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Neom No one is surprised that Neom — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s $1.5 trillion-with-a-t plan to build a futuristic megacity smack dab in the middle of the desert — has turned out to be a disaster. Its centerpiece was supposed to be a towering skyscraper called The Line, over 100 miles in length, that could accommodate millions of people, something that the laws of reality always suggested would be impossible to pull off. But, according to new

AI generated Terminally online right wing dorks are falling head over heels for an AI-generated waifu — and setting themselves up to get scammed in the process. The damsel at the center of all their fawning is “Amelia,” who, we must stress, is not real. Nonetheless, she’s everywhere on places like X, where users ask Elon Musk’s AI Grok to imagine her as a purple-haired British schoolgirl — because of course she is — who’s also the anti-woke rebel of their

Getty / Futurism AI tech leaders have a lot to gain from striking fear into the hearts of their investors. By painting the tech as an ultra-powerful force that could easily bring humanity to its knees, the industry is hoping to sell itself as a panacea: a remedy to a situation it had a firm hand in bringing about. Case in point, Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei is back with a 19,000-word essay posted to his blog, arguing that “humanity is about to

Getty / Futurism For decades, tech companies have relied immensely on India’s vast workforce, from entry-level call center jobs to software engineers and high-ranking managerial positions. But with the advent of advanced AI, which has been accompanied by employers greatly cutting back on hiring with the hopes of eventually automating tasks entirely, India’s tech workers are having to cope with a vastly different reality in 2026. As Rest of World reports, r

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images We all know that tech companies keep tabs on everything about our online habits. But it’s another thing to actually be confronted with just how much data they have on you. This was the experience of tech journalist Pranav Dixit, who experimented with using Google’s new “Personal Intelligence” feature for Gemini and its search engine’s AI Mode. And boy, did things get personal. The AI was

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Mike Winkelmann / Chanda Khanna / AFP via Getty Images Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of doing many seedy things on behalf of Meta’s bottom line, but the latest allegations may blow the rest out of the water. According to internal Meta emails and messages filed in a New Mexico state court case which were made public this week, Zuckerberg himself signed off on allowing minors to access Meta’s AI chat

worst-people-alive-obsessed-smart-glasses There’s something about smart glasses that bring out the worst in people. It’s really no mystery, though: they’re powerful little surveillance devices that let wearers secretly record anyone they’re looking at, uniting tech bros and vapid influencers under the same, obnoxious umbrella. The popularity of wearables like Meta Ray-Bans are quickly reminding us why the slang term “glasshole” was already a thing over a d

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s in-house philosopher, is sounding pretty conflicted about whether AI models can be conscious and have feelings. The flip side of that: she thinks it’s a possibility they already do — which would be a very fringe and controversial position. But, she takes pains to emphasize, it’s all very murky. “We don’t really know what gives rise to consciousness,” she said in

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty Images It’s been a little over three years since the launch of the first commercially-available large language model (LLM) chatbot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And though the AI model has certainly made performance gains since it came online, the lackluster performance of recent iterations hasn’t helped the perception that LLMs are hitting a plateau. Case in point, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman re

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images A man who works at an AI watchdog group was alarmed when OpenAI suddenly showed up at his doorstep last fall, demanding he turn over documents. To his utter disbelief, he was being subpoenaed. “It’s a bit scary to know that the most valuable private company in the world has your address and has shown up and has questions for you,” the man, Tyler Johnston, who founded the nonprofit advocac

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images OpenAI announced on Thursday that it would retire GPT-4o — an especially warm, sycophantic version of the chatbot at the heart of a pile of user welfare lawsuits, including several that accuse OpenAI of causing wrongful death — along with several other older versions of the chatbot. In a blog post, OpenAI said that will sunset “GPT‑4o, GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini, and Open

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Still think getting a job in 2026 is as easy as walking in with a résumé and a firm handshake? You might want to read on. In the United States, at least, the employment outlook is rough. After a horrendous year for employment, US jobs growth stalled out in December as layoffs and hiring freezes in areas like construction and manufacturing take their toll on job growth numbers. And beneath

Getty / Futurism The AI industry has been pouring untold resources into building out enormous data centers across the world. The plants are immensely resource-hungry, sucking up huge amounts of fresh water to cool ripping-hot computer hardware. They’re turning into a massive strain on the electric grid, forcing some utility operators to enact rolling blackouts during heat waves and cold weather. The issue reached a fever pitch after the Washington Post rep

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images China is a country defined by major contradictions. The nation is governed by a communist party that has carefully embraced market forces as part of a long transition away from capitalism. Against this backdrop of ideological tension, it’s no surprise that smaller contradictions abound. Among them is the country’s embrace of human-like AI systems, which are increasingly being embedded in

Getty Images We’ve seen plenty of evidence suggesting that prolonged use of popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT can coax some users into spirals of paranoid and delusional behavior. The phenomenon, dubbed “AI psychosis,” is a very real problem, with researchers warning of a huge wave of severe mental health crises brought on by the tech. In extreme cases, especially involving people with pre-existing conditions, the breaks with reality have even been linked s

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images Just one month into his new job, New York City mayor Mamdani is cracking down on more than just predatory landlords. Apparently, useless AI chatbots are also on his administration’s agenda. In a press conference held last week, Mamdani made it a point to single out New York City’s large language model as a target for destruction. According to local publication The Ci

Getty / Futurism Along with being used to generate nonconsensual sexual images of women and girls, spread racist rhetoric, and doxx the home addresses of both celebrities and non-public figures, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is struggling to get a grip on reality. The mercurial billionaire’s social media platform X, which was folded into his AI startup xAI last year — and subsequently acquired by SpaceX this week — has once again been thrust into the center

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images It was only yesterday that Elon Musk announced that SpaceX had acquired his AI company xAI, a merger that catapulted the rocket maker into being the most valuable private company in the world, but raised significant questions about bringing two firms with vastly different missions under the same wing. Now, the freshly-joined entity is facing one of its first maj

Getty / Futurism For decades, the United States stock market has been a juggernaut on the international stage. The US dollar has been — and still is — the de facto currency globally. But for how much longer that will be the case is now looking uncertain. As the New York Times reports, investors are starting to look elsewhere as the Trump administration continues to threaten the independence of its central bank, start a trade war with Europe, and implement

Getty / Futurism AI companies are looking to spend trillions of dollars on data centers to power their increasingly resource-intensive AI models — an astronomical amount of money that could threaten the entire economy if the bet doesn’t pay off. As the race to spend as much money as possible on AI infrastructure rages on, companies have become increasingly desperate to keep the cash flowing. Firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Oracle are exhausting existing