AI News

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images With so many puff pieces out there about what AI can do, it’s rare to see a story about what it can’t do. And as some researchers tell it, AI is falling terribly short at what many of us find to be one of the easiest tasks of all: getting into arguments on social media. First spotted by Ars Technica, a team of researchers from Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the US recently released a p

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Sorry, fellas: your spicy AI anime girlfriend is actually destroying your mind — at least according to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. During a fireside chat at the University of Chicago, covered by Business Insider, Srinivas charged that the huge rise in popularity of AI-powered companion chatbots is “dangerous.” The tech CEO fretted that the AI bots — which are designed to mimic doting

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Alex Wong / Getty Images; Chesnot / Getty Images A major shake up appears to be taking place at Meta. According to new reporting from the Financial Times, the company’s top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, is planning to leave his position there and start his own AI startup. It’s a genuinely startling decision. LeCun, who joined Meta in 2013, is a towering figure in the AI industry. A Turing Award winner, th

Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor An AI-generated country song has topped Billboard’s “Country Digital Song Sales” chart in the United States — once again highlighting how ubiquitous algorithmically generated music is becoming. The song, titled “Walk My Walk,” by a fictional group called Breaking Rust, tells an incredibly generic story about a man who has “been beat down” and got “mud on my jeans,” yet perseveres through it all. The song was accompanied by an AI slo

Elon Musk made headlines overnight when he expressed interest in funding a hypothetical film production of The Odyssey directed by Mel Gibson. The billionaire quickly pivoted to a pledge to just make the same feature-length movie with his AI tool Grok and shared an example of what that might look like. As you can probably guess, it looks like dogshit. Musk has spent recent weeks complaining about Christopher Nolan’s new version of The Odyssey, which has ra

The release of a powerful open-source AI model from China has once again split the tech industry into two camps: the evangelists who believe good tech should be accessible and the protectionist hawks who believe anything foreign is a threat. It must simply kill Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money and a guy who has never once been deterred by being both loud and wrong, to find himself on the opposite side of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, given how much he loves

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

Forget AI coding agents. One startup is now working on an AI CEO that it hopes could automate an entire business from end to end. Skyfall AI came out of stealth this week after spending the past year developing AI systems that are designed to make the long-term decisions typically handled by company executives. Now, the startup wants to put its technology to the test in the real world by buying a small SaaS or e-commerce business for up to $1 million and l

Sorry in advance for this, but: do you remember back in January when Darren Aronofsky, director of the best movie ever made about computers and math, produced a series of AI shorts about the founding fathers, and they sucked? No? Here, let me jog your memory: If you can make it through that entire clip, you’ll notice at the very end there’s a logo for something called Primordial Soup. Primordial Soup calls itself “an AI-native storytelling studio founded b

Longtime fears of AI going rogue are starting to feel more real, so much so that some lawmakers now want powerful AI systems to come with an emergency kill switch. U.S. Reps. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, and Nathaniel Moran, a Texas Republican, introduced a bipartisan bill Thursday that would require major AI companies to make sure they have the ability to throttle, suspend, or shut down their most powerful AI. The so-called AI Kill Switch Act would al

Artificial intelligence has always had the capacity to present a meaningful improvement in accessibility for people with disabilities. Unfortunately, accessibility devices usually aren’t thought to have major commercial applications, so they often get coopted by tech bros who think every innovation is for them. Case in point: the technology of Augmental. The startup pretty explicitly markets itself as an accessibility technology company. On its “About” pag

Elon Musk sat down with the editor-in-chief of the Economist for a taped interview that went live Thursday. The Tesla CEO has been avoiding normal journalists recently, even cancelling a planned interview with CNBC earlier this month. And it now seems pretty obvious why. Musk has a hard time answering normal questions about his often fascist and sometimes incoherent worldview. The interview started cordially enough, with Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddo

Midjourney, the artificial intelligence lab that was an early contender in the AI image generation race, has purchased the astrology app Co-Star. The company plans to offer a new astrology-focused image generator, according to Bloomberg, a first for Midjourney since users must currently belong to the company’s Discord server to use the product. Midjourney burst onto the scene in early 2022, shortly before the explosion of AI tools like ChatGPT. But it’s la

Open-source AI models from China are once again causing a crisis in America, leading to accusations of stolen training data and threats of closing the border to foreign-origin tech. With tensions high, some tech executives are looking to broker peace before the Trump administration declares war on open-source on behalf of America’s precious closed-source models produced by labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went so far as to create an

A group of environmental advocacy organizations is claiming that the race to build data centers in Earth’s orbit is not only potentially harmful to the environment, but it might also be illegal. In a petition filed jointly by the non-profits Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Environment America, and DarkSky International, the groups are asking the Federal Communications Commission to pause its licensing of orbital data center projects unti

A planned funding round at Hangzhou, China-based hedge fund and unexpected AI juggernaut DeepSeek has probably been cancelled. According to a very delicately worded Bloomberg report, this comes just on the heels of the supposed leak of a long, off-the-cuff conversation with the company’s reclusive founder and CEO, Liang Wenfeng, that went viral. The conversation in question would read as extremely dull to most people, but went viral for being more than a b