best ai search engine 2026

Getty Images / Trevor Williams The question that’s stumping top AI researchers isn’t about consciousness or doomsday scenarios. After interviewing dozens of developers at companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, Amelia Miller found it was this: should AI “simulate emotional intimacy?” One chatty researcher at one of the top AI labs “suddenly went quiet,” recalled Miller, who studies AI-human relations, in an essay for The New York Times — and then,

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Is the AI bubble going to burst? Will it cause the economy to go up in flames? Both analogies may be apt if you’re to believe one leading expert’s warning that the industry may be heading for a Hindenburg-style disaster. “The Hindenburg disaster destroyed global interest in airships; it was a dead technology from that point on, and a similar moment is a real risk for AI,” Michael Wooldrid

MARCO BELLO/AFP via Getty Images Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is running into some serious issues while overhauling his financial services company, Block. Earlier this month, the company started laying off its staff as part of what Bloomberg characterized as an “efficiency push,” potentially affecting up to ten percent of the company’s workforce. It’s been a painful, drawn-out process that could drag on for weeks, sources told Wired, triggering major anxiet

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images A veteran programmer shared his brutally honest opinions about AI’s role in the workplace, and it’s as much an indictment of the tech as it is of the organizations lazily deploying it. In an X rant that’s being praised in online programming circles, the programmer, Dax Raad, said that what’s holding back software companies isn’t the speed they’re able to churn out code, but the quality of

If there’s one line the tech giants of the world have been incessantly trying to drill into our skulls for the past few years—in product release events, media appearances, and one terrible ad after another—it’s that AI is going to change pretty much everything about our lives, very, very quickly. But in the face of heated, widespread public backlash against the data centers powering the AI boom, steep costs for customers, and other hurdles, OpenAI CEO Sam

Sidhaant Vasudeva, a PhD student in materials engineering, places a semiconductor chip for imaging on an X-ray microscope at Purdue University’s Flex Lab. Nikhilesh Chawla, Purdue’s Ransburg Professor in Materials Engineering and an expert in four-dimensional materials science, is working with Argonne National Laboratory to better detect defects in semiconductor chips. Credit: Purdue University photo/Kelsey Lefever A defect in a semiconductor chip may be s

Proteins can form "catch-bonds" that tighten under force, much like a finger trap. Using artificial intelligence and molecular simulations, Auburn scientists uncovered how these bonds strengthen almost instantly, offering clues for medicine and materials science. Credit: Rafael C. Bernardi - Auburn Physics Imagine tugging on a Chinese finger trap. The harder you pull, the tighter it grips. This counterintuitive behavior also exists in biology. Certain prot

A visualization of an atom-thin crystal sandwiched between electrodes. Auburn physicists discovered that electrodes and tiny atomic imperfections help the material switch between insulating and metallic states. This switching is the key mechanism behind next-generation memory devices that could power low-energy computing, artificial intelligence, and wearable electronics. Credit: Department of Physics—Auburn University Picture the smartphone in your pocket

Pillar I: An action plan to support the private AI sectorAt its heart, the strategy is a full-throated endorsement of the private sector. The first move is to take a buzzsaw to the regulatory frameworks of the past, with the document explicitly targeting the “onerous” approach of the previous administration.The philosophy is simple: get out of the way and let innovators innovate. According to US Vice President JD Vance, smothering the technology with rules

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images OpenClaw, an open source AI agent that supposedly “actually does things,” has driven everyone in the industry completely mad — something that seems to happen with every subsequent release of the trendy AI thing of the moment. Programmers are handing the keys to their computers to the OpenClaw AI and basically letting it run rampant in the name of added productivity, ignoring the obvious s

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images; AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post via Getty Images Anthropic’s ongoing battle with the Pentagon over the military’s use of its AI systems flared up this week around a hypothetical nuclear strike scenario, according to new reporting from the Washington Post. The Claude AI builder has frustrated the Pentagon by objecting to its systems being used for autonomous weaponry

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images It’s looking more and more like using AI to churn out work can take a considerable toll on your mental health, despite the tech’s promises of easing workloads. The latest research to illustrate this grim trend: a survey of nearly 1,500 full time US workers, which found that an alarming proportion of employees who constantly use AI at work to push their productivity past their normal capac

Getty / Futurism For about as long as the internet has existed, users have been able to speak their mind freely through pseudonymous accounts that protect them from being doxxed or stalked. But thanks to the advent of sophisticated AI, unmasking pseudonymous users on the internet has become ominously easy. As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, a team of researchers at ETH Zurich and AI company Anthropic found that “large language models can be us

Getty / Futurism While the exact impact of AI on the job market remains hazy at best, ongoing fears that an AI-triggered job apocalypse is nigh are coming to a boiling point. Last week, Twitter cofounder and Block (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he was firing 4,000 employees at his fintech company, informing investors that “intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.” “A significantly smaller team, using the t

Credit: AI-generated image A new wave of aviation innovation is taking shape above our cities, where short flights in electric air taxis could complement cars and trains as part of everyday transportation. Known as advanced air mobility (AAM), this emerging industry aims to connect communities more efficiently while reducing emissions and noise. Before these futuristic aircraft can take off, Georgia Tech researchers say there's serious work to do—in the ai

One-shot federated learning AI technology model structure. Credit: Medical Image Analysis (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.media.2025.103714 A research team has developed a new one-shot federated learning artificial intelligence (AI) technique that enables efficient training of large-scale models without sharing personal information. This research outcome is extremely significant, as it demonstrates that privacy protection, learning efficiency, and model performance

Caption:The monitoring platform is composed of a digital microscope housed within a custom 3D-printed support. Credit: The researchers. The field of tissue engineering aims to replicate the structure and function of real biological tissues. This engineered tissue has potential applications in disease modeling, drug discovery, and implantable grafts. 3D bioprinting, which uses living cells, biocompatible materials, and growth factors to build three-dimensio

Credit: Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2025). DOI: 10.1002/anie.202513147 Everyday items like car tires, plastic bags and foam cushions come from materials called polymers that can take years to develop and test. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a new approach to create better rubber-like materials more quickly by combining artificial intelligence with human expertise. Ty

Getty / Futurism The AI jobs apocalypse, long predicted by tech leaders and AI critics alike, has never felt closer. A major job market disruption has been rumored for years now, but given the latest swings on Wall Street and major layoffs roiling the tech industry, the alarm bells are starting to go off. It’s looking likely that not every profession will be hit in the same way, nor to the same extent — a topic that frontier AI companies have been studying

Getty / Futurism More and more research shows that introducing AI in the workplace is actually forcing employees to work harder, instead of making their jobs easier. The latest comes from a new analysis from ActivTrak of over 164,000 workers’ digital work activity. After examining their activity 180 days before and after the employees started using AI at work, the software company found that AI “intensified” their jobs in nearly every category, the Wall St