giant said in a post on X Friday morning that service availability is improving, but some users may still be affected. “Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as recovery continues,” the company said. As of Friday mo

There will be no tokenmaxxing happening in Norwegian classrooms. According to a report from Reuters, the nation’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere announced Friday that the government will impose restrictions on the use of AI tools in schools in an effort to combat what it sees as a negative impact on learning. The new rules, which will take effect when students return to school in August of this year, will place a near-total ban on AI for primary school s

Once again, AI people are letting a work of fiction seep into their brains. This time it’s a piece of speculative fiction for Europeans called “Europe 2031.” Before that, it was Citrini Research’s ”The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” a story about white collar unemployment that caused stocks to dip. Before that, it was AI 2027 in which a superintelligent AI kills humanity. The sitting Vice President of the United States says he read that one. Europe 2031

For years now, Amazon has been in Anthropic’s corner in the artificial intelligence war, putting $4 billion into the AI startup in 2023. Since then, it’s poured in more and more cash at every turn, including another $25 billion just this past April to Anthropic’s growing infrastructure needs. So you’d imagine, then, that Amazon would be thrilled that Anthropic is on its way to becoming a publicly traded company with a highly touted model that has lapped so

One of the biggest PR challenges currently facing Silicon Valley is the sizable ecological impact of building new AI systems; just this morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft has inked a new deal with Chevron to build a sprawling new data center in West Texas powered by natural gas. Now, Nvidia is claiming to have effectively removed at least one major component of the AI industry’s environmental footprint: its dependency on local water s

A24 has apparently decided that just distributing the film Ex Machina isn’t enough—it needs to make it real. The film production and distribution darling has entered an agreement with Google that will see the tech giant pour $75 million into the studio as part of what is being positioned as an artificial intelligence research partnership. What does that mean? It seems, per Google’s press release, that A24 will gain access to Google DeepMind’s lab and the b

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Over the past year, Oracle has cut 21,000 jobs, according to an SEC filing. Part of the reason is apparently AI. As published on Stock Titan, the filing says “the adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce.” The relevant paragraph begins with bolded text reading, “Our periodic workforce restructurings and reorganizations can be disruptive,“ which certainly seems

A new lawsuit filed on Monday in Sacramento, California, proposed as a class action, accuses BP, 7-Eleven, Walmart, Albertsons, and other gas station chains operating in California—along with a software platform—of using AI to “coordinate high prices and wring more money from the pockets of consumers,” according to Reuters, who reviewed the suit. Reuters says the software in question is Kalibrate, one of the defendants, and a company whose website says it

Goats are comedy gold. They headbutt confused cats! They faint! They make hilarious noises! Really hilarious noises! They do unspeakable things to the sheriff! And sometimes they’re complete and utter… well, let’s just say that as an Australian, I feel compelled to shout out the immortal Kevin, whose epithet shall not be spoken in polite American company but whose YouTube career should be rejoiced in all its foul-mouthed glory. The point is that if you wan

Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder and CEO of Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, doesn’t seem too convinced by Elon Musk’s plan to put data centers in space. Son said the costs of orbital data centers would likely outweigh the benefits and that the AI race will be decided much closer to home, Bloomberg reports. “In the battle for AI, the next few years will be far more important than what might happen a decade or so from now,” said Son on Tuesday wh

Anthropic updated its privacy policy earlier this month, including a new clause stipulating that Claude users would be required to verify their age or identity “in certain circumstances” by uploading an image of a government-issued ID, such as a driver’s license or passport, and it didn’t take long for the outrage machine and rumor mill to start churning. Some people claimed the new age-verification requirement was the harbinger of a dark new era for the i

Is it a little ironic that someone who plays other people professionally is leading the charge in protecting people’s identities in the age of artificial intelligence? Sure, but it’s not like anyone else is doing anything about it. On Tuesday, multi-time Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett announced the release of the Human Consent Registry, a new tool designed to help people control their likeness and how it can be used by AI systems. The tool, which is b

Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 AI model was released to the public on June 9 and taken down on June 12. By my math, it was available for a little over three days. Anthropic took down Fable 5 voluntarily in a manner of speaking, but by all accounts it was complying with an export control directive from the U.S. government under threat of penalties. Now a startup called Legion says in a new lawsuit against the government that Claude Fable 5 was so critical to it

Early leaks about President Trump’s executive order on AI made it sound like a crackdown that would have forced companies to let the U.S. government vet AI models for safety before they could be released to the public. But it didn’t take long for those behind the scenes to signal what was really coming: voluntary vetting. The executive order he signed on June 2 asks companies to submit their new models for government oversight. Tech companies should, prett