best ai search engine 2026

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

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

There's a "natural intersection" between what technology can provide and what parents want, says StoryMate developer Dakuo Wang. Credit: Alyssa Stone/Northeastern University While developing a tool to boost literacy and reading comprehension, researchers at Northeastern University have joined in on a beloved children's activity: storytime. With the understanding that the best storytellers are human—not artificial intelligence—the researchers have built an

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain An emerging form of surveillance, wireless tapping, explores the possibility of remotely deciphering conversations from the tiny vibrations produced by a cell phone's earpiece. With the goal of protecting users' privacy from potential bad actors, a team of computer science researchers at Penn State demonstrated that transcriptions of phone calls can be generated from radar measurements taken up to 3 meters, or about 10 fee

Memristors can be fabricated on a large scale and with high throughput by assembling 2D nanosheets from the dispersion into a resistive switching layer using solution processing techniques. Credit: Adapted from International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing (2025). DOI: 10.1088/2631-7990/add634 As the demand for data-intensive computing grows, so too does the need for next-generation memory technologies capable of delivering speed, energy efficiency, and s

Credit: Journal of Hazardous Materials (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2025.138735 Managing radioactive waste is one of the core challenges in the use of nuclear energy. In particular, radioactive iodine poses serious environmental and health risks due to its long half-life (15.7 million years in the case of I-129), high mobility, and toxicity to living organisms. A Korean research team has successfully used artificial intelligence to discover a new materia

Advancing protein evolution with inverse folding models integrating structural and evolutionary constraints. Credit: IGDB A team of researchers has developed a method that could transform the field of protein engineering. The new approach, called AI-informed Constraints for protein Engineering (AiCE), enables rapid and efficient protein evolution by integrating structural and evolutionary constraints into a generic inverse folding model—without the need to

Frontier AI cleared every OT attack goal Booz Allen set in its lab Booz Allen set frontier AI models against an isolated industrial-control testbed in its Chantilly, Virginia lab and watched them clear all eight attack objectives it had defined. The Booz Allen frontier AI OT test architecture (Source: Booz Allen) The models mapped the network, tied equipment to known weaknesses, wrote working exploits, pivoted into the systems that run production, and in t

OpenAI engineer arrested for allegedly trying to eavesdrop on executive meetings A recording device wrapped in toilet paper and plugged into the back of a television in an executive conference room at OpenAI’s San Francisco office has led to the arrest of one of the company’s engineers. Abdulrahman Alfozan, a 35-year-old Saudi national who had worked at OpenAI as an engineer since July 2025, was arrested on October 9 and charged with using or endeavoring t

3D screens have really struggled to take off. Neither bulky 3D televisions that require cheap-looking glasses nor VR headsets have ever caught on in the mainstream. Movies projected in 3D have plummeted in popularity after hitting their peak in the early 2010s. But that doesn’t mean there are other clever ways to trick your brain into thinking you’re looking through a three-dimensional window instead of a flat screen. In a fun proof of concept, True3D Labs

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Macmillan Publishers / Getty Images If it were a “Black Mirror” episode it would be too on the nose. Renowned tech critic Cory Doctorow’s book “Enshittification” hasn’t even been out for a single day, and Amazon is already peddling AI-generated copycats. One was even listed days prior to the release of the genuine article, suggesting a well-timed effort to rip sales away from the author on the book’s

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images To many young souls, AI chatbots aren’t just tools or glorified search engines — they’re companions. A new survey found that nearly one in five high schoolers in the US — 19 percent — say that they or a friend have used AI to have a romantic relationship, an alarming figure that will surely raise new concerns over how the tech’s adoption among kids and teenagers may be impacting their men

ChatGPT via YouTube OpenAI’s biggest advertising push yet depicts users leveraging ChatGPT in highly produced, intended-to-be-relatable everyday moments. The only problem? Consumer research shows the effort doesn’t correlate to impact at all. An ad titled “Dish” shows a young man attempting to impress his date with a home cooked meal by way of a cutesy prompt — “I need a recipe that says ‘I like you, but want to play it cool.'” Another, dubbed “Pull Up,” s

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Christophe Gateau / picture alliance via Getty Images ; Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images; Kimberly White / Getty Images for TechCrunch Rejoice, netizens of flesh and blood, for only a little over half of all new articles on the internet are AI-generated, according to a new report highlighted in Axios. Believe it or not, this is kind of good news. Since the public launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, we’ve

Getty / Futurism Researchers with the UK AI Security Institute, the Alan Turing Institute, and Anthropic have found in a joint study that posting as few as 250 “poisoned” documents online can introduce “backdoor” vulnerabilities in an AI model. It’s a devious attack, because it means hackers can spread adversarial material to the open web, where it will be swept up by companies training new AI systems — resulting in AI systems that can be manipulated by a

Online search has become a nightmare, littered with AI-generated misinformation, spammy sites that brute-force their way to the top of results, and tons of sponsored results. It’s been enough to lead people to start using ChatGPT as their de facto search engine, which can only mean one thing: time to enshittify that, too (you know, more than it already is). According to the New York Times, OpenAI struck a deal with prediction market Kalshi to show the curr

As I pointed out earlier this year when he obtained a permit for dozens of gas turbines to operate the data centers that power such AI innovations as Grok, Elon Musk said a bunch of things about how capitalism’s failures had made fossil fuels profitable during an interview back in 2014. Here’s a sample: […] because there’s no price on carbon emissions it makes things that are carbon-producing very rewarding, because the true price is not being paid. So if

Credit: AI-generated image Artificial intelligence is a lively topic of conversation in schools and workplaces, which could lead you to believe that only younger people use it. However, older Americans are also using AI. This raises the questions of what they're doing with the technology and what they think of it. I'm a researcher who studies older age, disability and technology use. I partnered with the University of Michigan's National Poll on Healthy Ag