best ai search engine 2026

A new study involving Binghamton University researchers offers a promising solution: developing an AI system to map out interactions between content and algorithms on digital platforms to reduce the spread of potentially harmful or misleading content. Credit: Binghamton University, State University of New York Falling for clickbait is easy these days, especially for those who mainly get their news through social media. Have you ever noticed your feed litte

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain From electric cars to artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, the technologies people use every day require a growing need for electricity. In theory, nuclear fusion—a process that fuses atoms together, releasing heat to turn generators—could provide vast energy supplies with minimal emissions. But nuclear fusion is an expensive prospect because one of its main fuels is a rare version of hydrogen called tritium. Now, re

Overview of LEONARDO workflow. Credit: Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-61632-1 Nanoparticles—the tiniest building blocks of our world—are constantly in motion, bouncing, shifting, and drifting in unpredictable paths shaped by invisible forces and random environmental fluctuations. Better understanding their movements is key to developing better medicines, materials, and sensors. But observing and interpreting their motion at the atomi

Privacy-preserving AI can protect your heart data, the bill is the problem A heart monitor used to be a box beside a hospital bed. Electrodes fed a cable, the cable fed a screen, and a nurse watched the screen. The threat model fit on a sticky note. Cardiac care doesn’t work like that anymore. A patch or smartwatch records the electrocardiogram (ECG). A phone or gateway relays it. A cloud service stores and analyzes it, and a cardiologist reviews it from s

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty / X (Screenshots) An OpenAI exec bragged that ChatGPT had discovered a mathematical breakthrough — and was immediately left with egg on his face when it turned out to be bogus, The Decoder reports. We begin where any good controversy begins: with a now-deleted tweet. This one was by Kevin Weil, a vice president at OpenAI who last week proclaimed that the company’s newest large language model, GP

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: STR / NurPhoto via Getty Images Inveterate overpromiser Elon Musk is teasing that his chatbot Grok could soon “achieve artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — a hypothetical form of AI system that surpasses humans in virtually every way, and remains the white whale of the AI industry. “My estimate of the probability of Grok 5 achieving AGI is now at 10 percent and rising,” Musk wrote on his website

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images When former OpenAI safety researcher Stephen Adler read the New York Times story about Allan Brooks, a Canadian father who had been slowly driven into delusions by obsessive conversations with ChatGPT, he was stunned. The article detailed Brooks’ ordeal as he followed the chatbot down a deep rabbit hole, becoming convinced he had discovered a new kind of math — which, if true, had grave i

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images A hype cycle as overwhelming and logic-defying as the AI boom comes with its own whirlwind succession of trends that are their own mini booms driven by billions of dollars of money. Once the world got used to large language model-powered AI chatbots, autonomous AI agents became the next big thing. This past year, video generating models have been having their time in the Sun after rapid i

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images OpenAI is fighting a lawsuit alleging that the AI company is responsible for the death of Adam Raine, a 16-year-old in California who took his life after extensive conversations with ChatGPT about his suicidal ideation and intent to die. Part of OpenAI’s defense strategy, according to The Financial Times? Requesting that the family cough up details of the teen’s funeral. As the FT reports

Cheng Xin/Getty Images Earlier this week, OpenAI unveiled an AI browser, dubbed Atlas, which is built around its blockbuster AI product, ChatGPT. “A browser built with ChatGPT takes us closer to a true super-assistant that understands your world and helps you achieve your goals,” the company boasted in its announcement. Thanks to an “agent mode,” the browser can complete entire tasks, such as booking flights or buying groceries online, a process OpenAI eng

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Over two decades ago, the New Oxford American Dictionary wanted to see if any of its competitors were cribbing its definitions. So it set up a trap. In its first edition, published in 2001, NOAD included a word called “esquivalience,” which it defined as the “willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.” The word was a fake. And the bait worked: the word reference website Diction

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Will your favorite sycophantic AI helper be servile forever? Maybe not. New research from the AI safety group Palisade Research suggests that some top AI models could be developing “survival drives,” after finding that they frequently refused instructions to shut themselves down. And more ominously, they can’t fully explain why this is happening. “The fact that we don’t have robust explan

Weak AI safety regulations may “backfire,” creating a product that is potentially more dangerous than AI products created under no regulation, according to a new study published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using theoretical economics and game theory principles, a group of researchers from Cornell and Carnegie Mellon University created a theoretical model that aims to show how AI regulation can be most effective at ensu

The Lonestar6 (left) supercomputer and Corral data management and storage systems (right) at the Texas Advanced Computing Center are resources available through allocations awarded by the UT System Research Cyberinfrastructure (UTRC). Credit: TACC From the voice-to-text feature on your phone to the captions that make videos more accessible, speech transcription is already woven into everyday life. Behind the scenes, artificial intelligence is doing the hea

Evaluation of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary trust research. Credit: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-05481-9 An international team of researchers has put forward a framework that it argues can be used to answer one of the biggest questions facing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies: can AI be trusted? The framework offers an organized approach for tackling a complex subject that draws on a wide var

Philip Dulian/picture alliance via Getty Images It didn’t take long for cybersecurity researchers to notice some glaring issues with OpenAI’s recently unveiled AI browser Atlas. The browser, which puts OpenAI’s blockbuster ChatGPT front and center, features an “agent mode” — currently limited to paying subscribers — that allows it to complete entire tasks, such as booking a flight or purchasing groceries. However, that makes the browser vulnerable to “prom

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images People who are the worst at doing something also tend to severely overestimate how good they are at doing it, while those who are actually skilled tend to not realize their true talent. This galling cognitive bias is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, as you’re probably familiar — and would you believe it if we told you that AI appears to make it even worse? Case in point, a new study publ

Getty / Futurism OpenAI unveiled its AI browser Atlas last month, effectively building a web browsing interface around its blockbuster chatbot ChatGPT. The browser’s “agent mode” has caught most of the attention so far. The feature can navigate the web on behalf of the user, like a human, to carry out tasks like research or online shopping. Besides some serious security concerns — and a glacial pace that undermines its effectiveness — another striking issu

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

It’s been a while since the internet felt like a place where you could be transported into another world—where landing on someone’s website meant entering a space shaped by their ideas and designed on their terms. Now everything feels so uniform—made worse by the vibe-coding aesthetic that has mass-produced an explosion of visual sameness. A good fix for that would be to return to a web where creativity reigns. A bad fix for it would be to slap filters tha