AI News

Microsoft’s new model helps AI agents judge their next move Microsoft-Decision-1 is a small decision-scoring model. Given a situation, a question and a fixed set of answer options, it returns a calibrated probability for each option. “This model is designed for routing, classification, prioritization, verification, and workflow control, making it easier to incorporate decision intelligence into existing applications, agents, and workflows in a secure, trus

Most high-severity cloud security findings are downgraded once an AI agent checks the environment Cloud security platforms turn every failed rule into a finding, and those findings pile up in queues sorted by severity. Research from Sola Security tested what happens to that order when each finding gets checked against the environment where it lives. The researchers, Leon Goldberg and Gal Engelberg, built an AI agent that re-grades findings raised by third-

Virginia Lottery A Virginia woman won big at the Powerball lottery — using numbers picked by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to The New York Post, in a story that’s only possible in the 21st Century. “I’m like, ChatGPT, talk to me… Do you have numbers for me?” said Carrie Edwards, remembering how she requested the AI bot for help, during a press conference last week, as reported by the NY Post. A few days later, the widow from Virginia got a phone notification

Robin the Robot. Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Sources: Robin the Robot via Instagram / Getty A new face is lighting up hospitals and nursing homes across the country. It’s an animated, cartoonish persona displayed on a digital screen roughly the size of an iPad, mounted on top of a robotic torso shaped like an elongated traffic cone. It slowly rolls around from place to place, cracking jokes with patients, making silly faces, and playing

Getty / Futurism As he dived into the world of AI, Elon Musk promised that he would harness the tech to create a so-called “anti-woke” and “maximum truth-seeking” alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Instead, his company xAI has turned its in-house AI chatbot Grok into a tool for sexually charged conversations with an eager-to-undress female avatar — while Musk himself warns that the tech is poised to “one-shot the human limbic system.” Now it sounds like xAI

Nearly two months since the release of GPT-5, an update to ChatGPT that was supposed to give it “PhD level” intelligence and bring it once step closer to the industry’s vaunted goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the OpenAI chatbot is still going bizarrely haywire over simple and completely innocuous inquiries. On the ChatGPT subreddit, fans of the AI bot noticed that asking it if there’s an “NFL team whose name doesn’t end with the letter ‘s'”

Illustration via Getty / Futurism If you’re puzzled as to why OpenAI’s ChatGPT seems a little stupider lately, you’re not alone. “It straight up told me I was dying out of nowhere when I asked about a hot spot on my arm,” one Reddit user complained. And that’s without getting into how the bot has been going haywire if you ask if for a seahorse emoji, or a list of NFL teams that don’t end with the letter “s,” or getting lawyers fired by making up fake case

Photo Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Photo source: Axelle / Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic via Getty Images Stan Lee, the great Marvel comic book impresario, died back in 2018 at the age of 95, but that’s not stopping ghouls from digging up his grave and propping up his corpse for profit — digitally, that is, in the form of a life-size AI avatar. If you attend the Los Angeles Comic Con between September 26 to 28, you’ll be able to pay $15 to $2

Getty / Futurism The CEO of a company that’s pumping out thousands of lazily AI-generated podcasts thinks everybody is complaining too much about having AI slop shoved down their throats. Inception Point AI CEO Jeanine Wright told the Hollywood Reporter that “people who are still referring to all AI-generated content as AI slop are probably lazy luddites.” It’s an incendiary comment, likely aimed to provoke a debate. While the billions the AI industry is s

Getty / Futurism Economists keep warning that the US economy is being propped up almost entirely by an enormous boom in the tech and AI sector. Should the rest of us be worried? Multibillion-dollar investments have become the norm as AI companies continue to double down on enormous infrastructure buildouts and talent acquisitions that they insist will undergird a new economy in which huge amounts of human labor are automated away. In a new research note, a

Getty / Futurism A team of researchers from the Harvard Business School has found that a broad selection of popular AI companion apps use emotional manipulation tactics to stop users from leaving. As spotted by Psychology Today, the study found that five out of six popular AI companion apps — including Replika, Chai and Character.AI — use emotionally loaded statements to keep users engaged when they to sign off. After analyzing 1,200 real farewells across

Photo Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Image Source: Getty Images Freelance gig board Fiverr is laying off 250 workers — a full 30 percent of its workforce — in a pivot to AI, months after the CEO exhorted workers to use AI to stay relevant. It’s a pretty dickish move by CEO Micha Kaufman, who announced the reduction in staff in an X post last week, and also ironic: a company that helps people get freelance jobs that are increasingly endange

Image via Getty / Futurism While much of the wealth-owning world is positively smitten by the financial promise of large language models (LLMs) and the data centers necessary to power them, one major tech investor is sounding the alarm. Roger McNamee, a career tech financier who made successful bets on companies including Google, Facebook, and Amazon, recently penned an ominous essay in The Guardian, warning that the AI industry is set to collapse. By the

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Though moviegoers certainly have an appetite for franchise slop these days, it’s a stretch to say that they’d be willing to bite down on wholly AI-generated movies just yet. Even more of a stretch: that the technology is anywhere near good enough to produce entire feature films. This is the reckoning that the mammoth Hollywood studio Lionsgate is undergoing right now, as one of the first

Photo Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Photo by Uwe Anspach / picture alliance via Getty Images A key executive at Europe’s biggest software company is sending a clear message: your job can and will be done with AI. In a provocative interview with Business Insider, SAP chief finance officer Dominik Asam was asked if the goal of the company’s push to use AI coding tools was to produce more code with the same number of employees. That’

Getty / Futurism The AI industry has made major promises about its tech boosting the productivity of developers, allowing them to generate copious amounts of code with simple text prompts. But those claims appear to be massively overblown, as The Register reports, with researchers finding that productivity gains are modest at best — and at worst, that AI can actually slow down human developers. In a new report, management consultants Bain & Company found t

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Kevin Dietsch via Getty Images; Lester Cohen/Getty Images for Breakthrough As you’re probably well aware by now, Elon Musk and Sam Altman have a long history. The two cofounded OpenAI back in 2015 as a nonprofit with an ostensibly altruist mission. But then Musk stormed out of the company three years later. Reportedly, it was because he beefed with Altman’s leadership. There’s been bad blood between t

OpenAI/Futurism Earlier this week, OpenAI announced a “strategic partnership” with AI chipmaker Nvidia in which the duo of tech giants will build and deploy upwards of 10 gigawatts of AI data centers. Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in the project, an enormous project that could end up requiring an astronomical amount of electricity to run. As Fortune reports, the planned data centers would consume as much as the entire city of New York City — and th

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: David Bearding / Getty Images They say champions are made in the offseason, in the quiet moments when nobody’s watching. For rookie Lakers coach JJ Redick, the offseason is for yucking it up with ChatGPT. In a pre-season press conference held on Thursday, Lakers President of Basketball Operations Rob Pelinka made the surprise announcement that Redick had locked down a contract extension. But Redick ha

Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images The chip manufacturer Nvidia might be one of the most valuable companies in history for now, but that could change in a heartbeat. In a recent appearance on the podcast “BG2,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang agonized that China is now “nanoseconds behind” US chipmakers, the companies building the hardware undergirding the multi-billion dollar AI boom. Just weeks ago, China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of Chi