Latest AI News

In an era where Silicon Valley’s conservatism is both expressed openly and becoming more intense by the day, it’s strange to think that tech was once seen as a hive of liberalism. The right-wing nature of today’s tech industry means that its products tend to also be seen as serving right-wing interests, either in their actual operation (like X’s openly and unrepentantly right-wing chatbot Grok) or by the simple fact that their existence serves to enrich a

Sam Altman is calling off the jobs apocalypse, so please put your molotov cocktails away. In a recent appearance at a conference hosted by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the CEO of OpenAI admitted that his previous warnings about mass job loss and societal upheaval were incorrect. (Well, maybe not totally incorrect, but that societal upheaval is more directed at him than he’d like, and now he’s trying to do some crisis management). He’s also very happ

Within some tech circles not so long ago, there was excitement around the concept of a wearable AI “companion”; essentially, a chatbot built into a compact piece of hardware, which users would carry around with them on their person. The idea was marketed as a mix between an ever-present conversation partner, a personalized note-taker, and, most memorably—or cringe-ily, depending on your views—an artificial “Friend.” Anyone who rode a New York City subway i

On Thursday, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.8, the latest and most advanced version of its flagship AI model. It’s available everywhere at the same price as its predecessor, Opus 4.7 ($5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens). Opus 4.8 boasts industry-leading scores on tasks like agentic coding and agentic computer use, which is par for the course for a new Anthropic model. The key differentiator that’s being underscored by the compa

If you’re worried about artificial intelligence getting so advanced that it eventually traps humanity in some sort of Matrix-like simulation, rest easy. It seems like you’ll be able to see through the facade pretty easily. Researchers at the upstart lab Emergence AI allowed AI models to govern their own simulated world to see what would happen. Turns out we probably shouldn’t hand over governance to the machines, who woulda thought? The project, called Eme

Kevin O’Leary came to Utah with a pitch: He gets 40,000 acres of their land, and they get an ugly, energy-guzzling data center that creates minimal long-term jobs. Utahans said, “I’m out,” but the Shark Tank star isn’t taking no for an answer. Instead, he’s claiming that it’s actually the Chinese Communist Party behind the pushback against his data center project, despite a Washington Post report finding little to no evidence to back those claims. The data

Battle lines are being drawn between two camps of developers: so-called vibe coders, on the one side—those who wholeheartedly embrace handing over complex coding tasks to AI tools—and on the other, those of a more puritan persuasion, who prefer to keep AI out of the codebase. Shots were fired this week when a German developer named Johannes Link added instructions to an open-source app he’d built, called jqwik, commanding the automatic and immediate deleti

Just last month, the most important metric in Silicon Valley was tokens burned—the units of measurement for the computing power being used by AI models. CEOs were giving employees the Matthew McConaughey “those are rookie numbers, you gotta pump those numbers up” speech from The Wolf of Wall Street. Now, they’re asking their staff to pump the brakes. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, corporate leaders have realized that it actually costs

Dishes piling up? Trash well past the brim of the can? That thin layer of dust on your furniture starting to stratify? Well, if you’re in New York City and open to unusual propositions, there’s a company willing to take care of those and other unresolved house cleaning tasks you might have, all for free. The catch: you let the cleaners record the entire process inside your home from the cameras affixed to their “magic hats” to help train AI. The German sta

In a blog post on Thursday, Anthropic wrote that it “has raised $65 billion in Series H funding led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $965 billion post-money.” The most recent blog post along similar lines from OpenAI places its valuation at $852 billion. That means the top of the leaderboard has flipped. Among AI-first tech companies, Anthropic, “the Claude one,” is now technically more valuable than O

Will Sawin got OpenAI’s email on a Friday night. Or Saturday morning. Either way, Sawin, a professional mathematician, spent his entire weekend thinking about that email. By next Monday, he decided to write up a paper that essentially improved what was given to him—an AI’s “proof” of Paul Erdős’s unit-distance problem, an infamous conjecture from 1946. Last week, OpenAI published a blog post on the AI’s proof. The paper came with a companion piece containi

Anthropic trained the latest version of its Claude chatbot to be more honest than its predecessors. And honestly? Not everyone’s into it. Unveiled on Thursday, Claude Opus 4.8 was described by the company as being “more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims.” Claude—like all chatbots—is still liable to hallucinate, but the idea behind its new “honesty” upgrade is to add more transparency to its responses, so

Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite, and AI company SpaceX is expected to go public this month in what could be the largest IPO in history. The company is reportedly targeting a valuation of nearly $1.8 trillion and could raise about $75 billion when it lists on the Nasdaq. If it reaches that valuation, SpaceX would instantly become one of the most valuable companies in the world. And Wall Street is already bending its rules to give the rocket/AI/social media co